'Hey…'
'Look, my fuckin' contract is up in two months, and we're talking, me and the station,' she said. 'I'm asking sixty and it's like, Maybe yes, maybe no, what've you done for us lately? I need something: you're it.' She posed, ankles crossed, fist on her hip.
'What's in it for me?' Lucas asked.
'You want somebody inside Three? You got it.'
Lucas looked at her for a moment, then nodded. 'I trust you just once,' he said, holding up an index finger. 'You burn me, you never come back.'
'Fine. And it's the same with me. You ever burn me, or even get close, and I'll deny everything and sue your ass,' the blonde said. They were both in the street, face to face. A black Trans Am slowed as it passed around them, and the passenger window rolled down. A kid with carefully coiffed hair and a hammered forehead looked out and said, 'What's happening?'
'Cop,' Lucas said. 'Keep moving.'
'We're cool,' the kid said, then pulled his head inside, and the car accelerated away.
'So what happened?' Carly asked, glancing after the Trans Am, then turning back to Lucas.
'You know about the Bekker killing?'
'Sure.'
'This one's identical. A woman named Elizabeth Armistead with the Lost River Theater, she's an actress…'
'Oh shit, I know her… I mean I've seen her. There's no doubt that it was the same guy?' The woman put a long red thumbnail in her mouth and bit it.
'Not much…'
'How was she killed?'
'Clawhammer. Hit her on the back of the head, then smashed out her eyes, just like with Stephanie Bekker.' The traffic light was running through its sequence again, and the woman's hair glowed green, then gold as the yellow came on.
'Jesus Christ. What are the chances that the other stations'll have it by the morning shows?'
'I told the people back there to put a lid on everything, pending a release from the chief,' Lucas said. 'You should have it exclusively, if some uniform hasn't leaked it already…'
'Nobody's talking back there,' she said. 'Okay, Lucas, I appreciate it. Anything you need from the station, let me know. My ass is in your hands.'
'I wish,' Lucas said with a grin. The blonde grinned back, and as the stoplight turned red, Lucas added, 'There's not much more I can tell you about the murder.'
'I don't need more,' she said as she turned back toward her car. 'I mean, why fuck up a great story with a bunch of facts?'
She left Lucas standing in the street, her car careening around in an illegal U-turn, simultaneously running the red light. Lucas laughed and got back in the Porsche. He had something going, for the first time in months. He was operating again.
And he thought: A copycat? The idea didn't hold up; the murderer's technique with Armistead was too similar to the Bekker killing. There hadn't been enough information in the press to tell a copycat exactly what to do. The killings had to be the same guy. The guy in coveralls, the coveralls a way to get inside?
He was edging toward a conclusion: They had another psycho on their hands. But if the guy was a psycho, why had he taken a weapon to Armistead's, but not to Bekker's? He'd killed Stephanie Bekker with a bottle he'd picked up in the kitchen. The Bekker scene made sense as a spur-of-the-moment killing by an intruder, a junkie who killed and got scared and ran. The Armistead scene did not. Yet both by the same guy.
And neither woman was sexually assaulted. Sex, in some way, was usually involved in serial killings…
If Bekker had hired the first killing done, was it possible that he'd set off a maniac?
No. That's not how it worked.
Lucas had worked two serial killers. In both cases, the media had speculated on the effect of publicity on the mind of the killer: Did talking about killers make more killers? Did violent movies or pornography desensitize men and make them able to kill? Lucas didn't think so. A serial killer was a human pressure-cooker, made by abuse, by history, by brain chemistry. You don't get pressure like that from something as peripheral as TV. A serial killer wasn't a firecracker to be lit by somebody else…
Tangled. And interesting. Without realizing it, Lucas began whistling, almost silently, under his breath.
CHAPTER 10
The briefing room stank of cigarette smoke, nervous armpits and hot electronics. Twenty reporters crowded the front of the room, Lucas and a dozen more cops hung in the back. Carly Bancroft's early-morning report on the second murder had touched off a panic among the other stations. The press conference had started just after ten o'clock.
'Any questions?' Frank Lester's forehead was beaded with sweat. Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, put down the prepared statement and looked unhappily around the room.
'Lester in the lion's den,' Sloan muttered to Lucas. He stuck a Camel in the corner of his mouth. 'Got a light?'
Lucas took a book of matches out of his pocket, struck one and held it for Sloan's cigarette. 'If you were Loverboy, would you come in?'
Sloan shook his head as he exhaled a lungful of blue smoke. 'Fuck no. But then, I'm a cop. I know what treacherous assholes we are. I don't even know if I would've mentioned Loverboy in the thing…'
'About Mrs. Bekker's… friend, have you done any voice analysis on the nine-one-one tapes?' a reporter asked Lester.
'Well, we've got nothing to match them to…'
'We hear you're calling him 'Loverboy.'…'
'Not me, but I've heard that,' Lester said grimly.
'Could the killer be going for women in the arts?' a reporter called out. She worked for a radio station and carried a microphone that looked like a Ruger Government Model.22-caliber target pistol. The microphone was aimed at a point between Lester's eyes.
'We don't know,' he answered. 'Mrs. Bekker would only be peripherally in the arts, I'd say. But it could be- there's no way to tell. Like I said, we're not even sure it's the same perpetrator.'
'But you said…'
'It probably is…'
From the front row, a newspaper reporter in a rumpled tan suit: 'How many serial killers have we had now? In the last five years?'
'One a year? I don't know.'
'One? There were at least six with the Crows.'
'I meant one series each year.'
'Is that how you count them?'
'I don't know how you count them,' Lester barked.
'By series,' a newspaper reporter called.
'Bullshit.' Television disagreed. 'By the killers.'
From the back of the room, a radio reporter with a large tapedeck: 'When do you expect him to hit again?'
'How're we gonna know that?' Lester asked, a testy note creeping into his voice. 'We told you what we knew.'
'You're supposed to be running the investigation,' the reporter snapped back.
'I am running the investigation, and if you'd ever worked in a market bigger than a phone booth, you'd know we can't always find these guys overnight in the big city…'
