'Hey, hey…' O'Dell said.
'Look, Lily, you know goddamned well…' Lucas said.
'Stop, stop, not in a restaurant,' O'Dell said. 'Jesus…'
'Okay,' said Lily. She and Lucas had locked up, and now she broke her eyes away.
The waiter returned with a plate piled with French toast and a small tureen of hot maple syrup. A pat of butter floated on the syrup. He unloaded the French toast in front of O'Dell, and coffee cups in front of Lucas and Lily. O'Dell tucked a napkin into his collar and started on the toast.
'There's something more going on here,' O'Dell said, when the waiter had gone. 'These three hits we're most worried about, the lawyer, the activist, and Petty himself-I believe these guys may be coming out. The shooters.'
'What?' Lucas glanced at Lily, who stared impassively at O'Dell.
'That's my sense, my political sense,' O'Dell said. He popped a dripping square of toast into his mouth, chewed, leaned back and watched Lucas with his small eyes. 'They're deliberately letting us know that they're out there and that they aren't to be fooled with. The word is getting around. Has been for a couple of months. You hear this shit, 'Robin Hood and his Merry Men,' or 'Batman Strikes Again,' whenever some asshole is taken off. There are a lot of people who'd like the idea that they're out there. Doing what's necessary. Half the people in town would be cheering them on, if they knew.'
'And the other half would be in the streets, tearing the place apart,' Lily said to Lucas. She turned her head to O'Dell. 'There's the other thing, too, with Bekker.'
'What?' asked Lucas, looking between them.
'We're told that this is real,' she said. She fished in her purse, took out a folded square of paper and handed it to him. A Xerox copy of a letter, addressed to the editor of the New York Times.
Lucas glanced down at the signature: Bekker. One word, an aristocratic conceit and scrawl. … taken to task for what I consider absolutely essential experiments into the transcendental nature of Man, and accused of crimes; so be it. I will stand on my intellectual record, and though accused of crimes, as Galileo was, I will, like him, be vindicated by a future generation.
Though accused of crimes, I am innocent, and I will have no truck with criminals. It is in that spirit that I write. On Friday night last, I witnessed an apparent gangland shooting…
'Jesus Christ,' Lucas said, looking at Lily. 'Was this one of the killings you were talking about?'
'Walt,' she said.
Lucas went back to the letter. Bekker had seen the two killers clearly. … would describe him as white, thick, square-faced with a gray, well-trimmed mustache extending the full length of his upper lip, weighing two hundred and twenty pounds, six feet, two inches tall, sixty-one years old. As a trained forensic pathologist, I would wager that I am not wrong by more than five pounds either way, or by more than an inch in height, or two years in age.
The description of the other one, the one I have called Thin, I will hold to myself, for my own reasons…
'This never ran in the paper?' Lucas asked, looking at O'Dell.
'No. They've agreed to hold it at our request, but they've reserved the right to print it if it seems relevant.'
'Do you have any idea who it is? This Thick guy?'
He shook his head: 'One of four or five hundred cops-if it's a cop at all.'
'You could probably narrow it more than that,' Lucas said.
'Not without going public,' Lily said. 'If we started checking out five hundred cops… Christ, the papers would be all over us. But the main thing is, you see…'
Lucas picked up her thought: 'Bekker can identify two cop killers and he's willing to do it…'
'And for that reason, we think these guys'll make a run at Bekker.'
'To shut him up.'
'Among other things.'
'If they are coming out, they're more likely to go for Bekker,' O'Dell said. 'They might have to go for him anyway, if they think he can identify two of them. But there's more than that: Killing Bekker would be one way to make their point, that some people have to be killed. Bekker's a nightmare. Who can object to killing him? He's made to order for them, if they can find him.'
'This is getting complicated,' Lucas said. 'I worry about Lily. She's close to this thing, funneling stuff around. What happens if they come after her?'
'They won't,' O'Dell said confidently. 'Two dead cops would be unacceptable…'
'I'd think one dead cop would be unacceptable.'
'One dead cop can be finessed. Denied. Two is a pattern,' O'Dell said.
'Besides, I'm not exactly a pushover,' Lily said, patting the purse where she kept her.45.
'That'll get your ass killed,' Lucas said, anger in his voice. They locked up again. 'Anyone's a pushover when the shooters are using a fuckin' machine gun from ambush. You're good, but you ain't bulletproof.'
'All right, all right…' She rolled her eyes away.
'And there's always Copland,' O'Dell said. 'When Lily's outside working, she's usually with me in the car. Copland's more than a driver. He's tough as a nail and he knows how to use his gun. I'll have him take her home at night.'
'Okay.' Lucas looked at Lily again, just for a second, then shifted back to O'Dell. 'How'd you get onto Fell? Exactly?'
'Exactly.' O'Dell mopped up a river of syrup with a crust of the toast, looked at it for a minute, then popped it in his mouth and chewed, his small eyes nearly closing with the pleasure of it. He swallowed, opened his eyes. Like a frog, Lucas thought. 'This is it, exactly. Once or twice a semester I go up to Columbia and lecture on Real Politics, for a friend of mine. Professor. This goes way back. So a few years ago-hell, what am I saying, it was fifteen years ago-he introduced me to a graduate student who was using computerized statistical techniques to analyze voting patterns. Fascinating stuff. I wound up taking classes in statistics, and a couple in computers. I don't look like it'-he spread his arms, as if to display his entire corpulent body-'but I'm a computer jock. When these guys in intelligence found what they thought was a problem, I sorted the killings. There was a pattern. No mistake about it. I called in Petty, who specialized in computer searches and relational work. We turned up almost two hundred possibles. For one reason or another, we eliminated a lot of them and got it down to maybe forty. And twelve of those, we were just about sure of. I think Lily told you that…'
'Yeah. Forty. That's a pretty unbelievable number.'
O'Dell shrugged. 'Some of the killings are probably just what they seem to be-thugs getting killed on the street by other thugs. But not all of them. And I'm sure we missed some. So balancing everything out, I think forty, fifty aren't bad numbers.'
'How does Fell fit in?' Lucas asked.
'Petty ran the bad guys against cops who'd know them-a lot of complicated name sorts here, but I've got total access.'
'And Fell's name came up…'
'Way too much.'
'I hate statistics,' Lucas said. 'The newspapers were always fuckin' with them back in Minneapolis, drawing stupid conclusions from bad data.'
'That's a problem, the data,' O'Dell agreed. 'We'd certainly never get Fell in court, based on my numbers.'
'Mmmph.' Lucas looked at Lily and then O'Dell. 'I need some heavy time to dig through this…'
'Don't,' said O'Dell. He pointed a fork at Lucas' nose. 'Your first priority is to find Bekker and to provide a diversion for the media. We need a little air. You've got to do that for real. If this gang is out there, these killers, they won't be easily fooled. Bringing you to New York was supposed to be like bringing in a psychic from Boise: to keep the Boises in the newsroom happy. Everybody's buying it so far. They've got to keep buying it. This other thing has to be way, way in the background.'
'What happens if we catch Bekker too soon?' Lucas asked. 'Before we identify these guys?'
Lily shrugged. 'Then you go home and we find some other way to do it.'
'Mmm.'
