'Not at all?'
'Not a thing. Her mind's still okay, but she's got Lou Gehrig's disease and she's, like, totally paralyzed. Cheryl says she's got maybe a week or two to live, no more. Cheryl can't figure Bekker-he's not exactly the social type. Anyway, I thought it might be something.'
'Hmph. I got a guy over there. I'll give him a call,' Lucas said. 'Are you on Druze today?'
'Yeah, I'm about to go over.'
'I may see you.'
Lucas hung up, yawned, glanced at the clock. After ten, already: he'd slept more than four hours after looking at the paper. He dropped back on the pillow, but his mind was working.
He got up, called Merriam, was told the doctor wasn't in yet, left a message and went off to shave. Merriam called back just as he was about to leave the house.
'There's a woman there I'd like you to check,' he said. 'Her name is Sybil…'
Lucas stopped at Anderson's office first.
'Where's Druze?'
'Still bagged out at his apartment.'
At his own office, the answering machine showed two messages. Loverboy? He punched the message button as he took off his jacket.
'Lucas, this is Sergeant Barlow. Stop and see me when you come in, please.' God damn it, he had no time for this. If he could slip out without encountering Barlow… The machine clicked and started again.
'Lieutenant Davenport, this is Larry Merriam. You better come over here right away. I'll leave a note at the desk to send you up. Pediatric Oncology. I'll be out in the ward. Talk to the duty nurse and she'll chase me down.'
Merriam sounded worried, Lucas decided. He put his jacket back on and was locking the office door when Barlow came down the steps at the end of the hall and saw him.
'Hey, Lieutenant Davenport, I need to talk to you,' he called.
'Could I stop up later? I'm kind of on the run…'
Barlow kept coming. 'Look, we gotta get this done,' he said, his mustache bristling.
Lucas shook him off: 'I'm up to my ass. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.'
'God damn it, Davenport, this is serious shit.' Barlow moved so that he was between Lucas and the door.
'I'll talk to you,' Lucas said, irritated, letting it show. They stared at each other for a second; then Lucas stepped around him. 'But I can't now. Talk to Daniel if you don't believe me.'
Barlow hadn't been good on the street. He was a control freak and didn't deal well with ambiguities-and the street was one large ambiguity. He'd done fine with Internal Affairs, though.
IA usually went to work on a cop only if there was a blatantly public foul-up, and that was okay with most of the cops in the department, outside of a few hothead brother-cop freaks. Better IA, the feeling went, than some outside board full of blacks and Indians and who knows what, which seemed to be the alternative.
The department had barely managed to fight off a city council proposal that would have formed a review board with real teeth. The study commission on that-the commission Stephanie Bekker had served on-had gone a bit too far, though, had given the impression that it wanted to get on the cops a little too much. That hadn't gone down well with voters scared by crime…
So a gross screw-up in public would get you an IA investigation. A cop could find himself a target also if he got too deep into drugs, or started stealing too much. Screwing off and getting your partner hurt, that would do it too.
But IA didn't worry much if a pimp got slapped around in a fistfight. Especially not if he'd pulled a knife. Half of the cops on the force would've shot him and let it go at that, and they would have been cleared by the board. And if the fight had taken place during an arrest on a warrant charging a violent crime, and if the victim of that crime was scarred for life and still around to testify, to be looked at…
Where was Barlow coming from? Lucas shook his head. It didn't compute. Anderson was going in the door and Lucas was going out, when Lucas hooked him by the arm.
'You think… the guys in the department would like to see me fall? Get taken off by IA?' Lucas asked.
'Are you nuts?' Anderson asked. 'What's happening with IA?'
'They're on me for the fight with that kid, the pimp. I can't figure out where it's coming from.'
'I'll ask around,' Anderson said. 'But when the guys decide somebody ought to fall, it's no big secret. You know that. And nobody's talking about you.'
'So where's it coming from?' Lucas asked.
Barlow stayed in the back of Lucas' mind all the way to the university campus. He dumped the car in a no- parking zone outside the hospital, stuck a police ID card in the window and went inside. Pediatric Oncology was on the sixth floor. A nurse took him down through a warren of small rooms, past a larger room with kids in terry-cloth robes, sitting in wheelchairs and watching television, into another set of hospital rooms. They found Merriam sitting on a bed, talking to a young girl.
'Ah, Lieutenant Davenport,' he said. He looked at the girl in the bed. 'Lisa, this is Lieutenant Davenport. He's a police officer with the Minneapolis Police Department.'
'What's he doing here?' she asked, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. The girl was completely bald and had a very pale face and unnaturally rosy lips. The chemotherapy aside, Lucas thought, touched with a cold finger of fear, she looked a lot like his daughter would in ten years.
'He's a friend of mine, stopping to chat,' Merriam said. 'I've got to go for a while, but I'll be back before they start setting up the procedure.'
'Okay,' she said.
Outside, in the hall, Lucas said, 'I couldn't do this.' And, 'Do you have kids?'
'Four,' Merriam said. 'I don't think about it.'
'So what happened?' Lucas asked. 'You sounded a little tense.'
'The woman you called about. I went down to see her. She has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis…'
'Lou Gehrig's disease…'
'Right. She's almost completely incommunicado. Her brain works fine, but she can't move anything but her eyes. She'll be dead in a week or two. And Bekker is trying to kill her.'
'What?' Lucas grabbed Merriam by the arm.
'This absolutely defeats me: a goddamn doctor,' Merriam said, pulling away. 'But you have to see for yourself. Come along.'
Lucas trailed behind him as they went down a flight of stairs.
'I went down to find her this morning and stopped to ask at the nursing station,' Merriam said over his shoulder. He pushed through a door at the bottom of the stairs. 'The duty nurse had worked overnight, and was working an extra half-shift because somebody was sick. Anyway, I mentioned that I was there to see Sybil and asked if Dr. Bekker had been around. The nurse said-you'll have to take this with a grain of salt-she said she didn't see him but she'd felt him. Late last night. She said it occurred to her that dirty old Dr. Death was around, because she shivered, and she always shivers when she sees him.'
'She calls him 'Dr. Death'?'
' 'Dirty old Dr. Death,' ' Merriam said. 'Not very flattering, is it? So then I went down to talk to Sybil. She's going by inches, but the nurses say she's got an inch or two left…'
Merriam led him past the nurses' station and down the hall, past an exit door and three or four more rooms, then glanced inside a room and turned. Sybil lay flat on her back, unmoving except for her eyes. They went to Merriam, then to Lucas, and stayed with him. They were dark liquid pools, pleading.
'Sybil can't talk, but she can communicate,' Merriam said simply. 'Sybil, this is Lieutenant Davenport of the Minneapolis Police Department. If you understand, say yes.'
Her eyes moved up and down, a nod, and stayed with Merriam.
'And a no,' Merriam prompted.
They moved from side to side.
'Has Dr. Bekker been coming here?' Merriam asked.
Yes.
'Are you afraid of him?'
