Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 81 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

Lucas turned away from Smith and walked down the street to Fell. “I wish I could read lips,” she said. “I’d give a lot to know what you just told him.”

“I told him why I wanted to know if those were his guys who came after me,” Lucas said.

“Tell me,” she said.

“No. And I’m not Internal Affairs.”

They spent the day walking through the Village and SoHo, drifting in and out of shops, talking to Fell’s contacts on the street, chatting with uniform cops in Washington Square, watching the street action on Broadway. They found the bookstore where Bekker had been spotted, a long, narrow shop with a narrow front window and a weathered, paint-peeled door three steps up. A sign in the door said “Open All Night, 365 Nights a Year.”

The clerk who had talked to Bekker wasn’t working, but happened by on his bike a few seconds after they asked for him. A thin man with a goatee and a book of poetry, he looked like a latter-day Beat, his face animated as he told them about the encounter.

“He’s a good-looking woman, I’ll tell you that,” the clerk said. “But you can look at somebody and know what kind of book they’re going to buy, and I never picked her—him—out for the one he found. Torture and shit. I thought maybe he was, like, an NYU professor or something, and that’s why he bought it . . . .”

Down the sidewalk, Fell said, “I think he’s real.”

“So do I,” said Lucas. “He saw him.” He looked up at the red-brick buildings around him, with their iron stoops and window boxes full of petunias. “And he’s somewhere close, Bekker is. He didn’t drive any distance to get to a small bookstore. I can smell the sonofabitch.”

He took her to the restaurant where Petty had been killed, sat and had Cokes, and almost told her about it.

“Not too bad a place,” he said, looking around.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“You ever been here? Your regular precinct is around here, right?”

“Ten blocks,” Fell said, poking a straw in her Coke. “Too far. Besides, this is sort of a sit-down place, not the kind of place you come to for lunch if you’re a cop.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

Late in the afternoon, while Fell browsed a magazine rack, Lucas stopped at a pay phone, dropped a quarter, and got Lily in O’Dell’s car.

“Where are you?”

“Morningside Heights.”

“Where’s that?”

“Up by Columbia.”

“I need to see you. Tonight. By yourself. Won’t take too long.”

“All right. How about nine, at my place?”

“Good.”

When he hung up, Fell looked up from a copy of Country Home and said, “So. Are you up for dinner?”

“I’m talking to Lily tonight,” he said. “I’d like to come around later, though.”

“I hate to see you hanging around with that woman,” Fell said, dropping the magazine back on the rack.

“This is purely business,” Lucas said. “And look, could you stop by Midtown and pick up those file summaries? We’ve been floating around all day, listening to bullshit . . . maybe something’ll come out of the files.”

“All right. I’ll haul them over to my place . . . .”

Lily was sitting in a living room chair, her high heels in the middle of the carpet, her bare feet up on a hassock. The hassock was covered with a brocaded throw that seemed to Lucas to be vaguely Russian, or Old World. She was sipping a Diet Coke, tired smudges under her eyes.

“Sit down. You sounded tense,” she said. “What happened?” Her head was back, her dark hair a perfect frame around her pale oval face.

“Nothing happened, not today, anyway. I just need to talk to you,” he said. He perched on the edge of her other overstuffed chair. “I need to know about you and Walter Petty—your relationship.”

She leaned farther back in the chair, wiggled once to settle in, laid her head back, and closed her eyes. “Can I ask why you need to know?”

“Not yet.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him carefully and said, “Robin Hood?”

“I’m not sure. What about Petty?”

“Walt and I went back as far as you can go,” Lily said, her eyes unfocusing. “We were born on the same block in Brooklyn, sort of middle-class brownstones. I was exactly one month older, to the day. June first and July first. His mother and mine were friends, so I suppose I first laid eyes on him when I was five or six weeks old. We grew up together. Went to kindergarten together. We were both in the smart group. Someplace along the way, sixth or seventh grade, he got interested in math and science and ham radio in that geeky way boys do, and I got interested in social things. After that we didn’t talk so much.”

“Still friends, though . . .”

She nodded. “Sure. I’d talk to him when I saw him around the block, but not at school. He was in love with me for most of his life. And I guess I loved him, you know, but not sexually. Like a handicapped brother, or something.”

“Handicapped?”

