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“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 tailored navy-blue suit and a long, ma
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 Ke
“He may specifically pick victims who look healthy,” said Case, one of the serial-killer specialists. “This science thing he has—Da
“All right,” said Ke
“They’re all noticeably small, except the first one,” Kuhn said. “The second guy was only five-six and ski
“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.”
Ke
“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 Ke
“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 Ke
“And that means he’s living with somebody or he’s on the street,” Ke
“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,” Ke
“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,” Ke
“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 Ke
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 Ke
When he was gone, Lucas looked at Ke
The distaste that had flicked across Ke