"Well, we're gonna do the conference early tomorrow afternoon. Probably two o'clock. We'll want you around. You know, for the PR. Wear the usual undercover rig, you know they like that, the TVs…"
"All right. I'll be down a little early tomorrow, talk it over. But today would be better."
"Can't do it," Daniel said. "Too many details to smooth out. You coming in?"
"Maybe later. I'm trying to get an interview over at University Hospital with a guy who knows Bekker."
When Daniel got off the phone, Lucas peeked over the windowsill and found a redheaded woman staring vacantly at the front of his house while pretending not to see her dog relieve itself in Lucas' bushes.
"God damn it." He crawled back to the bedroom, found his notebook, sat on his bed and called Webster Prentice at the University of Minnesota. He got a secretary and was switched to Prentice's office.
"You think Bekker killed her?" Prentice asked, after Lucas introduced himself.
"Who mentioned Bekker?"
"Why else would a cop be calling me?" the psychologist said in a jovial fat-man's voice. "Listen, I'd like to help, but you're talking to the wrong guy. Let me suggest that you call Dr. Larry Merriam."
Merriam's office was in a building that from the outside looked like a machine, with awkward angles, unlikely joints. Inside, it was a maze, with tunnels and skyways linking it to adjoining buildings, ground-level exits on different floors. Entire floors were missing in some parts of the structure. Lucas wandered for ten minutes, and asked twice for directions, before he found a bank of elevators that would take him to the sixth floor of the right wing.
Merriam's secretary was short, overweight and worried, scurrying like a Disney churchmouse to locate her boss. Larry Merriam, when she brought him back from the lab, was a balding, soft-faced man in a white smock, with large dark eyes and tiny worried hands. He took Lucas into his office, pressed his fingertips to his lips and said, "Oh, dear," when Lucas told him what he wanted. "This is totally off the record?"
"Sure. And nothing'll come back to you. Not unless you confess that you killed Mrs. Bekker," Lucas said, smiling, trying to loosen him up.
Merriam's office overlooked a parking garage. The cinderblock walls had been painted a cream color; a small bulletin board was covered with medical cartoons. From behind the desk Merriam mouthed silently, Shut the door.
Lucas reached back and eased the door shut. Merriam relaxed, folding his hands over his chest.
"Clarisse is a wonderful secretary, but she does have trouble keeping a secret," Merriam said. He stood, hands in his pockets, and turned to look out the window behind his desk. A man in a red jacket, carrying what looked like a doctor's bag, was walking across the roof of the parking garage. "And Bekker is a troubling subject."
"A lot of people seem to be troubled by Mr. Bekker," Lucas said. "We're trying to find an angle, a…" He groped for the right words.
"An entry wedge," Merriam said, glancing back over his shoulder at Lucas. "You always need one, in any kind of research."
"Exactly right. With Bekker-"
"What's this man doing?" Merriam interrupted, staring down at the roof of the parking garage. The man in the red jacket stopped next to a midnight-blue BMW, glanced around, took a long silver strip of metal from his coat sleeve and slipped it between the window and the weather stripping, down into the door. "I think, uh… Is this man stealing that car?"
"What?" Lucas stepped over to the window and looked out. The man below stopped for a moment and looked up at the hospital building, as though he sensed Merriam and Lucas watching. He wouldn't be able to see them through the tinted glass. Lucas felt a pulse of amusement.
"Yeah, he is. Gotta make a call, just take a minute," Lucas mumbled, reaching for Merriam's desk phone.
"Sure," Merriam said, looking at him oddly, then back down at the thief. "Dial nine…"
Lucas dialed straight through to the dispatcher. "Shirl', this is Lucas. I'm looking out a window at a guy named E. Thomas Little. He's breaking into a BMW." He gave her the details and hung up.
"Oh, dear," Merriam said, looking out the window, his fingertips pressed to his lips again. E. Thomas Little finally got the door open and climbed into the front seat of the BMW.
"E. Thomas is an old client of mine," Lucas said. The amusement pulsed through him again, felt good, like a spring wind.
"And he is stealing the car?"
"Yeah. He's not much good at it, though. Right now he's jerking the lock cylinder out of the steering column."
"How long will it take a police car to get here?"
"Another minute or so," Lucas said. "Or about a thousand bucks in damage." They watched, silently, together, as Little continued to work in the front seat of the car. Sixty seconds after he got inside, he backed the car out of the parking space and started toward the exit. As he was about to enter the circular down ramp, a squad car, driving up the wrong way, jerked to a stop in front of him. Little put the BMW in reverse and backed away, but the squad stayed with him. A minute later he was talking to the cops.
"Very strange," Merriam said, as the cops handcuffed Little and put him in the backseat of the squad. One of the patrolmen looked up at the hospital windows, as Little had, and waved. Merriam lifted a hand, realized that he couldn't be seen, and turned back to Lucas. "You wanted to know about Michael Bekker."
"Yeah." Lucas went back to his chair. "About Dr. Bekker…"
"He's… Do you know what I do?"
"You're a pediatric oncologist," Lucas said. "You treat kids with cancer."
"Yes. Bekker asked if he could observe our work. He has excellent credentials in his own field, which is pathology, and he's also developing something of a reputation among sociologists and anthropologists for work on what he calls the social organization of death. That's what brought him up here. He wanted to do a detailed examination of the chemistry we use, and how we use it, but he also wanted to know how we handle death itself… what conventions and structures had grown up around it."
"You agreed?"
Merriam nodded. "Sure. There are dozens of studies going on here all the time-this is a teaching and research hospital. Bekker had the credentials and both the studies had potential value. In fact, his work did result in procedural changes."
"Like what?"
Merriam took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, Lucas thought. Not like he'd missed a night's sleep, but like he'd missed five years' sleep. "Some of it's stuff you just don't notice if you work with it all the time. When you know somebody's about to die-well, there are things that have to be done with the body and the room. You have to clean up the room, you have to prepare to move the body down to Path. Some patients are quite clearheaded when they're dying. So how must it feel when a maid shows up and peeks into the room with a bunch of cleaning stuff, checking to see if you're gone yet? The patient knows we must've told her, 'Well, this guy'll be gone today.' "
"Ouch," Lucas said, wincing.
"Yeah. And Bekker was looking at more subtle problems, too. One of the things about this job is that some medical people can't handle it. We treat kids with advanced and rare types of cancer, and almost all of them eventually die. And if you watch enough kids die, and their parents going through it with them… well, the burnout rate with nurses and technicians and even doctors is terrific. And they sometimes develop problems with chronic incapacitating depression. That can go on for years, even after the victim has stopped working with the kids. Anyway, having Bekker look at us, we thought, might give us some ideas about how we might help ourselves."
"That sounds reasonable," Lucas said. "But the way you're talking… did Bekker do something wrong? What happened?"
"I don't know if anything happened," Merriam said, turning to look out at the sky. "I just don't know. But after he was here for a week or two, my people started coming in. He was making them nervous. He didn't seem to be studying so much the routines of death… the structures, processes, the formalities, whatever you'd call them… as watching the deaths themselves. And enjoying them. The staff members were starting to call him 'Dr. Death.' "