Silent Prey

"Man, there's nothin'…"

But Lucas and Fell were out the door.

The body was in a dead-end alley off Prince. Uniforms blocked the mouth of the alley, kept back the curious. Fell and Lucas flashed their badges and went through. Ke

"Goddamn maniac," he said as Lucas and Fell walked up. The crime-scene techs had dropped a ladder into the well. Lucas looked over the railing and saw a small woman's body at the bottom of the well, nude, crumpled like a doll, the techs working over her.

"No question it was Bekker?" Lucas asked.

"No, but it's different. This doesn't look so scientific. She's pretty slashed up, like he… I don't know. It looks like he was having fun."

"Eyes?"

"Yeah, the eyes are cut and the doc says it looks like his work. The eyelids gone, very neat and surgical. The sonofabitch has a signature."

"How long has she been down there?" Fell asked.

"Not long. A few hours at the most. Probably went in before dawn, this morning."

"Got an ID?" asked Lucas.

"No." Ke

"No." Fell shook her head, carefully not looking at him.

"God damn it," Ke

"Anything on the Bellevue phones?" Lucas asked, watching the techs get ready to roll the woman's body.

Ke

"Did he carry a beeper? Maybe a cellular?" Fell asked.

"Not that we can find," said Ke

"That's bullshit," Lucas said flatly. "He was dealing, right? We know that for sure?"

"Yeah."

"Then he's got a phone. We've just got to find it…"

"Carter's guys are interviewing people over there right now, at Bellevue. Maybe you could listen in for a while?" Ke

At the bottom of the window well, the crime-scene techs rolled the body. The woman's head flopped over, and her wide white eyes suddenly looked up at them.

"Aw, shit," Fell gagged. She turned away, hunched over the alley cobblestones, and a stream of saliva poured from her mouth.

"You okay?" Lucas asked, his hand on her back.

"Yes," she said, straightening. "Sorry. That just caught me, the eyes…"

Five minutes later, the body was out of the window well. The removal crew had wrapped it in a blanket, but Ke

Ke

"Pliers," Ke

"Treats them like… lumber," Lucas said, groping for the right concept.

"Or lab animals," Ke

"Sonofabitch." Lucas leaned to one side, almost toppled, caught himself with his hand, then knelt over the body until his face was only inches from the body's left ear. He looked up at one of the techs and said, "Roll her a little to the right, will you?" He took a pen from his shirt pocket and, to Ke

Ke

"Have you ever seen anything like that?" Lucas asked.

Ke

"Not exactly. It looks like a discharge wound from one of those electroshock self-defense gizmos, stun guns. The St. Paul cops carry them. I went over to see a demonstration. If you keep the discharge points on bare skin for more than a second or two, you can get this kind of injury."

"That's why there's no fight," Fell said, looking at him.

Lucas nodded. "He hits them with the shocker. When you get hit, you go down, like right now. Then he comes with the gas."

"Couldn't be too many places around that sell those things," Ke

"Police-supply places, but I've seen them in gun magazines, too, mail order," Lucas said.

Ke

Lucas and Fell took a cab to Bellevue, windows open, the hot popcorn smell of the city roaring in as they dodged through traffic, and got trapped for five minutes in a narrow one-lane crosstown street. Fell's jaw was working with anger.

"Thinking about Bekker?"

"About the body… Jesus. I hope Robin Hood gets him," she said. "Bekker."

"What? Robin Hood?" He looked at her curiously.

"Nothing," she said, looking away.

"No, c'mon, who's Robin Hood?"

"Ah, it's bullshit," she said, digging in her purse for a cigarette. "Supposedly somebody is knocking off assholes."

"You mean, a vigilante?"

She gri

"Huh."

She lit the cigarette, coughed, and looked out the window.

Whitechurch had been a maintenance foreman. A changing roll of a dozen people worked under his loose supervision, doing minor repairs all over the hospital on the three-to-eleven shift.

"A great goddamn job if you're stealing stuff," Fell said as they joined Carter in an employees' lounge. Three detectives were interviewing hospital employees, with Carter supervising.

"Or if you're dealing," said Carter. He looked at his list. "Next one is Jimmy Beale. Goddamn, I got little faith in this."

"I know what you mean," Lucas said, watching the scared employees trooping through the lounge.

Beale knew nothing. Neither did any of the rest. Fell burned through a pack of Luckys, left to get another, came back and leaned in the door.

"God damn it, Mark… it's Mark?" Carter was saying. "God damn it, Mark, we're not getting anywhere and it's hard to believe that a guy could be stealing the place blind and nobody'd know about it. Or dealing dope, and nobody'd know…"

Mark, tall, narrow, acned, nodded nervously, his Adam's apple working convulsively, sliding up and down his thin neck. "Man, you never seen the dude, you know? I mean, I'd come in and he'd say, Mark, g'wan up to 441D and put on a new doorknob and then see if there's a leak on the drinking fountain up on six, and that's what I'd do. He'd come by, but like, I never hung out with him or nothing."

When he was gone, Lucas said, "Nobody knew. How many do you believe?"

"Most of them," Carter said. "I don't think he was dealing here. And if you're stealing stuff, you don't talk about it. Somebody'll try to cut in-or somebody'll try to do the same thing, then feed you to the cops on plea bargain."

"Somebody must've known," Fell objected. "That was the last of them?"

"That was the last…" said Carter.

A woman knocked on the edge of the door and stuck her face in. She had curly white hair and held her hands in front of her as though she were knitting.