from the best parts of several animals, Bekker's face seemed to have been assembled from the best features of several movie stars.
'Is he hurt?' Lucas whispered. Bekker was walking awkwardly, his legs like lumber.
'Not that I know of,' Swanson whispered back.
Bekker walked down the aisle; one hand on the coffin, unbending, his eyes invisible behind dark sunglasses. Occasionally his lips moved, as though he were mumbling to himself, or praying. It did not seem an act: the woodenness appeared to be real.
He followed the coffin to the hearse, waited until it was loaded, then walked down the block to his car. At the car he turned and looked directly at Lucas. Lucas felt the eyes and stood still, watching, letting their gazes touch. And then Bekker was gone.
Lucas went to the cemetery, curious. What was it with Bekker? Grief? Despair? An act? What?
He watched from a hillside as Stephanie Bekker's coffin was lowered into the ground. Bekker never changed: his beautiful face was as immobile as a lump of clay.
'What do you think?' Swanson asked, when Bekker had gone.
'I think the guy's a fruitcake,' Lucas said. 'But I don't know what kind.'
Lucas spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening putting the word out on his network, a web of hookers, bookstore owners, barbers, mailmen, burglars, gamblers, cops, a couple of genteel marijuana dealers: Anything on a hit? Any nutso walking around with big cash?
A few minutes after six, he took a call on his handset and drove back downtown to police headquarters in the scabrous wart of Minneapolis City Hall. Sloan met him in the hall outside the chief's office.
'You hear?' Sloan asked.
'What?'
'We got a letter from a guy who says he was there when Stephanie got killed. Loverboy.'
'No ID?'
'No. But there's a lot of stuff in the letter…'
Lucas followed Sloan past the vacant secretary's desk to the inner office. Daniel sat behind his desk, rolling a cigar between his fingers, listening to a Homicide detective who sat in a green leather chair in front of the desk. Daniel looked up when Sloan rapped on the open door.
'C'mon in, Sloan. Davenport, how are you? Swanson's filling me in.'
Lucas and Sloan pulled up chairs on either side of the Homicide detective and Lucas asked him, 'What's this letter?'
Swanson passed him a Xerox copy. 'We were just talking about possibilities. Could be a doper, scared off by Loverboy. Unless Loverboy did it.'
'You think it's Loverboy?'
The detective shook his head. 'No. Read the letter. It more or less hangs together with the scene. And you saw Bekker.'
'Nobody has a good word for the guy,' Sloan said.
'Except professionally. The docs at the university say his work is top-notch,' Swanson said. 'I talked to some people in his department. 'Ground-breaking,' is what they say…'
'You know what bothers me?' Lucas said. 'In this letter, Loverboy says she was on her back in a pool of blood, dead. I saw the pictures, and she was facedown next to the wall. He doesn't mention a handprint. I think he left her there alive…'
'He did,' Swanson said, nodding. 'She died just about the time the paramedics got there-they even gave her some kind of heart shot, trying to get it going again. Nothing happened, but she hadn't been dead very long, and the blood under her head was fresh. The blood on the floor, though, the blood by the sink, had already started to coagulate. They figure she was alive for fifteen or twenty minutes after the attack. Her brain was all fucked up- who knows what she could have told us? But if Loverboy had called nine-one-one, she might still be around.'
'Fucker,' Sloan said. 'Does that make him an accomplice?'
Swanson shrugged. 'You'd have to ask a lawyer about that.'
'How about this doctor, the guy she talked with at parties…' Lucas asked.
'That's under way,' Daniel said.
'You doing it?' Lucas asked Sloan.
'No. Andy Shearson.'
'Shit, Shearson? He couldn't find his own asshole with both hands and a pair of searchlights,' Lucas said in disbelief.
'He's what we've got and he's not that bad,' Daniel said. He stuck the end of the cigar in his mouth, nipped it off, took the butt end from his mouth, examined it and then tossed it into a wastebasket. 'We're getting a little more TV on this one-random-killer bullshit. I'd hate to see it get any bigger.'
'The story'll be gone in a week. Sooner, if we get a decent dope killing,' Sloan said.
'Maybe, maybe not,' Daniel said. 'Stephanie Bekker was white and upper middle class. Reporters identify with that kind of woman. They could keep it going for a while.'
'We'll push,' Swanson said. 'Talk to Bekker some more. We're doing the neighborhood. Checking parking tickets in the area, talking to Stephanie Bekker's friends. The main thing is, find the boyfriend. Either he did it or he saw it.'
'He says the killer looks like a goblin,' Lucas said, reading through the letter. 'What the hell does that mean?'
'Fuck if I know,' said Swanson.
'Ugly,' said Daniel. 'Barrel-chested…'
'Do we know for sure that the goblin's not Bekker? That Bekker was actually in San Francisco?' Lucas asked.
'Yeah, we do,' Swanson said. 'We wired a photo out, had the San Francisco cops show it to the desk people at Bekker's hotel. He was there, no mistake.'
'Hmph,' Lucas grunted. He stood up, slipped his hands in his pockets and wandered over to Daniel's wall of trophy photos. Jimmy Carter's smiling face looked back at him. 'We're leaning the wrong way with the media. If Bekker hired a killer, the best handle we've got is the boyfriend. The witness…'
'Loverboy,' said Sloan.
'Loverboy,' said Lucas. 'He's got some kind of conscience, because he called and he wrote the letter. He could've walked out and we might never have suspected…'
'We would have known,' Swanson said. 'The M.E. found that she'd had intercourse not too long before she was killed. And he did leave her to die.'
'Maybe he really thought she was dead,' Lucas said.
'Anyway, he's got some kind of conscience. We ought to make a public appeal to him. TV, the papers. That does two things: it might bring him out of the woodwork, and it might put pressure on the killer, or Bekker, to make a move.'
'No other options?' asked Daniel.
'Not if you want to catch the guy,' Lucas said. 'We could let it go: I'd say right now that the chance of convicting Bekker is about zero. We'll only get him one way-the witness has to identify the killer and the killer has got to give us Bekker on a plea bargain.'
'I hate to let it go,' Daniel said. 'Our fuckin' clearance rate…'
'So we get the TV people in here,' Lucas said.
'Let's give it another twenty-four hours,' Daniel said. 'We can talk again tomorrow night.'
Lucas shook his head. 'No. You need to think about it overnight, 'cause if we're going to do it, we got to do it quick. Tomorrow'd be best, early enough for the early evening news. Before this boyfriend, whoever he is, gets his head set in concrete. You should say flatly that we don't believe the boyfriend did the killing, that we need all the help we can get. That we need him to come in, that we'll get him a lawyer. That if he didn't murder the woman, we'll offer him immunity-maybe you can get the county attorney in on this angle. And that if he still doesn't think he can come in, we need him to communicate with us somehow. Send us letters with more detail. Cut out pictures from magazines, people who most look like the killer. Do drawings, if he can. Maybe we can get the papers to print identikit drawings, have him pick the best ones, change them until they're more like the killer.'
