"You can't catch him in a lie…" Lucas said.
"No."
"Were there any other deaths? Like this kid's?"
"One. The second or third week he was on the wards. A little girl with bone cancer. I thought about it later, but I don't know…"
"Were there postmortems on the kids?"
"Sure. Extensive ones."
"Did he do them? Do you know?"
"No, no, we have a fellow who specializes in that."
"Did he find anything unusual?"
"No. The fact is, these kids were so weak, they were so near the edge, that if he'd simply reached out and pinched off their oxygen feeds… that might have been enough. We'd never find that on a postmortem-not enough to separate it from all the other wild chemical shit we see in cancer cases: massive loads of drugs, radiation reactions, badly disturbed bodily functions. By the time you do a postmortem, these kids are a mess."
"But you think he might have killed them."
"That's too strong," Merriam said, finally turning around and looking at Lucas. "If I really thought that, I'd have called the police. If there had been any medical indication or anybody who actually saw anything or had a reason to believe he'd done it, I'd have called. But there was nothing. Nothing but a feeling. That could simply be a psychological artifact of our own, the insider's resentment of an outsider intruding on what Bekker called our 'rituals of death.' "
"Did he publish?" Lucas asked.
"Yes. I can give you the citations. Actually, I can probably have Clarisse scrounge up some photocopies."
"I'd appreciate it," Lucas said. "Well… You know what happened. The other night."
"Bekker's wife was killed."
"We're looking into it. Some people, frankly, think he might have had a hand in it."
"I don't know. I'd kind of doubt it," Merriam said grimly.
"You sounded like you thought he'd be capable…"
"I'd doubt it because if he knew his wife was going to be killed, he'd want to be there to see it," Merriam said. Then, suddenly abashed, he added, "I don't know if I believe that, really."
"Huh," Lucas said, studying the other man. "Is he still in the hospital, working with live patients? Bekker?"
"Yes. Not on this ward, but several others. I've seen him down in the ORs a couple of times and in the medical wards where they deal with the more extreme varieties of disease."
"Did you ever mention to anyone…?"
"Listen, I don't know anything," Merriam barked, his soft exterior dropping for a moment. "That's my problem. If I say anything, I'm implying the guy is a killer, for Christ's sakes. I can't do that."
"A private word…"
"In this place? It'd stay private for about thirty seconds," Merriam said, running a hand through his thinning hair. "Listen, until you've worked in a university hospital, you've never really experienced character assassination. There are ten people on this staff who are convinced they'll be on next year's Nobel list if only some klutz in the next office doesn't screw them up. If I suggested anything about Bekker, it would be all over the hospital in five minutes. Five minutes later, he'd hear about it and I'd be fingered as the source. I can't do anything."
"All right." Lucas nodded. He stood, picked up his coat.
"Would you get me copies of those papers?"
"Sure. And if there's anything else I can do for you, call, and I'll do it. But you see the kind of jam I'm in."
"Sure." Lucas reached for the door, but Merriam stopped him with a quick gesture.
"I've been trying to think how to characterize the way Bekker acted around death," he said. "You know how you read about these zealots on crusades against pornography, and you sense there's something wrong with them? A fascination with the subject that goes way beyond any normal interest? Like a guy has a collection of two thousand porno magazines so he can prove how terrible it is? That's how Bekker was. A kind of a pious sadness when a kid died, but underneath, you got the feeling of a real, lip-smacking pleasure."
"You make him sound like a monster," Lucas said.
"I'm an oncologist," Merriam said simply. "I believe in monsters."
Lucas walked out of the hospital, hands in his pockets, thinking. A pretty nurse smiled at him, and he automatically smiled back, but his head wasn't smiling. Bekker killed kids?
The medical examiner's investigator was a fat, gloomy man with cheeks and lips so pink and glossy that he looked as though he might have been playing with an undertaker's makeup. He handed Lucas the file on Stephanie Bekker.
"If you want my opinion, the guy who did her was either a psycho or wanted it to look that way," the investigator said. "Her skull was like a broken egg, all in fragments. The bottle he hit her with was one of those big, thick tourist things from Mexico. You know, kind of blue-green, more like a vase than a bottle. The glass must have been a half-inch thick. When it broke, he used it like a knife, and drove the edges right down through her eyes. Her whole face was mutilated, you'll see in the photographs. The thing is…"
"Yeah?"
"The rest of her body was untouched. It wasn't like he was flailing away, hitting her anyplace he could. You take somebody flying on crank or PCP, they're just swinging. They go after a guy, and if the guy gets behind a car, they'll go after the car. If they can't hit you on the face, they'll hit you on the shoulders or chest or back or the soles of your feet, and they'll bite and claw and everything else. This thing was almost… technical. The guy who did it is either nuts and it has something to do with the face, with the eyes, or it's supposed to look that way."
"Thanks for the tip," Lucas said. He sat down at an empty desk, opened the file and glanced at the photos.
Freak, he thought.
The file was technical. To judge from body temperature and lack of lividity, the woman had died just before the paramedics arrived. Stephanie Bekker had never had a chance to resist: she had been a strong woman, with long fingernails, and they were clean-no blood or skin beneath them. There were no abrasions on the hands. She'd had intercourse, while alive and probably an hour or so before she'd died. No bruising was evident around the vagina and there were indications that the intercourse had been voluntary. She had washed after the intercourse, and samples taken for DNA analysis might not prove valid. The samples had not yet been returned.
The medical examiner's investigator noted that the house had been undisturbed, with no evidence of a fight or even an argument. The front door had been unlocked, as had a door into the kitchen from the garage. Bloody tracks led into the garage. The outer garage door had also been unlocked, so an intruder could have come through the house from the alley. There was a single bloody handprint on the wall, and a trail of blood from the point where she'd fallen in the initial attack. She'd lived, the medical examiner thought, for twenty to thirty minutes after the attack.
Lucas closed the file and sat staring at the desktop for a moment.
Loverboy could have done it. If the few solid facts of the case had been given him, Lucas would have bet money on it. But this kind of violence rarely came immediately after a successful sexual encounter; not without some preliminary crockery-tossing, some kind of mutual violence.
And then there was Bekker. Everybody had a nervous word for the man.
The fat investigator was washing his hands when Lucas left.
"Figure anything out?" he asked.
"Freak," Lucas said.
"A problem."
"If it's not a freak…" Lucas started.
"Then you got a big problem," the fat man finished for him, shaking water from his delicate pink fingers.
The days were getting longer. In the pit of winter, dusk arrives shortly after four o'clock. When Lucas arrived at City Hall, there was still light in the sky, although it was well after six.