There are ten people on this staff who are convinced they'll be on next year's Nobel list if only some klutz in the next office doesn't screw them up. If I suggested anything about Bekker, it would be all over the hospital in five minutes. Five minutes later, he'd hear about it and I'd be fingered as the source. I can't do anything.'
'All right.' Lucas nodded. He stood, picked up his coat.
'Would you get me copies of those papers?'
'Sure. And if there's anything else I can do for you, call, and I'll do it. But you see the kind of jam I'm in.'
'Sure.' Lucas reached for the door, but Merriam stopped him with a quick gesture.
'I've been trying to think how to characterize the way Bekker acted around death,' he said. 'You know how you read about these zealots on crusades against pornography, and you sense there's something wrong with them? A fascination with the subject that goes way beyond any normal interest? Like a guy has a collection of two thousand porno magazines so he can prove how terrible it is? That's how Bekker was. A kind of a pious sadness when a kid died, but underneath, you got the feeling of a real, lip-smacking pleasure.'
'You make him sound like a monster,' Lucas said.
'I'm an oncologist,' Merriam said simply. 'I believe in monsters.'
Lucas walked out of the hospital, hands in his pockets, thinking. A pretty nurse smiled at him, and he automatically smiled back, but his head wasn't smiling. Bekker killed kids?
The medical examiner's investigator was a fat, gloomy man with cheeks and lips so pink and glossy that he looked as though he might have been playing with an undertaker's makeup. He handed Lucas the file on Stephanie Bekker.
'If you want my opinion, the guy who did her was either a psycho or wanted it to look that way,' the investigator said. 'Her skull was like a broken egg, all in fragments. The bottle he hit her with was one of those big, thick tourist things from Mexico. You know, kind of blue-green, more like a vase than a bottle. The glass must have been a half-inch thick. When it broke, he used it like a knife, and drove the edges right down through her eyes. Her whole face was mutilated, you'll see in the photographs. The thing is…'
'Yeah?'
'The rest of her body was untouched. It wasn't like he was flailing away, hitting her anyplace he could. You take somebody flying on crank or PCP, they're just swinging. They go after a guy, and if the guy gets behind a car, they'll go after the car. If they can't hit you on the face, they'll hit you on the shoulders or chest or back or the soles of your feet, and they'll bite and claw and everything else. This thing was almost… technical. The guy who did it is either nuts and it has something to do with the face, with the eyes, or it's supposed to look that way.'
'Thanks for the tip,' Lucas said. He sat down at an empty desk, opened the file and glanced at the photos.
Freak, he thought.
The file was technical. To judge from body temperature and lack of lividity, the woman had died just before the paramedics arrived. Stephanie Bekker had never had a chance to resist: she had been a strong woman, with long fingernails, and they were clean-no blood or skin beneath them. There were no abrasions on the hands. She'd had intercourse, while alive and probably an hour or so before she'd died. No bruising was evident around the vagina and there were indications that the intercourse had been voluntary. She had washed after the intercourse, and samples taken for DNA analysis might not prove valid. The samples had not yet been returned.
The medical examiner's investigator noted that the house had been undisturbed, with no evidence of a fight or even an argument. The front door had been unlocked, as had a door into the kitchen from the garage. Bloody tracks led into the garage. The outer garage door had also been unlocked, so an intruder could have come through the house from the alley. There was a single bloody handprint on the wall, and a trail of blood from the point where she'd fallen in the initial attack. She'd lived, the medical examiner thought, for twenty to thirty minutes after the attack.
Lucas closed the file and sat staring at the desktop for a moment.
Loverboy could have done it. If the few solid facts of the case had been given him, Lucas would have bet money on it. But this kind of violence rarely came immediately after a successful sexual encounter; not without some preliminary crockery-tossing, some kind of mutual violence.
And then there was Bekker. Everybody had a nervous word for the man.
The fat investigator was washing his hands when Lucas left.
'Figure anything out?' he asked.
'Freak,' Lucas said.
'A problem.'
'If it's not a freak…' Lucas started.
'Then you got a big problem,' the fat man finished for him, shaking water from his delicate pink fingers.
The days were getting longer. In the pit of winter, dusk arrives shortly after four o'clock. When Lucas arrived at City Hall, there was still light in the sky, although it was well after six.
Sloan had already gone, but Lucas found Del in Narcotics, flipping through a reports file.
'Anything good?' Lucas asked.
'Not from me,' Del said. He pushed the file drawer shut. 'There were meetings all day. The suits were arguing about who's going to do what. I don't think you'll get your surveillance team.'
'Why not?'
Del shrugged. 'I don't think they'll do it. The suits keep saying that there's nothing on Bekker, except that some dope cop thinks he did it. Meanin' me-and you know what they think about me.'
'Yeah.' Lucas grinned despite himself. The suits would like to see Del in a uniform, writing tickets. 'Is the press conference still on?'
'Two o'clock tomorrow,' Del said. 'You been out on your net?'
'Yeah. Nothing there. But I talked to a doc at University Hospital, he thinks Bekker might have killed a kid. Maybe two.'
'Kids?'
'Yeah. In the cancer ward. I'll use it to jack up Daniel on the surveillance, if I have to.'
'Awright,' Del said. 'Nothing works like blackmail…'
Lucas' answering machine had half a dozen messages, none of them about Bekker. He made two answering calls, checked the phone numbers on the pen register and locked up. City Hall was almost dark and his footfalls echoed through the emptying corridors.
'Davenport…'
He turned. Karl Barlow, a sergeant with Internal Affairs, was walking toward him with a sheaf of papers in his hand. Barlow was small, square-shouldered, square-faced and tightly muscular, like a gymnast. He wore his hair in a jock's crew cut and dressed in white short-sleeved shirts and pleated pants. He always had a plastic pocket protector in his breast pocket, filled with an evenly spaced row of ballpoint pens. He was, he professed, an excellent Christian.
An excellent Christian, Lucas thought, but not good on the streets. Barlow had trouble with ambiguities…
'We need a statement on the brawl the other night. I've been trying…'
'That wasn't a brawl, that was an arrest of a known pimp and drug dealer on a charge of first-degree assault,' Lucas said.
'A juvenile, sure. I've been trying to get you at your office, but you're never in.'
'I've been working this Bekker murder. Things are jammed up,' Lucas said shortly.
'Can't help that,' Barlow said, planting one fist on his waist. Lucas had heard that Barlow was a Youth Football coach and had found himself in trouble with parents for insisting that a kid play hurt. 'I've got to make an appointment with a court stenographer, so I've got to know when you can do it.'
'Give me a couple of weeks.'
'That might be too long,' Barlow said.
'I'll come in when I can,' Lucas said impatiently, trying to get away. 'There's no rush, right? And I might bring an attorney.'
'That's your right.' Barlow moved in closer, crowding, and poked the sheaf of papers at Lucas. 'But I want this settled and I want it settled soon. If you get my drift.'
'Yeah. I get your drift,' Lucas said. He turned back toward Barlow, so they were chest to chest and no more
