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She blushed and said, “We just go
“You don’t want to talk about how terrific you look?”
“Hey, just shut the fuck up, okay, Davenport?” she said.
“Anything you want . . .” Under his breath, he added, “Toots.”
“What? What’d you just say?”
“Nothing,” Lucas said i
She closed one eye and said, “You’re walking on the edge, buddy.”
Arnold was scared. “He maybe got done because he talked to you,” she said, sucking her heavy lips in and out.
“No. He got done because he called this asshole Bekker, who he was protecting, and told him that we’d interviewed him,” Lucas said. “Bekker knows me. He didn’t want to take any chances.”
“So what do you want from me? I gave you everything.”
“How’d you get in touch with Whitechurch when you needed to?” Lucas asked.
“I never needed to. When he had something good, he’d bring it over. Otherwise—shit, I don’t handle hospital stuff. I handle shit you can sell, cheap. Suits. Neckties. Telephones. I wouldn’t know what to do with no hospital stuff.”
Fell pointed a finger at her: “You took down Simpson-McCall, what, two months ago . . . ?”
Arnold looked away. “No. I don’t know nothing about that.”
Fell studied her for a moment, then looked at Lucas. “Brokerage moves to a new building, one of those over-the-weekend moves. Trucks coming and going all night with files, computers, telephones, furniture, putting it in. The only thing is, not all of the trucks were hired by the brokerage. Some assholes rented trucks, drove them up to the loading docks, and disappeared over the horizon. . . . One of them took off six hundred brand-new beige two-button phones. Somebody else got fifty Northgate IBM compatibles, still in the boxes.”
“Really?” said Arnold, faintly distressed. “Computers?”
Fell nodded, and Lucas looked back at Arnold. “If you had to get to Whitechurch, what’d you do?”
Arnold shrugged. “Call him at the hospital. Wasn’t no big secret where he worked. Nights only, though.”
“Did he have a special number?”
“I don’t know, man, I never called him.”
“Did . . .”
Fell’s beeper went off. She took it out of her purse, glanced at the readout. “Where’s the phone?” she asked Arnold. To Lucas, she said, “I bet they got him.”
“Over there, at the end of the counter, underneath . . .” Arnold said, pointing.
As Fell punched the number into the telephone, Lucas went back to Arnold. “Did he work with anybody?”
“Man, I bought telephones from him, four dollars apiece,” Arnold said impatiently. “Boxes of pens and pencils. Notepads. Cartons of Xerox paper. Cleaning supplies. He once came in with two hundred bottles of ERA, you know, the laundry soap. I don’t know where he got it, I didn’t ask any questions. And that’s all I know about him.”
“Yeah, this is Fell, you beeped?” Fell said into the phone. And then, voice hushed, “Jesus. What’s the address. Huh? Okay.” She hung up and looked at Lucas. “Bekker did another one, another woman. Ten minutes from here, walking.”
Lucas pointed a finger at Arnold: “Did you hear that? Think about Whitechurch. Anything you think of, call us. Anything.”
“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.”