'That's all bullshit, the fast-metabolism excuse,' Lucas said. 'I read it in the Times. '
'Another sign of decline, the Times printing obvious bullshit,' Lily said. She stuffed the notebook back in her purse, put the purse aside and crossed her legs, clasping her hands on her knees. 'Okay, a beer and half a sandwich.'
They ate at the breakfast bar, facing each other, making small talk, checking each other. Lucas was off the police force and missed the action. Lily had moved up, off the street, and was doing political work with a deputy commissioner. Lily asked, 'How's Jennifer? And Sarah?'
Lucas shook his head, finishing the sandwich. 'Jen and I-we're all done. We tried, and it didn't work. Too much bad history. We're still friends. She's seeing a guy from the station. They'll probably get married.'
'He's okay?'
'Yeah, I guess,' Lucas said.
But he was unconsciously shaking his head as he said it.
Lily considered the tone: 'So you think he's an asshole?'
'Hell… No. Not really.' Lucas, finished with his half of the sandwich, stepped over to the sink, squirted Ivory Liquid into the palm of one hand, turned on the water and washed off the traces of the sandwich's olive oil. His hands were large and square, boxer's hands. 'And he likes Sarah and he's got a kid of his own, about seven months older than Sarah. They get along…'
'Like a family…' Lily said. Lucas turned away and shook the water off his hands and she quickly said, 'Sorry.'
'Yeah, well, what the fuck,' Lucas said. He went back to the refrigerator, took out another bottle of Leinenkugel's and twisted the top off. 'Actually, I've been feeling pretty good. Ending it. I'm making some money and I've been out on the road, looking at the world. I was at Little Bighorn a couple of weeks ago. Freaked me out. You can stand by Custer's stone and see the whole fucking fight…'
'Yeah?'
He was marking time, waiting for her to tell him why she'd come to the Cities. But she was better at waiting than he was, and finally he asked, 'What're you here for?'
She licked a chip of roast beef from the corner of her mouth, her long tongue catching it expertly. Then: 'I want you to come to New York.'
'For Bekker?' he asked skeptically. 'Bullshit. You guys can handle Bekker. And if I was a New York cop, I'd get pissed off if somebody came in from the outside. A small-town guy.'
She was nodding. 'Yeah, we can handle Bekker. We've got guys saying all kinds of things: that we'll have him in a week, in ten days… It's been six weeks, Lucas. We'll get him, but the politics are getting ugly.'
'Still…'
'We want you to jawbone the media. You're good at that, talking to reporters. We want to tell them that we're doing everything we can, that we're even importing the guy who caught him the first time. We want to emphasize that we're pulling out all the stops. Our guys'll understand that, they'll appreciate it-they'll know we're trying to take the heat off.'
'That's it? A public-relations trick?' He grimaced, began to shake his head. He didn't want to talk to reporters. He wanted to get somebody by the throat…
'No, no. You'll work the case, all right,' she said. She finished the sandwich and held her hands out, fingers spread, looking for a napkin, and he handed her a paper towel. 'Right down on the street with the rest of them. And high priority, too. I do value your abilities.'
Lucas caught something in her voice. 'But?'
'But… all of that aside, there's something else.'
He laughed. 'A third layer? A Lily Rothenburg layer? What're you doing?'
'The thing is, we've got serious trouble. Even bigger than Bekker, if you can imagine it.' She hesitated, searching his eyes, intent, then balled up the paper napkin and did a sitting jump shot into a wastebasket before continuing. 'This can't come out anywhere.'
Irritated, he wordlessly backhanded the comment away, like a bothersome gnat. She nodded, slipped off the stool, took a quick turn around the kitchen, picked up an enamel coffee cup, turned it in her hands, put it down.
'We're looking at thirteen murders,' she said finally. 'Not Bekker's. Someone else's. These are all… hits. Maybe. Of the thirteen-those are the ones we're sure of, we think there are more, as many as forty-ten were out-and-out assholes. Two of them were pretty big: a wholesaler for the Cali cartel and an up-and-coming Mafia guy. The other eight were miscellaneous small-timers.'
'Number eleven?'
'A lawyer,' Lily said. 'A criminal defense lawyer who represented a lot of big dopers. He was good. He put a lot of people back on the street that shouldn't have been there. But most people thought he was straight.'
'Hard to be straight, with that job,' Lucas said.
'But we think he was. The investigation hasn't turned up anything that'd change our mind. We've been combing his bank records, along with the IRS and the state tax people. There's not a goddamned thing. In fact, there wouldn't have been any point in his being crooked: he was pulling in so much money he didn't need any more. Three million bucks was a slow year.'
'Okay. Who was twelve?'
'Number twelve was a professional black… spokesman,' she said. 'A community leader, a loudmouth, a rabble-rouser, whatever you want to call him. But he wasn't a crook. He was a neighborhood politician trying to climb the pole. He was shot in a drive-by, supposedly a couple of gang-bangers. But it was very slick for gang- bangers, good weapons, a stolen car.'
'Thirteen?'
'Thirteen was a cop.'
'Crooked?'
'Straight. He was investigating the possibility that we've got a rogue group inside the police department, inside intelligence, systematically killing people.'
There was a moment of silence as Lucas digested it. 'Sonofabitch,' he said finally. 'They've killed thirteen people for sure, and maybe forty?'
'The cop who was killed-his name was Walter Petty-claimed there were twelve, for sure. He's the thirteenth. We think. He said there could be thirty or forty more.'
'Jesus Christ.' Lucas pulled at his lip, turned away from her, blankly staring at the microwave. Forty? 'You should've picked it up…'
'Not necessarily,' Lily said, shaking her head. The short hair whipped around her ears, like a television advertisement, and he caught a smile and suppressed it. This was business, she said. 'For one thing, they were killed over a long time. Five years, anyway. And most of them died like you'd have expected, knowing their records. Except more efficiently. That's what you notice when you decide you've got a pattern: the efficiency of it. Bang, bang, they're dead. Never any cops close by-once or twice, they were actually decoyed out. There are never any good witnesses. The getaways are preplanned. No collateral damage, no mushrooms getting knocked down.'
'So you've got a pattern of small-time assholes killed by big-time shooters,' Lucas said.
'Right. Like this one guy, I met him myself, years ago, when I was just coming off patrol. Arvin Davies.' She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and wet her lips, remembering the file. 'He was forty-two when he was killed. He was a doper, a drunk. A brawler. He had twenty priors going back to age twelve, and he'd been picked up for one thing or another maybe twenty more times. All small stuff. Street muggings, burglaries, car thefts, rip-offs, possession. He'd get his nose clogged up with angel dust and beat his victims. He killed one five or six years ago, but we could never prove it. He spent twenty years inside, all short time. The last time he got out, he did a couple of muggings and then somebody put him on a wall. Shot him twice in the heart and once in the head. The head shot came when he was already down, a coup de grace. The shooter walked away,' she said, hopping back up on the breakfast-bar stool across from him.
'A pro,' Lucas said.
'Yeah. And there just wasn't any reason a pro would go after Arvin Davies. He was small-time, chickenshit. But
