tailored navy-blue suit and a long, mannish red necktie knotted with a loose Windsor. She carried a heavy leather cop's purse over her shoulder, her hand lying casually on the strap at the back of the purse. If she moved her hand four inches, she'd be gripping the butt of a.45. Lucas had seen her use it once, had seen her shove the.45 in a man's face and pull the trigger, the man's face smearing as though he'd been struck with a hammer, all in the space of a tenth of a second…
Lily touched O'Dell's elbow, guided him toward a chair, then moved around where she could sit next to Lucas. 'Get a chance to talk to Dick?' she whispered.
'Yeah. He seems like a pretty good guy…'
She looked at him, as though checking to see if he was serious, then nodded and looked away.
O'Dell was up-to-date on the case's progress, and had no particular ideas about what to do next, he told the cops. He just wanted to sit in, to get a feel for the movement. 'What about decoys?' he asked. 'Somebody downtown suggested that we might put a few people on the street…'
They argued about decoys for a while, a last-resort effort, but Kennett shook his head. 'The area's too big,' he said. He wandered over to a bulletin board-sized map of Manhattan, ran a finger from Central Park to the financial district. 'If he was hitting a specific group, like hookers or gays, then maybe. But there's no connection between the victims. Except some negatives. He doesn't take street people, who'd probably be the easiest…'
'He may specifically pick victims who look healthy,' said Case, one of the serial-killer specialists. 'This science thing he has-Danny and I think he rules out anybody who's too odd, or diseased or infirm. They'd mess up his findings. The medical examiner reports are all pretty much the same: these people are healthy.'
'All right,' said Kennett. 'So he takes seven people, five female, two male, one black, six white. Two of the whites are Hispanic, but that doesn't seem to mean anything.'
'They're all noticeably small, except the first one,' Kuhn said. 'The second guy was only five-six and skinny.'
'Disposal,' Huerta grunted.
They all nodded, and there was another long moment of silence, everybody in the room staring at the map of Manhattan.
'It's gotta be a cab,' somebody said. 'If he can't let anybody see him, and he's gotta have money for drugs, and he's gotta have someplace to gas these people…' One of the cops looked at Lucas: 'What are the chances that he had some money stashed? He was pretty well-off, right? Could he have ditched…?'
Lucas was shaking his head. 'When we took him, we blindsided him. He thought he was home free. When his wife's estate got into court, all their money was accounted for.'
'Okay, that was pretty thin.'
'It seems to me that somebody's protecting him,' Lucas said. 'An old friend or a new friend, but somebody.'
Kennett was nodding. 'I've worried about that, but if that's right, there isn't much we can do about it.'
'We can try pushing his friend, using the media again,' Lucas said. 'If he depends on somebody else…'
O'Dell, seated heavily on a shaky folding chair, interrupted. 'Wait, wait. You guys are getting ahead of me. How do we think this, that he has a friend?'
'We've papered the goddamn town with his picture and with simulations of what he'd look like if he dyed his hair or grew a beard or if he shaved his head,' said Kennett. 'These aren't identikit mock-ups, these are based on good-quality photographs…'
'Yeah, yeah…' O'Dell said impatiently.
'So unless he's invisible or living in the sewers, he's probably being protected,' Lucas said, picking up the thread from Kennett. 'He can't be a regular tenant somewhere. He'd have to pay rent and people'd see him on a regular basis. He can't risk landlords or nosy neighbors.'
'And that means he's living with somebody or he's on the street,' Kennett said.
'He's not on the street,' Lucas said positively. 'I can't see him living like that. He just wouldn't do it. He's… fastidious. Besides, he's got to have a vehicle. He didn't call a cab to haul these bodies around.'
'Unless he drives a cab himself,' said Huerta.
'Not much there,' said Diaz, shaking his head. 'We'll push the stolen one…'
'And it'd still be pretty risky,' Lucas said.
'Yeah, but it answers a lot of questions: how he gets transportation, how he makes money and still keeps his face hidden,' Kennett said. 'If he worked a couple of hours a night, late, and picked his spots… maybe concentrated on the tourist and convention areas, you know, the Javits Center, places like that. He'd mostly be dealing with out-of-towners, which would explain Cortese. People trust cabbies. Like if he pretended he had a parcel, gets out and asks somebody where an address was…'
'I don't know,' said Lucas.
They all stared at the map some more. Too much city; single buildings that would hold the populations of two or three small towns.
'But I still think you might be right, that he's living with somebody,' Kennett said finally. 'How he gets his money…'
'He's got skills,' Lucas said. 'He's got an M.D., he knows chemistry. A good chemist on the run…'
'Methedrine,' said White, a bald man in gray knit slacks. 'Ecstasy. LSD. It's all back, almost like the old days.'
'Be a good reason to protect him, too,' said Kuhn. 'He'd be a cash cow.'
'Assuming this isn't just bullshit, what does it get us?' O'Dell asked impatiently.
'We start looking for ways to put pressure on whoever he's living with or who's covering for him,' Lucas said. 'We need some heavy-duty contact with the media.'
'Why?' said O'Dell.
'Because we have to move them around. Get them to do a little propaganda for us. We need to talk about how anybody who's hiding Bekker is an accessory to mass murder. We need some headlines to that effect. That their only hope is to roll over on him, plead ignorance, get immunity. We've got to chase him out in the open.'
'I could call somebody,' O'Dell said.
'We need the right emphasis…'
'We can figure something out,' O'Dell said. 'Are you still talking to the reporters this morning?'
'Yeah.'
'Throw something in, then…'
When the meeting broke up, O'Dell lurched ponderously out of his chair, leaned toward Lucas, and said, 'We'd like to sit in on the press thing. Me and Lily.'
Lucas nodded. 'Sure.' O'Dell nodded and headed toward the front of the room, and Lucas turned to Fell. 'We're going out this afternoon?'
'Yeah. They've got us looking for fences,' she said. She had gray eyes that matched the touch of gray in her hair; she was five-six or so, with a slightly injured smile and nicotine-stained fingers.
'Could I get copies or printouts of all the Bekker files, or borrow what I can't copy?'
'Right here,' she said, patting the stack of manila folders in her lap.
From the front of the room, where he was talking to Kennett, O'Dell called, 'Davenport.' Lucas stood up and walked over, and O'Dell said, 'Dick has been telling me about your idea, the lecture thing, the Mengele. I'll call around this afternoon and set it up. Like for next week. We'll play it like it's been set for a while.'
Lucas nodded. 'Good.'
'I'll see you in the hall,' O'Dell said, breaking away. Out of the corner of his eye, as O'Dell spoke to him, Lucas could see Kennett's mouth tic. Disgust? 'I've gotta pee.'
When he was gone, Lucas looked at Kennett and asked, 'Why don't you like him?'
The distaste that had flicked across Kennett's face had been covered in an instant. He looked at Davenport for a long, measured beat and then said, 'Because he never does anything but words. Maneuvers. Manipulations. He looks like a pig, but he's not. He's a goddamn spider. If he had a choice between lying and telling the truth, he'd lie because it'd be more interesting. That's why.'
'Sounds like a good reason,' Lucas said, looking after O'Dell. 'Lily seems to like him.'
'I can't figure that,' Kennett said. They both glanced down the room at Lily, who was talking with Fell. 'That pig-spider business, by the way… I put my ass in your hands. If he knew I thought that, my next job'd be directing
