Sloan nodded and sighed. 'Like you said, it's fucked up.'
'Interesting,' Lucas said.
'Gimme the keys,' Sloan said. 'I wanna drive this piece of shit.'
On the way back to City Hall, Lucas told Sloan about the gravesite, and about the deputy's line: 'The game's afoot.'
'Cracked us up, Swanson and me,' Lucas said.
'That ain't bad,' Sloan admitted. He had a weakness for wordplay. 'The game's afoot.'
They were headed west on I-94, and Lucas, in the passenger seat, was looking blankly at a billboard advertisement for South Dakota tourism. Afoot? 'Jesus,' he said. 'When they dusted for prints at Bekker's place, did they do the floor outside her bathroom? The bathroom that opens off her bedroom?'
'Fuck if I know,' said Sloan. 'Why?'
'Footprints,' Lucas said. 'The lover, whoever he is, might have wiped all the handles and stuff, but I bet the sonofabitch didn't wipe the floor. And if he didn't, we might still be able to get prints. I mean, since the game is a foot…'
Cassie came over and cooked Italian, humming in the kitchen, brewing tomato sauce, dancing around and sucking on the wooden spoon as she worked in the spices. She was wearing a fuzzy sweater that clung to her, and Lucas moved around behind her, handling her, stroking her stomach.
'Christ, the muscles are unbelievable,' he said.
'I pray to Jane Fonda every morning…'
'Mama's Got a Squeeze Box' came up on the radio and she tried to give him a quick dance lesson. He failed.
'You got the same problem as all large white men: you're afraid to shake your ass,' she complained. 'You can't dance if you don't move your ass.'
'I feel ridiculous when I try to move my ass,' Lucas said. He gave it a tentative shake.
'Yeah,' she said, nodding, 'you do look kinda weird. We could work on it…'
'Maybe I could take banjo lessons or something…'
The phone rang while they ate, and Lucas stepped into the kitchen to pick it up.
'This is Mikkelson,' said a deputy medical examiner. 'Things are getting strange outside.'
'What'd you find?' Lucas asked.
'All kinds of shit. There was fresh blood and fresh fecal matter in George's clothing when he went into that grave. It mixed with the mud before it started to congeal, so it hadn't congealed yet when he went into the hole.'
'Which means he wasn't killed until last night…'
'That's what you'd think, but that'd be wrong,' the medical examiner said. 'The holes in his eyes were filled with mud, too, but the holes were made after all the blood had pooled into his chest and arms, a long time after he was killed.'
'That doesn't compute,' Lucas said, confused.
'Only one way,' the deputy M.E. said with evident relish.
'They had to bury him and then dig him up to do the eyes. We've got some more tests going, but from the tissue evidence, I'd say that's what they did.'
'Why?'
'Shit, Lucas, I'm a goddamned doctor, not a fuckin' psychic. But that's what happened. And there's something else, too-some people from your lab brought me over a bunch of footprints from the Bekker house?'
'Yeah?'
'Not a match in the bunch. Not even close.'
CHAPTER 18
'I need help,' Daniel said. 'Political help. You know how the city council gets. They think the voters are stupid, they think the voters are gonna run them out of office if we don't catch the guy today. They're getting pissy.'
'You got a couple of bad columns, too,' Lucas said. They were sitting in Daniel's office, under the watchful eyes of Daniel's political mug shots.
'Yeah, well, what do you expect?' Daniel said. He looked in his cigar humidor, then slammed the lid. 'Column-writing is the only job I know where sarcasm passes for intelligence… God damn it, Davenport. I need something, and I don't care what it is.'
'Stick full-time surveillance on Bekker,' Lucas suggested.
'All right,' Daniel said, grasping. 'Why?'
'To settle him, one way or another. Tag everybody he talks to, track everywhere he goes. If he's involved, he hired a really strange-looking dude for the killing. We need somebody on the team with enough brains to break off Bekker, if he has to, and go after a likely-looking killer. And we ought to get a court order, tap his phones both at home and at work. We either clear him or we hang him.'
'What do you think? Is he the guy?' Daniel asked with genuine curiosity.
'I don't know.' Lucas shrugged. 'He's the only thing we've got, but everything points somewhere else.'
'All right, I'll get the surveillance going,' Daniel said. 'I can give that out to a couple of people, that we've got a guy being watched. That'll cool some of the council fever. But it'd be nice if we got a little decent PR for a change.'
'I was talking to a snitch a few nights ago, and he said a mutual acquaintance came into a bunch of TV sets- maybe a couple hundred of them, a boxcarload from over in St. Paul. Then I talked to another guy and he says Terry-this is Terry Meller, you remember him? No? He's a longtime semi-bad dude-he says Terry is working out of a rental warehouse off Two-eighty. He says the TVs are stuffed in there, and probably a bunch of other shit. We could get the ERU and a warrant, call up the TV and the papers…'
'I could tell the ERU guys to armor up some of the reporters-we got some extra vests…' Daniel said, brightening. The Emergency Response Unit always got airtime. 'Give them some good film.'
'We won't lose the Bekker story, but we'll look good on this other thing,' Lucas said. 'And there'll be film…'
'Get a warrant,' Daniel said enthusiastically, poking a finger at him. 'I'll get the ERU started and some Intelligence guys over to look at the warehouse. Stop down at Intelligence when you leave and give them the location.'
'I've got a new friend at TV3, by the way,' Lucas said. 'She kind of owes me…'
'You feed her that break on George's body?' Daniel asked, looking sideways at Lucas.
Lucas grinned and shrugged. 'Maybe something slipped out. But since we're not going to kill the Bekker story, anyway, I want to tell her that I'm going off the reservation. I want to tell her I don't think George is the lover, and I want to make it seem like there's a little controversy between me and the department. Good guy, bad guy, the department being the bad guy. That'll get us better play, and the other stations will come after it, and the papers…'
They'd talked about the possibility that Loverboy was still alive, but Daniel was skeptical. 'You really think he's still out there?'
Lucas' forehead wrinkled. 'Yeah. I know there are some problems with that-like, why was George killed and dumped if he wasn't the lover? I can't figure that out. I mean, he should have been her lover. They knew each other, they were the right age for each other… I don't know… By the way, has Shearson got anything on this shrink he was looking at? Stephanie's other friend?'
'He thinks there's something.'
'He ain't exactly the sharpest knife in the dishwasher…'
'Hey, he's okay,' Daniel said mildly. 'You don't like him because he wears better suits than you do.'
'Yeah, but with golf shirts…'
'Look,' Daniel said. 'We know that Bekker didn't kill either George or his wife, not in person…'
'Yeah. And I was sure that he set me up as an alibi on George, but now… God damn it, this thing is getting on
