'Not bad,' Druze admitted. 'But God damn, Michael, I've got the feeling that we've kicked the tarbaby. One foot's stuck and now we've got to stick the other one in, trying to get the first one loose…'
'This is the end and we've got to do it, don't you see? For your own safety,' Bekker said. 'Get him, dump him…'
'That bothers me, too. Dumping him. If I just whacked him, and walked away, who's to know? But if I have to take him out to Wisconsin… Jesus, I could get stopped by conservation officers looking for fish, or who knows what?'
Bekker shook his head, holding Druze with his eyes. 'If we kill him and leave him, they'll know from his eyes that he must be Stephanie's lover-why else would his eyes be cut? But that'll throw the serial-killer pattern right out the window. And how would the killer be able to find the guy? They're already suspicious, and if we killed him and left him in the lot, they'd be all over me.'
'We could skip the eyes…'
'No.' Bekker was cold as stone. He stepped close to Druze and gripped his arm above the elbow. Druze took a half-step back, chilled by the other man's frigid eyes. 'No. We cut the eyes. You understand.'
'Jesus, okay,' Druze said, pulling back.
Bekker stared at him for a moment, judging his sincerity. Apparently satisfied, he went on. 'If we dump him somewhere remote-and I know the perfect place-nobody's going to find him. Nobody. The cops might suspect that he was Stephanie's lover, but they won't know if he ran because he was afraid, or because he was the killer, or if he's dead, or what. They just won't know…'
Druze left the way he'd come, through the side door. Bekker walked back toward his office, rubbing his chin, thinking. Druze was reluctant. Not in rebellion, but unhappy. He'd have to consider that…
In the elevator, he glanced at his watch. He had time…
'Sybil.'
Was she asleep? Bekker leaned over the bed and pulled her eyelids up. Her eyes were looking at him, dark and liquid, but when he let go of her eyelids, she closed them again. She was awake, all right, but not cooperating.
He sat beside her bed. 'I have to look in your eyes as you go, Sybil,' he said. He could feel himself breathing a little harder than usual: his experiments had that effect on him, the excitement…
'Here we are…' He clapped a strip of tape over her lips, rested the heel of his other hand on her forehead and pulled her eyelids up with his index and ring fingers. Her eyes open, he leaned into her line of vision and said, quietly, 'I've taped your mouth so you can't breathe, and now I'll pinch your nose, until you smother… Do you understand? It shouldn't hurt, but I would appreciate a signal if you see… anything. Move your eyes up and down as you go through to the other side, do you understand? If there is another side?'
He was using his most convincing voice, and quite convincing it was, he thought. 'Are you ready? Here we go.' He pinched her nose, holding his fingers so she could see it, even if she couldn't feel it. Sybil couldn't move, but there were muscles that could twitch, and they did twitch after the first minute, small tremors running through her neck to his hands.
Her eyes began to roll up and he put his face an inch from hers, looking into them, whispering, urgent. 'Can you see it? Sybil, can you see…?'
She was gone, unconscious. He released her nose, placed his hand on her chest, compressed it, lifted, compressed it again. She hadn't been that close, he thought, although she couldn't know that. She'd thought she was dying. Had been dying, would have died, if he hadn't released his hand…
She owed him this information…
'Sybil, are you in there? Hello, Sybil, I know you're there.'
At two, Bekker was home, MDMA burning low in his mind, under control. The episode with Sybil had, ultimately, been unfulfilling. A nurse had come down the hall, gone into a nearby room. He'd left then, thinking it better not to be seen with Sybil. As far as he knew, he hadn't been. He'd gone from her bedside to his office, popped the ecstasy, hoping to balance the disappointment, turned off the lights and left.
He drove past the front of the house on the way to the alley. As he passed, he saw a man, there, at the end of the street. On the sidewalk. Turning his head to watch Bekker go by. Large. Watching. Familiar.
Bekker slowed, stopped, rolled down the window. 'Can I help you?' he called.
There was a long moment of silence, then the man sauntered out into the street. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket and boots.
'Mr. Bekker, how are you?'
'You're a police officer?'
'Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis police.'
Yes. The man at the funeral, the tough-looking one. 'Is the police department camped on my porch?' Bekker asked. Safe now-the man wasn't a mugger or revenge-bound relative-the sarcasm knit through his polite tone like a dirty thread in a doily.
'No. Only me,' the cop said.
'Surveillance?'
'No, no. I just like to wander by the scene of a crime now and then. Get a feel for it. Helps me think…'
Davenport. A bell went off in the back of Bekker's mind. 'Aren't you the officer that the FBI agent called a gunman? Killed some ridiculous number of people?'
Even in the weak illumination from the corner streetlight, Bekker could see the flash of the cop's white teeth. He was smiling.
'The FBI doesn't like me,' the cop said.
'Did you like it? Killing all those people?' The interest was genuine, the words surprising Bekker even as they popped out of his mouth. The cop seemed to think about it for a moment, tipping his head back, as though looking for stars. It was cold enough that their breath was making little puffs of steam.
'Some of them,' the cop said after a bit. He rocked from his toes to his heels, looked up again. 'Yeah. Some of them I… enjoyed quite a bit.'
Bekker couldn't quite see the other man's eyes: they were set too deep, under heavy brow ridges, and the curiosity was almost unbearable.
'Listen,' Bekker heard himself say, 'I have to put my car in the garage. But would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?'
CHAPTER 12
Lucas waited at the front door until Bekker got the car in the garage and walked through the house to let him in. Bekker turned on the porch light as he opened the door. In the yellow light, his skin looked like parchment, stretched taut over the bones of his face. Like a skull, Lucas thought. Inside, in the soft glow of the ceiling fixtures, the skull illusion vanished: Bekker was beautiful. Not handsome, but more than pretty.
'Come in. The house is a bit messy.'
The house was spectacular. The entry floor was oak parquet. To the left was a coat closet, to the right a wall with an oil painting of a British Isles scene, a cottage with a thatched roof in the foreground, sailboats on the river beyond. Straight ahead, a burgundy-carpeted staircase curled up to the right. Off the entryway, a room with glass doors, full of books, appeared to the right, under a balcony formed by the stairs. To the left was the parlor, with Oriental carpets, a half-dozen antique mirrors and a stone fireplace. Beautiful and hot. Seventy-five or eighty degrees. Lucas unzipped his jacket and crouched to press his fingers against the parlor carpet.
'Wonderful,' he said. The pile was soft as beaten egg whites, an inch or more deep, and as intricately woven as an Arabian fairy tale.
Bekker grunted. He wasn't interested. 'Let's go back and sit in the kitchen,' he said, and led the way to a country kitchen with quarry-tile floor. Stephanie Bekker had been killed in the kitchen, Lucas recalled. Bekker seemed unaffected by it, pulling earthenware cups from natural oak cabinets, spooning instant coffee into them.
'I hope caffeine is okay,' he said. Bekker's voice was flat, uninflected, as though he daily drank coffee with a
