top of me. And Loverboy's the key. If he's still out there, I want to get to him. Maybe I can make some kind of appeal. Or drop a hint that I'm closing in on him, and that he'd be better off talking to me now-that if he doesn't come in, we'll find him anyway and pack him off to Stillwater on a charge of accessory to first-degree murder.'
'I don't know,' Daniel said. He rubbed his developing five-o'clock-shadow fuzz with the back of his fingers. 'My inclination is not to do that.'
'Your inclination?'
'Yeah. That's my inclination. But you're an adult. Your ass is in your own hands,' Daniel said. Lucas nodded. Daniel was in politics. If Lucas went public and was wrong, Daniel had planted a little ambiguity around the decision process.
'Okay,' Lucas said. 'And you can tell the mayor we're watching a guy and hustling after Loverboy…'
'He's no dummy, the mayor,' Daniel said.
'Yeah, I know, but all he wants is something to feed to the sharks, and that's something.'
'Good enough. I'll get Anderson to pull some guys for a surveillance team and we'll get on Bekker by tonight.'
Lucas stopped at Intelligence, gave the duty officer the address of Terry Meller's TV warehouse, went to his office and called Carly Bancroft, then talked to the department artist and got a quick sketch done. A half-hour later, he met Bancroft at a Dairy Queen in the Skyway.
'I've got another piece of story for you,' he said, nibbling around the edge of his chocolate-dipped cone. 'Some of it's points for me-you'd owe me more-but some of it's part of your paycheck. Call it a wash. But I want to get it on the air.'
'Let's hear it,' she said.
'Everybody's assuming that Philip George was Mrs. Bekker's lover and the killer took him out to protect himself.'
'Yeah, that's what we're saying,' she said.
'I don't think that's right. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's wrong,' Lucas said. 'I think the guy's still out there. The Loverboy.'
She took a lick of her vanilla softie and nodded. 'That's an okay story if we can put your name on it. What else?'
'You've got to hint that I'm closing in on the guy-that I'm talking to people and that I've got an identikit picture I'm showing around. I'll show it to somebody you can interview, and they'll know they're supposed to talk to you. They'll describe the guy for you, but I'll refuse to show you the picture.'
'That's all fine. What's the payoff part?'
'I want you to report it as though you got it from a third source. You must use my name, but you can't quote me directly and you can't say I'm the source of the story. You have to say that I've refused comment…'
'That's lying,' she said.
'Right. Lying,' Lucas agreed. 'You have to indicate that you got the story from a secret source in the department, but definitely not me. Suggest that there's an interdepartmental difference of opinion and I've been ordered to keep my mouth shut. And then you've got to do a little background on me, say that Davenport has secret sources that not even other cops know about.'
'I don't understand what all this means,' she said, a tiny wrinkle appearing between her eyes. 'I'd like to know where I'm going, in case I'm going off a cliff.'
Lucas finished the chocolate part of the cone, took two licks of the vanilla ice cream, reached back and dumped the cone in a wastebasket. 'I do think the guy's out there. I want him to feel threatened, but I don't want to be the threatening guy. I want him to come to me,' Lucas said.
She nodded. 'All right. We can play it like you said.'
'And not a bad story,' Lucas said.
'Speaking of which'-she glanced at her watch-'I've got to run.'
'What's happening?'
'Some big bust going down somewhere-I don't know exactly what it is, but I'm going in with the ERU.'
'Sounds good,' Lucas said.
'Sounds like bullshit, but I get to be in the movies,' she said. 'Film at ten.'
Elle Kruger's lips moved silently as she walked slowly along the sidewalk, down the hill past the college duck pond, head bowed. Her hands counted through the large black beads of the rosary hanging down her side. Lucas, who'd missed her at her office, followed fifty feet behind, idly checking out the coeds-most were sweet and blonde and large, as though punched from a German Catholic cookie cutter-waiting until Elle had worked her way through the last decade.
When she'd finished, she released the beads, straightened up and lengthened her step, continuing her stroll around the pond. Lucas hurried after her, and she turned and spotted him coming when he was still fifty feet away.
'How long have you been back there?' she asked, smiling.
'Five minutes. The secretary said you'd be down here…'
'Has something happened?'
'No, not really. I'm puzzled, trying to hack my way through what's happening with this Bekker case.'
'A strange case, and getting stranger, if the papers can be trusted,' she said, but with an upward inflection, making the statement into a question.
'Yeah. Maybe.' He was reluctant to commit himself. 'Tell me this: We've got this guy who kills two women, completely destroys their eyes. Then he kills another guy, takes him out and buries him in Wisconsin, and he's spotted purely by chance-some neighbors see his car lights and think he might be a burglar. Turns out he probably buried the body the night before, and he came back for the sole purpose of hacking out the eyes…'
'… Doesn't want to be watched by the dead,' Elle said crisply.
'I was wondering if it might be something like that,' Lucas said. 'But I was also wondering-would it necessarily have to be sincere? If there was some kind of manipulation going on, could he be doing it for some other reason?'
'Like what?'
'Publicity? Or a deliberate effort to tie the murders together?'
She shrugged. 'I suppose he could, but then why go back and hack the eyes out of a man whose body you're trying to hide, and don't expect to be found?'
'Yeah, there's that,' Lucas said, discouraged. He thrust his hands into his jacket pockets.
'So it's probably real, and it has implications,' she said, looking up at him.
'Like what?'
'He hacked the eyes out of all three people he's killed-at least, all three that we know about. And he did it instantly: he killed the first one, Bekker, and did her eyes at the same time. How did he know that the first one would watch him after she was dead? It would suggest…'
'That he's killed before and was watched.' Lucas slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. 'Damn it. I missed that.'
'He's a very dangerous man, Lucas,' Elle said. 'In the psychological literature, we'd refer to him as a fruitcake.'
Restless, Lucas drove to the Lost River. The door was locked, but he could see a woman inside, painting. He rapped on the glass door, and when she saw him, he held up his badge case.
'Cassie around?' he asked when she opened the door.
'There's a rehearsal going on,' the woman said. 'They're all out on the stage.'
Lucas walked through the hall to the theater. The lights were up and people were walking or standing around the stage or the low pit in front of it. Two or three more were sitting in the seats, watching and talking. Half of the whites were in blackface, with wide white-greasepainted lips, while two blacks were in whiteface. Cassie saw him and raised a tentative hand, said something to the artistic director, and they both walked over.
'Just looking around, if that's okay,' Lucas said. 'Would it bother you if I watch?'
'Not much to see,' the artistic director said, his greasepainted lips turning down. 'You're welcome to stay, but it's mostly people talking.'
