A moment later, she came back on to say that the nun was at dinner, and a friend would get her. She told Sloan to hold on.
'Lucas?' Elle asked when she picked up the phone.
'No, this is his friend Sloan. Lucas has a problem…'
When Sloan returned to the car, Lucas' eyes were closed, and he was breathing slowly, as though he were sleeping. 'You okay?' Sloan asked.
'That fuckin' Loverboy. If he'd come in, he could've looked at the picture of Druze the minute I found it, and we could've busted him. But we had to go through this newspaper-ad bullshit…'
'Let it go,' Sloan said. 'Nothing we can do about it now.' • • • Elle was waiting at Lucas' house with another nun and a small black car.
'How are you?' she asked.
He shook his head, looking down at the driveway. Meeting her eyes would be impossible, too complicated.
'I'll call my friend, get a sedative for you.'
'I've got this stuff going around in my head…' he said. And the guns: he could feel the guns in the basement. Not heavy, not like last winter, but they were back.
'Let me call my friend.' Elle took his arm, then his hand, and led him toward the door like a child, while Sloan and the other nun followed behind.
Lucas woke the next morning exhausted.
The sedatives had beaten him into a dreamless sleep. The storm in his head had dissipated, but he could feel it just over the horizon of consciousness. He slid tentatively out of bed, stood up, swayed, opened the bedroom door and almost fell over the couch. Sloan had pushed it up against the door and was struggling to get up.
'Lucas…' Sloan, in a T-shirt and suit pants, with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, looked tired and scared.
'What the fuck are you doing, Sloan?'
Sloan shrugged. 'We thought it might be a good idea, in case you sleepwalked…'
'In case I started looking for my guns?'
'Something like that,' Sloan admitted, looking up at him. 'You look like shit. How do you feel?'
'Like shit,' Lucas said. 'I gotta get some dead kids dug up.'
The blood seemed to drain from Sloan's face, and Lucas smiled despite himself, smiled as a widow might smile the day before her husband is buried. 'Don't worry about it. I'm not nuts. Let me tell you about Bekker…'
CHAPTER 28
Daniel prowled around his office with his hands in his pockets. He'd pulled the shades but hadn't turned on the lights, and the office was almost dark.
'Homicide is satisfied,' he said. 'You know I don't clear murder cases on the basis of politics-and there's every indication that we got him. You got him. Bekker is something else.'
Lucas was also standing, propped against a windowsill, arms crossed. 'If Bekker kills another one and carves her eyes out, then what'll you do? The goddamned press'll be down here with pitchforks and torches.'
Daniel threw up his hands in exasperation. 'Look, I know this actress woman and you…'
'Doesn't have anything to do with it,' Lucas said. His head still felt like a chunk of wood. Cassie did have something to do with it, of course. Revenge wouldn't be enough, but it would be something. 'Druze may have killed her, but Bekker was behind it.'
'Have you talked to the lab people since you came in?'
'No…'
'They looked at that jacket in Druze's closet. There was blood on the back of it. You can't see it, because the fabric was black and the blood was soaked in. But it was there, and they've done some preliminary tests. The blood is the same type as Stephanie Bekker's…'
Lucas nodded. 'I think Druze killed Stephanie, all right…'
'And George. We got a taxi routing from the airport to the Lost River Theater the night George was done.'
'What about Elizabeth Armistead? I'm not so sure about that one. I asked that night, or the next day, and everybody agreed Druze was at the theater most of the afternoon.'
Daniel jabbed a forefinger at Lucas: 'But maybe not every minute. He could've been gone half an hour and that would have been enough. And the woman who saw the guy at Armistead's said he was in some kind of utility-man getup. That sounds like an actor to me-we've got Homicide guys over at the theater right now, going through their wardrobe.'
'What about the phone call?'
'Come on, Lucas. That so-called phone call doesn't make sense no matter how you cut it. And the kid out in Maplewood is pretty sure that Druze is the guy who did the Romm woman.' Daniel took a manila folder from his desk and handed it to Lucas. 'They found these in Druze's apartment.'
Lucas opened the folder: inside were photographs of Stephanie Bekker and Elizabeth Armistead. The eyes had been cut out. 'Where'd they get these?'
'Druze's file cabinet. Stuffed in the back.'
'Bullshit,' said Lucas, shaking his head. 'I went through the file cabinet. These weren't there.'
'Maybe he carried them with him.'
'And puts them in the file cabinet before he goes upstairs to blow his brains out?' Lucas said. 'Look, take this any way you want: as a continuing homicide investigation or just covering your political ass. We've got to stay with Bekker. We can tell the press that the case is cleared, but we've got to stay on him. We can start by exhuming these kids.'
'What do we say about that?' Daniel asked. 'How do we explain…'
'We don't say anything. Why should we say anything to anybody? If we can convince the parents to keep quiet…'
Daniel walked around the quiet office, head down, rubbing his hands. Finally he nodded. 'Damn, I'd hoped we'd finished with it.'
'We're not finished until Bekker falls. You saw the tapes with Sybil, for Christ's sake…'
'And you heard what the lawyers said. A dying woman, maybe paranoid, loaded with drugs? C'mon. I believe her, Merriam believes her, Sloan does, so do you-but there's no way a judge is going to put that in front of a jury.'
'Dying declaration…'
'Oh, bullshit, Lucas-she didn't make it while she was dying, for Christ's sake…'
'You know what Cassie couldn't understand about the killings? The eyes. She said Druze would never do the eyes. You know what my friend Elle says about them? The shrink. She says he has to do the eyes. So if Bekker is nuts, and he kills somebody else… Jesus, can't you see it? He'll do the eyes again, and your balls will be hanging from a pole outside the City Hall door.'
Daniel pulled on his lip, sighed and nodded. 'Go ahead. Talk to the kids' parents. If they say okay on an exhumation, do it. If they say no, come back here and we'll talk. I don't want to go for a court order.'
Lucas met Anderson in the hallway.
'You've heard?' Anderson asked.
'What?'
'The lab guys say that Druze didn't have much in the way of nitrites on his hands. He may have had a handkerchief on the gun, but still…'
'So what are they saying?'
'Maybe he didn't kill himself. The M.E. says the whole scene is a little weird, the way he did it, the way he must have been standing when he pulled the trigger. Can't figure out how the gun got underneath him, either. The