She carefully set the glass on the table and said, “Yeah, he was socially handicapped. Walked around with a slide rule on his belt, his table manners went from bad to worse, he got weird around girls. You know the type. Sort of ineffectual, nonphysical. Really nice, though. Eager . . . too eager.”

“Yeah. A dork. A nerd. The kind of kid that gets shredded by girls.”

“Yes. Exactly. The kind that gets shredded,” she said. “But we were friends . . . . And whenever I needed something done—you know, get an apartment painted, or help fixing something—I could call him up and he’d drop everything and be there. I took him for granted. He was always there, and I assumed he always would be.”

“Why’d he become a cop?”

“ ’Cause he could. It was a job you could get with a test and with family connections. He was brilliant on tests and had the connections.”

“Was he a good cop?”

“He was terrible in uniform,” she said. “He didn’t have that . . . that . . . cold spot. Or hot spot. Or whatever it is. He couldn’t get on top of people—you ought to know about that.”

“Yeah.” Lucas grinned. “I don’t know if it’s hot or cold, though. Anyway, Petty . . .”

“So he was terrible on the street and they moved him inside. He was working guard details and so on. Then they tried him on dope. And Jesus, he was something else. I mean nobody, nobody would believe he was a cop. He’d make a buy and the backup would drop on the dealer, and they still wouldn’t believe it. This dork couldn’t be an undercover cop. Sometimes even the judges didn’t believe it. Anyway, that’s about the first job he ever did really well at; he was a bit of an actor. Then he got interested in investigation, in crime-scene processing. He was good at that, too. The best. He’d go into a crime scene and he’d see everything. And he could put it together, too. Then computers came along, and he was great with computers.” She laughed, remembering. “Suddenly, the guy who fucked up everything, the nerd as big as the moon, was a hot item. And he was still good old Walt. When you needed your apartment painted, there he was. He had this great open smile, completely . . . geeky, but honest. When he looked happy to see you, he was happy to see you; he’d just light up. And if he got angry, he’d go off and start yelling, and then he’d maybe start crying or something; or you thought he would . . . .”

Lily’s lip was trembling, and she dropped her feet off the hassock and dropped her head.

“How’d he get the job looking for Robin Hood?”

“He knew computers and he’d worked with O’Dell, and we swung it for him. He could help us, and it was a chance for him to break out. And maybe I had something to do with it—he’d be working with me. Like I said . . .”

“Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”

“Sounds like arrogance, or vanity.”

Lucas shook his head. “Not really. Just life . . . You think he got close to Robin Hood?”

“He must have. Jesus, when he was killed, I couldn’t stop crying for a week. I really . . . I don’t know. There was no sexual impulse at all, but when I thought of him over all those years, that puppy-dog quality, that he loved me . . . It was like . . . I don’t know. I loved him. That’s what it came to.”

“Huh.” He was watching her, his elbow on the arm of the chair, one finger at his chin.

“So what’s this all about?” she asked. The weariness had slipped from her voice, and she looked up, intent.

“You and O’Dell are running me as some kind of lure,” Lucas said. “You’re dragging me out in front of whoever your targets are. I need to know who you think they are.”

After a long moment of silence, she said, “Fell. As far as I know, that’s it.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit,” she said. “She’s all we’ve got.”

“That can’t be right.”

“It is.”

“You know everything that O’Dell is doing?”

“Well, yes, I mean I schedule for him . . . I suppose he could run something on the side . . . .”

There was another moment of silence, then Lucas said, “I’m afraid you’re betraying me.”

She was offended, angry. “God damn it.”

“I know you are—or somebody is. O’Dell for sure, and you’re with O’Dell . . . .”

“Tell me about it,” she said, sitting back again.

Lucas looked her over and said, “First of all, Fell’s not involved.”

“Why not?”

“I just know, and I’m not wrong,” Lucas said.

“Lucas, instincts or no instincts, the goddamn records aren’t lying about this,” Lily said. “She’s all over the place.”

“I know. She’s an alarm.”

“What?”

“She’s a trip wire,” Lucas said. “Working the jobs she has, in Burglary, and as a decoy, she knows half the assholes in Midtown. So Robin Hood used her as a reference and picked on assholes that she knew. Then they watched her. If anybody got close, they’d get close to her first . . . .”

