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“Like who?”
“Like the guys who were in jail with him. Maybe I ought to go back to the Cities. I could run down the people who were in the next cells to his. Maybe he said something to somebody, or somebody gave him an idea of how to hole up . . . .”
“That’s not bad,” said Ke
“Art?”
Ke
One of the detectives handed Lucas a brown envelope. Lucas opened it and found a sheath of eight-by-ten color photos. Whitechurch, dead in the hallway, flat on his back. Blood on the tile behind his head, and on the wall. A twenty-dollar bill half pi
“What’s the money?” Lucas said.
“They must have been hassling over the cash when Bekker shot him,” said the cop named Jim. “One of the janitors heard the shots. Not being stupid, he hollered before he went to look. Then he kind of carefully stuck his head through a fire door and saw Whitechurch on the ground. The outside door was just closing. Bekker must’ve grabbed what he could and run for it.”
“He didn’t take the eyelids,” Lucas said. Except for the blood, Whitechurch might have been a sleeping drunk.
“Nope. Just poked him in the eyes and grabbed the dope, if there was any. They got a print, by the way, off a bill. It was Bekker.”
“All right, let’s get out there,” Ke
Huerta, bumping past Ke
Ke
“Yeah, old, kiss my ass, Huerta,” Ke
Lucas, astonished, watched Huerta walk away, then looked back at Ke
“What?” Ke
“Steve Martin?” Lucas asked.
“Asshole,” Ke
“They’re probably calling you the same thing, you putting them on the street like that,” Lucas said. Switching the topic away from Steve Martin, covering, covering . . .
“I know,” Ke
“Not a hell of a lot of choice,” Lucas said. “Keep pushing everywhere. With Whitechurch dead, Bekker’s gotta find a new source.”
• • •
An hour later, Lucas lay on his bed at the Lakota and thought about what Huerta had said. That he looked like Steve Martin, with all that white hair . . .
All right. You’re on the street. There’s been a killing. A car speeds by and inside is an old white guy. That’s what Cornell Reed told Bobby Rich’s snitch. An old white guy. How would you know he was old, when he was in a moving car? If he had white hair . . .
And then there was Mrs. Logan, and what she’d said, in the apartment beneath Petty’s . . . .
Ke
Ke
O’Dell was one answer. Lily was another. Or both together.
He lay on the bed with the Magic Marker and his art pad, trying to put together a list. Finally he came up with:
1. Cornell Reed.
CHAPTER
15
Lucas was flat on his back, half asleep, when Fell called. The room was semidark; he’d turned out all the lights but the one in the bathroom, and then half closed the door.
“I’m downstairs,” she said. “If you’re awake, let’s get something to eat.”
“Anything at Bellevue?” Lucas asked.
“I’ll tell you about it.”
“Ten minutes,” he said.
He was fifteen minutes. He shaved, going easy over the bruises, brushed his teeth and took a quick shower, put on a fresh shirt, dabbed on after-shave. When he got down to the lobby, Fell looked him over and said, “Great. You make me feel like a rag.”
“You look fine,” he said, but she didn’t. She looked worn, dirty around the eyes. The dress that had been crisp that morning hung slackly from her shoulders. “There’s an Italian place a couple of blocks down that’s friendly.”
“Good. I couldn’t handle anything complicated.” As they were going out the door, she said, “I’m sorry about ditching you and going with Ke
Lucas nodded and said, “No problem.” On the sidewalk, he added, “You don’t sound happy.”
“I’m not. Bellevue’s a rat’s nest. They have a dial-in paging system, so now we’re trying to figure out if we can match up the calls. And we’re looking for people who might have been paging doctors who shouldn’t have, that somebody else might have noticed. There are about two thousand suspects.”
“Can you thin them out?”
“Maybe. We’re trying extortion. Ke
“How do you know it’s a her?”
Fell gri
“What if it’s just the switchboard?”
“Then we’re fucked . . . although Carter thinks it probably isn’t. A switchboard might start recognizing names and voices . . . .”
• • •
The Whetstone had an old-fashioned knife-grinding wheel in the window, a dozen tables in front, a few booths in back. Between the booths was a wooden floor, worn smooth and soft by a century of sliding feet. A couple turned slowly in the middle of it, dancing to a slow, sleepy jazz tune from an aging jukebox.
“Booth?” asked Lucas.
“Sure,” said the waitress. “One left, in the no-smoking area.”
Fell smiled ruefully at Lucas, and said, “We’ll take it.”
They ate spaghetti and garlic bread around a bottle of rosé, talking about Bekker. Lucas recounted the Mi
“ . . . started killing them to establish their alibis. They apparently picked out the woman at the shopping mall at random. She was killed to confuse things.”
“Like a bug. Stepped on,” Fell said.
“Yeah. I once dealt with a sexual psychopath who killed a series of women, and I could understand him, in a way. He was nuts. He was made nuts. If he’d had a choice, I’d bet that he’d have chosen not to be nuts. It was like, it wasn’t his fault, his wires were bad. But with Bekker . . .”