A half-dozen more plainclothes cops, in thin short-sleeved shirts and wash pants, weapons clipped to their belts, watched the argument from the plastic chairs spread around the institutional carpet. Four of the six held Styrofoam coffee cups, and two or three were smoking cigarettes, snubbing them out in shallow aluminum ashtrays. One unattended cigarette continued to burn, the foul odor like a fingernail scratch on a blackboard.
'What's going on?' Kennett asked quietly, moving to the front of the room. The argument stopped.
'Discussing strategy,' the sunburned cop said shortly.
'Any conclusions?' Kennett asked. He was polite, but pushing. Taking over.
The cop shook his head and turned away. 'No.'
Lucas found a seat halfway back, the other cops looking at him, openly, carefully, with some distance.
'That's Lucas Davenport, the guy from Minneapolis,' Kennett said, almost absently, as Lucas sat down. He'd picked up a manila file with his name on it, and was flipping through memos and call slips. 'He's gonna talk to the press this morning, then go out on the street this afternoon. With Fell.'
'How come you let this motherfucker Bekker get out?' the sunburned cop asked.
'Wasn't me,' Lucas said mildly.
'Should of killed him when you could,' dog-face said. Dog-face's two top-middle teeth pointed in slightly different directions and were notably orange.
'I thought about it,' Lucas said, staring lazily at dog-face until the other broke his eyes away.
Somebody laughed, and somebody else said, 'Shoulda.'
Kennett said, 'You won't remember this, Davenport, but let me introduce Lieutenants Kuhn, Huerta, White, Diaz, Blake, and Carter, and Detectives Annelli and Case, our serial-killer specialists. You can get the first names sorted out later…'
The cops lifted hands or nodded at him as their names were called out. They looked like Minneapolis cops, Lucas thought. Different names, but the attitude was the same, like a gathering of paranoid shoe salesmen: too little pay, too many years of burgers and fries and Butterfingers, too many people with big feet trying to get into small shoes.
A red-haired woman walked into the room carrying a stack of files, and Kennett added, 'And this is Barb Fell… Barb, that's Lucas Davenport in what appears to be a five-hundred-dollar silk-blend jacket and two-hundred-dollar shoes…'
Fell was in her mid-thirties, slender, her red hair just touched with gray. An old scar, shaped like a new moon, cupped one side of her long mouth, a dead-white punctuation mark on a pale oval Welsh face. She sat next to him, perching, shook hands quickly and turned back to the front of the room.
'John O'Dell's coming over, he's going to sit in,' one of the cops was telling Kennett. Kennett nodded, dragged a chair around to face the others and said, 'Somebody tell me we've got something new.'
After a moment of silence, Diaz, a tall, gaunt detective, one of the lieutenants, said, 'About the time Bekker would've got here, a cab disappeared. Three months old. One of them new, round Caprices. Poof. Gone. Stolen while the driver was taking a leak. Supposedly.'
Kennett's eyebrows went up. 'Never seen again?'
'Not as far as we can tell. But, ah…'
'What?'
'One of the guys checked around. The driver doesn't know anything from anything. Went into a bar to take a leak, comes out, and it's gone. But the thing had been in two accidents, and the driver says it was a piece of shit. Says the transmission was shot, there was something wrong with the suspension, the front passenger-side door was so tight you could barely open it. I'd bet the sonofabitch is in a river someplace. For the insurance.'
Kennett nodded but said, 'Push it. We've got nothing else, right?' He looked around. 'Nothing from the Laski surveillance…?'
'No. Not a thing,' said another of the lieutenants.
'Um…' Lucas lifted a finger, and Kennett nodded at him.
'Lily told me about the Laski scam, and I've been thinking about it.'
The cops at the front of the room turned in their chairs to look at him. 'Like what?' asked Kennett.
'I don't think Bekker'll go for it. He'd think of Laski as a wrong-headed colleague, not somebody he'd hit. Maybe somebody he'd debate. He's an equal, not a subject.'
'We got nothing else going for us,' snapped Carter, the sunburned cop. 'And it's cheap.'
'Hey, it's a smart idea,' Lucas said. Laski was a Columbia pathologist who had agreed to analyze Bekker's medical papers for the media. He had condemned them, attacked their morality and science, attacked Bekker as a sadist and a psychotic and a scientific moron-all of it calculated to bring Bekker in. Laski, his apartment and his office were covered by a web of plainclothes cops. So far, Bekker hadn't touched any of the trip wires. 'That's why I was thinking about it. About variations.'
'Like what?' prompted Kennett.
'Back in the Cities, Bekker subscribed to the Times, and I bet he reads it here. If we could set somebody up to give a lecture, some kind of professional speech that would pull him in…'
'Don't tease me, darlin',' Kennett said.
'We have some guy lecture on the medical experiments done by Dr. Mengele,' Lucas said. 'You know, the Nazi dude…'
'We know…'
'So he lectures on the ethics of using Mengele's studies in research and the ethics of using Bekker's stuff,' Lucas said. 'And what might come out of their so-called research that's valuable. And we make an announcement in the Times. '
The cops all looked at each other, and then Huerta said, 'Jesus Christ, man, half the fuckin' town is Jewish. They'd go batshit…'
'Hey, I don't mean any goddamn anti-Semite fruitcake lecture,' Lucas said. 'I mean some kind of, you know, soft, intellectual, theory thing. I read about this Mengele ethics debate somewhere, so there's something to talk about. I mean, legit. Maybe we get somebody Jewish to front it, so nobody gets pissed off. Somebody with credentials.'
'You think that'd do it?' Kennett said. He was interested.
'Bekker couldn't resist, if he heard about it. He's nuts about the topic. Maybe we could arrange for this guy, whoever we get, to have a controversy with Laski. Something that would get in the papers.'
Kennett looked at the others. 'What do you think?'
Carter tipped his head, grudgingly nodded. 'Could you fix it?'
Kennett nodded. 'Somebody could. O'Dell, maybe. We could get somebody at the New School. We know Bekker's around there.'
'Sounds okay,' said Huerta. 'But it'll take a while to set up.'
'Two or three days,' said Kennett. 'A week.'
'We oughta have him by then…'
'So we cancel. It's like Laski: I don't see any downside, frankly, and it's cheap,' Kennett said. He nodded at Lucas. 'I'll get it started.'
'Quick.'
'Yeah,' Kennett said. He looked around the room. 'All right, so let's go over it. John, what'd we have from Narcotics?'
'We're hassling everybody, but nothing sounds good,' said Blake. 'Lotsa bullshit, we're chasing it…'
As they reviewed the status of the case, and routine assignments, Fell whispered to Lucas, 'Your interviews are all set up. A couple of reporters are already here, and three or four more are coming.'
Lucas nodded, but as she was about to add something, her eyes shifted away from him toward the door. A fat man walked in, his body swaying side to side, bumping the door frame, small dark eyes poking into the corners of the room, checking off the detectives, pausing at Lucas, pausing at Fell. He looked like H. L. Mencken in the later years. Spidery veins crisscrossed the gray cheeks; his thinning reddish hair was combed straight back with some kind of oil. His jowls were emphasized by a brooding, liverish underlip that seemed fixed in a permanent pout. He wore a three-piece suit in a color that might have been called oxblood, if anyone made oxblood suits.
'O'Dell,' Fell said under her breath, at his ear. 'Deputy commissioner in charge of cutting throats.'
Lily followed O'Dell into the room, picked out Lucas, tipped her head and lifted her eyebrows. She wore a