“I don’t know.” Lily was shaking her head. She didn’t believe it.

“It’d have to be a tough sonofabitch to set that up,” Lucas continued. “As soon as you pulled her off her regular job and put me next to her, the alarm went off. Petty’s been killed, the official investigation seems to be dead in the water—and here comes Lily Rothenburg and the department’s Svengali, towing me along behind. And you stick me next to Fell. They never bought the Bekker thing: they’ve been reading us like a book.”

“Who?”

Lucas hesitated. “I’m tempted to say Kennett.”

“Bullshit.” Lily shook her head. “I’d know. In fact, I asked him. He doesn’t even think there is such a group.”

“But we know there is. And I’m still tempted to say Kennett. O’Dell put me right up against Fell and he put me right up against Kennett. It’s possible that O’Dell knows it’s Kennett, but doesn’t have the proof.”

Lily thought it over, staring at him. “That’s . . .”

“Bizarre. I agree. And of course, there’re other possibilities, too.”

“That it’s me?” She smiled a small and frosty smile.

“Yeah.” Lucas nodded. “That’s one of them.”

“And what do you think?”

He shook his head. “It’s not you, so . . .”

“How do you know it’s not me?” she asked.

“Same way I know it’s not Fell—I’ve seen you operate.”

“Thanks for that,” Lily said.

“Yeah . . . which brings us to the last possibility.”

“O’Dell?”

“O’Dell. He has access to everything he needs to organize the group. He knows everybody on the force, and he probably could pick out likely candidates for his hit teams. He has the computer files to pick out the assholes, and to set up Fell as an alarm . . . .”

“There’s a hole,” Lily said quickly. “He’s so high up he wouldn’t need an alarm . . . .”

“Internal Affairs—he might not know about Internal Affairs investigations.”

She bit her lip. “Okay. Go ahead.”

“Since Petty was a computer maven too, maybe computers led him to O’Dell. Whatever it was, for whatever reason Petty got hit, O’Dell was right there to manage the investigation. Kept it out of Internal Affairs . . .”

“Said it was too political,” Lily said thoughtfully.

“Yeah. Then he pulls me into it, produces Fell, and he puts me up against Kennett. And you know what? Fell and Kennett are all I’ve got—all that paper you gave me, the regular investigation, the reports. It’s all bullshit. It’s all a stone wall. It looks impressive, but there’s nothing in it.”

“Why would O’Dell pick on Kennett?”

“Because Kennett’s going to die,” Lucas said bluntly. “Suppose he gets everything pointed at Kennett, and then Kennett . . . dies. Natural causes, a heart attack. If there was an agreement that Kennett was it, the investigation would die and the real organizer would be clear.”

Lily, pale as notebook paper: “He couldn’t have . . . I don’t think.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think . . . I don’t think he’s brave enough. Physically. He’d be thinking about prison.”

“That all depends on how he’s set it up. Maybe his shooters don’t know him.”

“Yeah, but remember—if O’Dell is it, he wouldn’t have to give you Fell. If Fell’s an alarm, I mean, he’d know what you were here for.”

“Yeah. And he’d know that Fell would get me exactly where she has: nowhere. And at the same time, lend a touch of truth to the whole business. Fell did know all those dead guys. Besides, with Petty talking to both of you, and Fell popping out of the computer, there was no way to get her back inside . . . .”

“Maybe,” she said.

“How’d you meet Kennett?” Lucas asked abruptly.

“In the intraconference meetings.”

“As O’Dell’s assistant?”

“Yes.”

“Did O’Dell feed you to him?” Lucas asked.

“Jesus, Lucas,” she said.

“Did he? I mean, he knows both of you. Could he have figured . . .”

“I don’t know. They don’t like each other, you know.” Lily stood and turned in place, like a dog trying to make a bed more comfortable. “You know, you’ve put this whole tissue together without a single goddamned fact . . . .”

“I’ve got one interesting, surprising, generally unknown fact,” he said; and it was his turn to produce a wintry smile.

“What?”

“I know that O’Dell’s trying to frame Kennett. I know that for sure. The question is, is he doing it because Kennett’s guilty and it’s the only way to get him? Or because he’s looking for a scapegoat?”

“Bullshit,” she said, but he could see the shock in her eyes.

