'Get Michael Bekker.'
'We don't know he's involved.'
Back on script, all inflection gone: 'He is a monster. But he did not kill Stephanie personally. I did not make that mistake.'
'Look, give me the connection between you and George, if you think there is one,' Lucas said, going soft. 'If you want to stay out there, and you get caught later, I'll testify that you were feeding me information, that you helped, okay? Maybe help you out.'
Another pause. Then: 'No. I can not. You have thirty more seconds.'
'Hold on… why?'
'Because you may trace the call. I budgeted two minutes. You have twenty-five seconds left…'
'Wait, wait, we've got to set up some way for me to reach you… If I need you, bad…'
'Put an advertisement in the Tribune personals… Say you are no longer responsible for the debts of your wife. Sign it 'Lucas Smith.' I will call about this time. Two minutes. Look at Bekker. Stephanie was scared of him. Look at Bekker.'
'Gimme one more question, one more,' Lucas pleaded. 'Why's Bekker a monster? What'd he do to Stephanie…?'
Click.
'God damn it,' Lucas said, looking at the phone.
'Who was it?' Cassie asked, moving up beside him. Her soft fingers trickled down his spine, warm, reassuring.
'Stephanie Bekker's lover,' Lucas said. He poked a seven-digit number and the other end was picked up instantly: Dispatch.
'This is Davenport. Let me talk to Kathy.'
'How's your daughter?' the woman asked a second later.
'That was all bullshit,' Lucas said. 'But it's okay, the guy had to get through to me. I'll need the tapes on your part of the call, so you might want to mark them.'
'Well… there aren't tapes,' the dispatcher said. 'He came in on the nonemergency line, the thirty-eight.'
'God damn it,' Lucas said. He scratched his head. 'Listen, write down what you remember he said and give it to Anderson in the morning. Write down everything you remember, what his voice sounded like, the whole nine yards.'
'Heavy-duty?' she asked.
'Yeah. Very heavy.'
When Lucas hung up, Cassie said, 'I think…,' but he waved her away and said, 'Shhh… I've got to remember…' She followed him into the bedroom and he flopped onto the bed, lay back and closed his eyes. Remember. Not the words. The feel of the other man. The voice was deep, the words well paced, the sentences clear. When he was off script for a moment, he'd used the word 'speculated.' He watched TV3.
And, Lucas thought, he looked like George. That's what he had speculated, Lucas was sure of it. Lucas had done the same thing: the phony identikit photo he was circulating was a simplified sketch of Philip George.
What else? Loverboy had not gone to the funeral, because he wasn't sure whether George was there. He had done research on Lucas. He knew that Lucas had a daughter and did not live with her. After the Crows case, there'd been quite a bit of press attention to Lucas, to Jennifer and their daughter, so the research wouldn't have been difficult-he might, in fact, simply be operating on memory. But just in case, a check of the libraries again, the newspaper files? He'd talk to Anderson about it.
Lueas opened his eyes. 'Sorry, I just had to try to get it down…'
'That's okay-that's how I remember lines,' Cassie said.
'He's a smart sonofabitch,' Lucas said. He stood up, found his underpants on a chair and pulled them on. 'I've got to make a few notes.'
She followed him down to the spare bedroom, looked at the charts hanging from the wall. 'Wow. Mr. Brainstorm.'
'Pieces of the puzzle,' he said. A sheet of paper, folded in quarters, was lying on the bed. As Cassie looked at the charts on the wall, he unfolded it. The photocopy of the cyclops painting. 'The thing is, we know Bekker is goofy, but everything points in some other direction…'
Cassie was still looking up at his charts, but somber now.
'Do you do this for all your cases?' she asked.
'The big complicated ones, yes.'
'Have you ever had all the clues up there, posted, but not been able to figure them out until too late?'
'I don't know-I've never thought about it. You hardly get all the information you need to make a case, unless it's simple open-and-shut: you catch a guy red-handed, or five witnesses see a guy kill his wife,' Lucas said. 'If it's more complicated than that… I don't know. I've sent people to prison who claimed to be innocent and still claim they're innocent. I'm ninety-nine percent sure they're not innocent, but… you can't always know for sure.'
'Wouldn't it freak you out if there was a key piece of information up there, you just didn't see it, and somebody got killed?'
'Mmm. I don't know. You can't blame yourself because a psycho kills people. I'm not Albert fuckin' Einstein.'
'So what're you going to do next?' Cassie asked, still wide-eyed.
Lucas tossed the folded Xerox of the cyclops back on the bed. 'What any good cop would do at three in the morning. Go back to bed.'
Lucas set the alarm for seven. When it went off, he silenced it, slipped out of bed, leaving Cassie asleep, and went to the kitchen to phone Daniel. He caught the chief at breakfast and told him about the call from Stephanie's lover.
'Sonofabitch,' Daniel sputtered. 'So you're right. But why'd they kill George?'
'He said he didn't know. Actually, he said he'd speculated about it, but didn't want to talk about it. But I know what he was thinking: that he looks like George. And when you sort through all the implications of that, it points at Bekker,' Lucas said, and explained.
Daniel listened and agreed. 'Now what? How do we get to the guy?'
'We could maybe invent a crisis, put an ad in the paper, stake people out all over town, wire up my line, and when he calls-bam, we're tracing. We might get him.'
'Hmph. Maybe. I'll talk to some of the techs about it. But what happens if he calls from Minnetonka?'
'I don't know. The thing is, he's smart,' Lucas said. 'If we fuck with him, he might just go back into the woodwork. I don't want to risk chasing him away. He can put the finger on a suspect, if we ever come up with one.'
'Okay. So let's keep this tight between us,' Daniel said. 'I'll order a tap on your line and we'll monitor calls. I'll talk with Sloan and Anderson and Shearson and see if we can come up with some kind of pressure that'll get to him to call back.'
'I could do that. I figure…'
'No. I don't want you chasing Loverboy. I want you focused on the killer or the killers-Bekker and whoever he's working with.'
'There's not much there.'
'You just keep pushing. Keep moving around. I got all kinds of guys who can do the pony work. I want you on the killer before he does it again.'
CHAPTER 20
Not knowing the nature of neighborhood friendships around Bekker, and afraid to ask, the surveillance team decided not to seek a listening post among Bekker's neighbors.
Instead the team keyed on the intersections around the front and back of his house. From two parked cars, they could watch the front door directly, and both ends of the alley that ran behind his house. The cars were
