'I'll think about it.'
'And we watch Bekker. If we make a heavy-duty appeal to the boyfriend and if Bekker really did buy the hit, he'll get nervous. Maybe he'll give us a break,' Lucas said.
'All right. I'll think about it. See me tomorrow.'
'We gotta move,' Lucas urged, but Daniel waved him off.
'We'll talk again tomorrow,' he said.
Lucas turned back to Jimmy Carter and inspected the former president's tweed jacket. 'If it's Bekker who did it, or hired it, if he's the iceman Sloan thinks he is…'
'Yeah?' Daniel was fiddling with his cigar, watching him from behind the desk.
'We better find Loverboy before Bekker does,' Lucas said.
CHAPTER 5
The evening sky shaded from crimson to ultramarine and finally to a flat gray; Lucas lived in the middle of the metro area, and the sky never quite got dark. Across the street, joggers came and went on the river path, stylish in their phosphorescent workout suits, flashing Day-Glo green and pink. Some wore headsets, running to rock. Beyond them, on the other side of the Mississippi, the orange sodium-vapor streetlights winked on as a grid set, followed by a sprinkling of bluer house lights.
When the lights came on across the river, Lucas pulled the window shade and forced himself back to the game. He worked doggedly, without inspiration, laying out the story for the programmer. A long ribbon of computer paper flowed across the library table, in and out of the puddle of light around his hands. With a flowchart template and a number-two pencil, he blocked out the branches of Druid's Pursuit. He had once thought that he might learn to program, himself. Had, in fact, taken a community college course in Pascal and even dipped into C. But programming bored him, so he hired a kid to do it. He laid down the stories with the myriad jumps and branches, and the kid wrote the code.
The kid programmer had no obvious computer-freak personality flaws. He wore a letter jacket with a letter and told Lucas simply that he'd gotten it in wrestling. He could do chin-ups with his index fingers and sometimes brought a girlfriend along to help him.
Lucas, tongue in cheek, thought to ask him, Help you do what?, but he didn't. Both kids came from Catholic colleges in the neighborhood and needed a cheap, private space. Lucas tried to leave them alone.
And maybe she was helping him. The work got done.
Lucas wrote games. Historical simulations played on boards, to begin with. Then, for the money, he began writing role-playing quest games of the Dungeons amp; Dragons genre.
One of his simulations, a Gettysburg, had become so complicated that he'd bought an IBM personal computer to figure times, points and military effects. The flexibility of the computer had impressed him-he could create effects not possible with a board, such as hidden troop movements and faulty military intelligence. With help from the kid, he'd moved the entire game to an IBM 386 clone. A computer database company in Missouri had gotten wind of the game, leased it from him, altered it and put it on line. On any given night, several dozen Civil War enthusiasts would be playing Gettysburg via modem, paying eight dollars an hour for the privilege. Lucas got two of the dollars.
Druid's Pursuit was something else, a role-playing game with a computer serving as game master. The game was becoming complex…
Lucas stopped to change discs in the CD player, switching Tom Waits' Big Time for David Fanshawe's African Sanctus, then settled back into his chair. After a moment, he put the programming template down and stared at the wall behind the desk. He kept it blank on purpose, for staring at.
Bekker was interesting. Lucas had felt the interest growing, watching it like a gardener watching a new plant, almost afraid to hope. He'd seen depression in other cops, but he'd always been skeptical. No more. The depression-an unfit word for what had happened to him-was so tangible that he imagined it as a dark beast, stalking him, off in the dark.
Lucas sat in the night, staring at his patch of wall, and the sickly smell of Stephanie's funeral flowers came back, the quiet dampness of the private chapel, the drone of the minister,… all who loved this woman Stephanie…
'Dammit.' He was supposed to be concentrating on the game, but he couldn't. He stood and took a turn around the room, the Sanctus chants banging around in his head. A manila folder caught his eye. The case file, copied by Sloan and left on his desk. He picked it up, flipped through it. Endless detail. Nobody knew what might or might not be useful, so they got it all. He read through it and was about to dump it back on the desk, when a line of the lab narrative caught his eye.
'Drain appeared to have been physically cleaned…'
The bedroom and the adjoining bath had been wiped, apparently by Loverboy, to eliminate fingerprints. That demonstrated an unusual coolness. But the drain? That was something else again. Lucas looked for returns on Stephanie Bekker's bed but found nothing in the report. The lab report was signed by Robert Kjellstrom.
Lucas dug in his desk and found the internal police directory, looked up Kjellstrom's phone number and called. Kjellstrom had to get out of bed to take the call.
'There's nothing in the report on hair in the bed…'
'That's 'cause there wasn't any,' Kjellstrom said.
'None?'
'Nope. The sheets were clean. They looked like they'd just been washed.'
'The report said Stephanie Bekker had just had intercourse…'
'Not on those sheets,' Kjellstrom said. • • • Lucas finished with the file and looked at his watch: ten o'clock. He walked back to the bedroom, changed from tennis shirt, slacks and loafers to a flannel shirt, jeans and boots, pulled on a shoulder rig with his new Smith amp; Wesson double-action.45, and covered it with a fleece-lined Patagonia jacket.
The day had been good, but the nights were still nasty, cutting with the last claws of winter. Even the bad people stayed inside. He rolled the Porsche out of the garage, waited in the driveway until the garage door was firmly down, then headed north on Mississippi River Boulevard. At Summit Avenue he considered his options and finally drove out to Cretin Avenue, north to I-94 and then east, past downtown St. Paul to the eastern rim of the city. Three St. Paul cop cars were parked outside a supermarket that had a restaurant in the back. Lucas locked the Porsche and went inside.
'Jesus, look what the fuckin' cat drug in,' said the oldest cop. He was in his late forties, burly, with a brush mustache going gray and gold-rimmed glasses. He sat in a booth with three other cops. Two more huddled over coffee cups in the next booth down.
'I thought you guys could use some guidance, so I drove right over,' Lucas said. A circular bar sat at the center of the restaurant floor, surrounded by swivel stools, with booths along the wall. Lucas took one of the stools and turned it to face the cops in the booth.
'We appreciate your concern,' said the cop with the mustache. Three of the four men in the booth were middle-aged and burly; the fourth was in his twenties, slender, and had tight blue eyes with prominent pink corners. The three older cops were drinking coffee. The younger one was eating French toast with sausage.
'This guy a cop?' the youngest one asked, a fork poised halfway to his mouth with a chunk of sausage. He was staring at Lucas' jacket. 'He's carrying…'
'Thank you, Sherlock,' an older cop said. He tipped his head at Lucas and said, 'Lucas Davenport, he's a detective lieutenant with Minneapolis.'
'He drives a Porsche about sixty miles an hour down Cretin Avenue at rush hour,' said another of the cops, grinning at Lucas over his coffee cup.
'Bullshit. I observe all St. Paul traffic ordinances,' Lucas said.
'Pardon me while I fart in disgust,' said the speed-trap cop. 'It must've been somebody else's Porsche I got a picture of on my radar about five-thirty Friday.'
Lucas grinned. 'You must've startled me.'