“I found Red Reed in Charleston, South Carolina,” he said. “He’s a friend of O’Dell’s, from Columbia . . . .”

And then he told her most of the rest of it, except for the curious thing Mrs. Logan had said, when they interviewed her in the apartment below Petty’s.

CHAPTER

24

Lily listened as Lucas called Fell, watched his face, watched him smiling, turning away, setting up a date. Lucas left, hurrying, and she stood at the window with her purse, watching him. He flagged a cab, and just before he got in, looked up and saw, pointed at her purse, waved.

Then he was gone.

She walked through the apartment, touching things, with the sense of something ending, with a sense of dread.

Kennett? No. But O’Dell was unthinkable too. Could O’Dell have coldly executed his own man . . .

Finally, she picked up the phone and punched in the number for Kennett’s boat. He picked it up and said, “Lily.”

Pleased, she said, “How’d you know it was me?”

“I think it might be love,” he said. “Are you feeling lonely?”

“You’re reading my mind.”

“The river’s beautiful tonight . . . .”

The river was quiet, smelling of mud and oil and salt. Halyard hardware tinkled against the aluminum masts. A late-night squall was rolling off the coast far to the northeast, and they could see the lightning in the sky far beyond the lights of Manhattan.

As Lily and Kennett made love, she had a moment of absolute clarity, could hear the Crash Test Dummies’ song “Superman” roll mournfully out of a nearby boat, muted by the ten thousand unidentifiable cheeps and knocks of the marina.

Later, in the cockpit . . .

“Jesus, I’m sitting here bullshitting and you’re sitting there crying,” Kennett said quietly. He reached across and thumbed a tear off her cheek. “What’s all this about?”

“I was just looking across the river, thinking how pretty it was, how good it feels. Then I thought about Walt, about how he’d never see it again.”

“Petty?”

“Yeah. God damn it.”

“The guy has a strange hold on you, m’dear,” Kennett said, trying to keep his voice light: an invitation to talk.

“You know why?” she asked, taking up the invitation.

“Why?”

“Because we were so goddamn mean to him, that’s why. Us girls, in school. Lucas got me thinking about it . . . .”

“It’s hard to see you as mean,” Kennett said.

“I didn’t think about it at the time. The thing about Walt was, he’d do anything for you. He was always so eager. And when we were in school—and even after that, on the force—we paid him back by laughing about the way he dressed, and the way he acted, and all those pens he used to carry around. We made him be a clown and he wasn’t a clown; but whenever he tried to be serious, we wouldn’t let him. We hurt him. That’s what I was thinking about, the times I know we hurt him—girls, in high school—that hurt look on his face when he’d try to do something, try an approach and we’d laugh in his face. He never really understood . . . . Oh, God.”

Suddenly, she was sobbing and Kennett patted her on the back, helplessly. “Jesus, Lily . . .”

A moment later she said, her voice clearing, “You’re a Catholic. Do you believe in visions? You know, like the Virgin Mary and all of that, talking to shepherds?”

“I’d want to see it myself,” Kennett said wryly.

“The thing is, I keep seeing Petty . . . .” She laughed, a short, sad laugh, and poked him. “No, no, no, I don’t see him floating around my room, I see him in my mind . . . .”

“Whew.”

“But the thing is, it’s so clear. Walt running down the street, and his hair plastered down and his ears sticking out . . . Jesus Christ. Walt was the only guy who ever loved me and didn’t want anything from me. No sex, no kids, no favors, just me being there and he was happy.”

Kennett found nothing to say, and they sat there, their feet up, watching the dark river. After a while, Lily began to cry again.

CHAPTER

25

Lucas called Fell from Lily’s, apologizing for the late hour.

“I was going down to the tavern,” she said. “Why don’t you meet me . . . .”

He flagged a cab, Lily watching from her window, smiling down at him. He waved, and she lifted her purse in her left hand, slipped her right inside the gun tote. Remember the last time?

At the tavern, Lucas pulled a twenty out of his Muskies Inc. money clip and tipped the driver two dollars for the eight-dollar ride. Fell was in the back booth, a beer on the table with a bowl of peanuts. She was reading a free newspaper.

“Hey,” he said, slipping into the booth.

“Hi. Any developments at Rothenburg’s?”

“No . . .”

“Good,” she said.

Lucas shook his head. “Jesus.” And then: “I gotta get a beer.” He waved at a waitress, pointed at Fell’s glass and gave her a victory/two sign. While they waited, a swarthy man in a light-blue sport coat and khaki slacks, a glass of dark beer in his hand, wandered up to the table and said to Fell in a bad imitation Bogart, “Howdy, shweet-heart. Sheen your name in the public prints.”

“Hey, Tommy. Sit down.” Fell patted the seat beside her, then pointed her trigger finger at Lucas. “That’s Lucas Davenport, who’s a cop.”

“I know who he is,” Kantor said, dropping into the booth. “But somehow I got left off the invitation list for the Welcome to New York interviews.”

“And Lucas,” Fell continued, “this is Tommy Kantor, who’s a columnist for the Village Voice. . . .”

They talked about the case for a while, and Kantor attracted the attention of a free-lance magazine writer and his girlfriend. They pulled up a chair and ordered a pitcher of beer. Then a TV producer stopped by and began talking to Fell.

“You’d make a good piece,” she told Fell.

“I’d certainly agree with that,” Lucas said, straight-faced.

“Fuckin’ Davenport . . .” Fell said.

They got back to Fell’s apartment at two o’clock, spent ten soapy minutes in the shower, dropped into her bed.

“That was fun, talking to those people,” Lucas said. “As long as your friend Kantor doesn’t get us in trouble.”

“He takes care of sources,” Fell said. “It’ll be okay. I’m surprised you get along so well with media people . . . .”

“I like them, mostly,” he said. “Some are a little stupid and half of them would kill for two dollars, but the good ones I like.”

“You like this?” she asked.

“Ooo, I think I do,” he said. Then: “I’m sure of it.”

He came out of the shower the next morning, rubbing his hair dry with a terry-cloth towel, and heard Fell’s voice from the living room. She came down the hall to the bedroom as he was pulling on his underwear. She was still naked and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him.

“I just talked to Carter. Not a thing, nada.”

“All right. Did you bring those files?”

“In the front room, on the floor,” she said.

“I’d like to sit around and read for a while, then maybe go back and change clothes. I don’t know, I’d like to be there when they get him . . . .”

“Bullshit. You’d give your left nut to get him yourself. So would I.”

“You’d give my left nut?” he asked, appalled.

“Well . . . you want a bagel with chive cream cheese and some juice?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact.”

They read the files and talked, and sometime after one o’clock Lucas chased her back into the bedroom, and they didn’t make it back out until two.

“I’m going back to the hotel to change,” he said, pulling on his jacket. “Why don’t we get together at Midtown. Like four-thirty, for the daily roundup.”

“All right . . .”

He looked at the floor by his feet, at a Xerox copy of the crime-scene photograph of Whitechurch, dead in the hospital. The few pitiful twenties stuck out from under his body like a comment on greed.

“Change oxen in midstream and you’ll come to a bad end,” he said.

“What?”

“An old English proverb my mom used to tell me,” Lucas said.

“Bullshit,” she said.

“You’re calling my mom a liar?”

“Get out of here, Davenport. See you at four-thirty.”

He took the elevator to the lobby, nodded at a guard who knew a one-night stand when he saw one, spotted a cab pulling up to the curb to drop a passenger, stopped and slapped his coat pocket where his wallet was.

“Dammit,” he said.

“Hub?” The guard looked up from his desk.

“Sorry. Not you . . . I forgot something upstairs.”

He went back up, knocked on the door. Fell, wrapped in a robe, let him in. “You got twenty bucks you can loan me?” he asked. “I got like two dollars left after last night. All the traveler’s checks are at the hotel.”

“Oh, jeez . . .” She went to her purse, opened it, took out a billfold. “I’ve got six bucks,” she announced. Then she brightened and dug further. “And a cash card. There’s a machine down the block. I’ll trust you with my code and change it when you skip on me.”

He looked at the cash card, looked down past it to the floor, at the Xerox of Whitechurch, the twenties under his body. The money, the money. Bekker.

“Get dressed,” Lucas snapped. “Hurry the fuck up.”

Three twenty-dollar bills had been found around and under Whitechurch’s body. They drew the money from the evidence locker, under the watchful eye of the custodian.

“Consecutive?” Fell whispered. She was excited, barely controlled.

Lucas scanned the numbers, rearranged the bills on the countertop. “Two of them,” he said. He took the numbers down on a notepad. “Let’s go talk to the feds.”

Terrell Scopes of the Federal Reserve had a procedure for everything, including the dispensing of information about serial numbers. “I can’t just have people come in here . . .” He waved, a wave that seemed to suggest that they didn’t quite meet a standard. Lucas was rumpled. Fell’s hair was beginning to go haywire, standing around her head in a halo.

“If we take several hours to get the data and Bekker cuts the heart out of somebody, your picture’ll be on the front page of the New York Times right along with his,” Fell snarled, leaning across his desk.

Scopes, naturally pale, went a shade paler. “Just a minute,” he said. “I’ll have to make some inquiries.”

After a while he came back and said, “Citibank . . .”

Citibank was more cooperative, but the process was a long one. “The money came out of a machine on Prince, all right, but exactly when, or where it went, that’ll take a while to figure out,” said a round-faced banker named Alice Buonocare.

“We need it in a hurry,” said Lucas.

“We’re running it as fast as we can,” Buonocare said cheerfully. “There’s a lot of subtraction to do—we have to go back to a known number and then start working through the returns, and there’s a lot of stuff we have to do by hand. We’re not set up for this kind of sorting . . . and there are something like twenty thousand items . . . .”

“How about the pictures?”

“They’re not really very good,” Buonocare confessed. “If all you know is that he’s got blond hair, there are probably a thousand blondes on the tape . . . . It’d be easier to do the numbers, then confirm with the pictures.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “How long?”

“I don’t know: an hour, or maybe two. Of course, that’s almost quitting time.”

“Hey . . .” Lucas, ready to get angry.

“Just kidding,” Buonocare said, winking at Fell.

Three hours. A mistake was found halfway through the first run, a question of which numbers went where, and another machine on Houston Street.

“All right,” one of the computer operators said at six o’clock. “Give us another twenty minutes and we’ll have it down to one person. If you want to look right now, I can give you a group of eight or ten and it’s ninety percent that he’s in that group.”

“How about the photos?”

“We’ll get the tape up now.”

“Let’s see the ten accounts,” Buonocare said.

The programmer’s fingers danced across the keyboard and an account came up on the green screen. Then another, and another and more. Ten altogether, six men, four women. Two accounts, one man, one woman, showed non-Manhattan addresses, and they eliminated them.

“Can we get account activity on the other eight? For the last two months?” Buonocare asked over the shoulder of the computer operator.

“No problemo,” he said. He rattled through some keys, and the first account came up.

“Looks routine . . .” Buonocare said after a minute. “Get the next one.”

“Better find it in a hurry,” Fell said. “I’m about to pee my pants.”

Edith Lacey’s account was the fifth one they looked at. “Oh-oh,” Buonocare said. To the computer operator: “Get the rest of this up, go back as far as you can.”

“No problemo . . .”

When the full account came up, Buonocare reached past the computer operator and pressed a series of keys, then paged down through an extensive account listing. After a moment, she ran it back to the top and turned to Lucas and Fell.

“Look at this: she started with a balance of $100,000 six weeks ago, and then started pulling out the max on her bankcard, five hundred a day, just about every day for a while. Even now, it’s three or four times a week.”

“That could be him,” Lucas said, nodding, excited. “Let’s get a picture up. You’ve got a name and address?”

“Edith Lacey . . .”

“In SoHo. That’s good, that’s right,” Fell said, tapping the screen.

“How about the video . . . ?”

“Let’s get the reference numbers on those withdrawals . . .” Buonocare said. She wrote the number on a scratch pad and they carried it to the storage. The right cassette was already in the machine, and Buonocare ran it through, looking at the numbers . . . .

“Here,” she said.

The screen showed a blonde, her face down.

“Can’t tell,” Fell said. “I swear to God, I’m gonna pee in my pants.”

“Let’s try another withdrawal in that sequence,” Buonocare said.

She ran the tape, stopped, started, searched. Found another blonde.

“Motherfucker,” Lucas said, looking at the screen. “Nice to see you again, Mike.”

“That’s him?” Fell asked, peering at the screen. “He’s so pretty.”

“That’s him,” Lucas said.

Bekker was smiling at the lens, his blond hair pulled demurely away from his forehead.