They were on the rug in the front room, and she started to pivot, going for the tissue. The power slowed her motion even more and demanded that he savor this. There could be no fights, no struggles, no chances. She couldn't be allowed to scratch him, or bruise him… This was business, but the power knew what it wanted. She was saying, "Here, in the kitchen…," she was pivoting, and Bekker, one hand clenched to his face, stepped close again, pulled the hammer from his pocket, swung it like a tennis racket, with a good forehand, got his back and shoulder in it.
The hammer hit with a double shock, hard, then soft, like knocking a hole in a plaster wall, and the impact twisted Armistead. She wasn't dead; her eyes were open wide, saliva sprayed from her mouth, her hips were twisting, her feet were coming off the floor. She went down, dying, but not knowing it, trying to fight, her hands up, her mouth open, and Bekker was on her, straddling her. One hand on her throat, her body bucking. Evading the fingernails, hitting with the blunt head of the hammer, her forehead, once, twice… and done.
He was breathing like a steam engine, the power on him, running him, his heart running, the blood streaming down his face. Can't get any on her… He brushed his bloodied face with the sleeve of his coveralls, looked back down, her eyes half open…
Her eyes.
Bekker, suddenly frightened, turned the hammer.
He'd use the claw…
CHAPTER 9
The evening dragged; the feeling that he was waiting stayed with him.
He thought of calling Jennifer, to ask for an extra visit with their daughter. He reached for the phone once, twice, but never made the call. He wanted to see Sarah, but even more, he wanted to settle with Jennifer. Somehow. End it, or start working toward reconciliation. And that, he thought, was not a process begun with a spur-of-the-moment phone call. Not with Jennifer.
Instead of calling, he sat in front of the television and watched a bad cop movie on Showtime. He switched it off a few minutes before the torturously achieved climax: both the cops and the crooks were cardboard, and he didn't care what happened to any of them. After the late news, he went back to the workroom and began plodding through the game.
Bekker stuck in the back of his head. The investigation was dying. He could sense the waning interest in the other cops. They knew the odds against the case: without eyewitnesses or a clear suspect who had both motive and opportunity, there was almost no chance of an arrest, much less a conviction. Lucas knew of at least two men who had killed their wives and gotten away with it, and a woman who'd killed a lover. There was nothing fancy about any of the murders. No exotic weapons, no tricky alibis, no hired killers. The men had used clubs: a grease gun and an aluminum camera tripod. The woman had used a wooden-handled utility knife from Chicago Cutlery.
I just found her/him like that, they told the answering cops. When the cops read them their rights, all three asked for lawyers. After that, there wasn't anything to go on. The pure, unvarnished and almost unbreakable two-dude defense: Some other dude did it.
Lucas stared at the wall behind the desk. I need this fuckin' case. If the Bekker investigation failed, if the spark of interest diminished and died, he feared, he might slip back into the black hole of the winter's depression. Before the depression, he'd thought of mental illnesses as something suffered by people who were weak, without the will to suppress the problem, or somehow genetically impaired. No more. The depression was as real as a tiger in the jungle, looking for meat. If you let your guard down…
Bekker's beautiful face came up in his mind's eye, like a color slide projected on a screen. Bekker.
At twenty minutes after eleven, the phone rang. He looked at it for a moment, with a ripple of tension. Jennifer? He picked it up.
"Lucas?" Daniel's voice, hoarse, unhappy.
"What happened?"
"The sonofabitch did another one," Daniel rasped. "The guy who killed the Bekker woman. Call Dispatch for the address and get your ass over there."
A little spark of elation? A touch of relief? Lucas hammered the Porsche through the night, across the Mississippi, west to the lakes, blowing leftover winter leaves over the sidewalks, turning the heads of midnight walkers. He had no trouble finding the address: every light in the little house was on and the doors were open to the night. Groups of neighbors stood on the sidewalk, looking down toward the death house; occasionally one would cross the street to a new group, a new set of rumors, walking rapidly as though his speed alone would prove to watching cops that he was on a mission of urgency.
Elizabeth Armistead was lying faceup on her living room carpet. A bloodstain marked the carpet under the back of her head, like a black halo. One arm was twisted beneath her, the other was flung out, palm up, the fingers slightly crooked. Her face, from the nose up, had been destroyed. In place of her eyes was a finger-deep pit, filled with blood and mangled flesh. Another wound cut across her upper lip, ripping it, exposing white broken teeth. Her dress was pulled up high enough to show her underpants, which appeared to be undisturbed. The room smelled like a wet penny, the odor of fresh blood.
"Same guy?" Lucas asked, looking down at her.
"Gotta be. I caught the first one, too, and this one's a goddamn carbon copy," said a bright-eyed medical examiner's investigator.
"Anything obvious?" Lucas asked, looking around. The house seemed undisturbed.
"No. No broken fingernails, and they're clean. There doesn't seem to have been a fight, and there's no doubt she was killed right here-there are some blood splatters over there by the table. I didn't look myself, but the other guys say there's no sign of a door or window being forced."
"Doesn't look like rape…"
"No. And there aren't any signs of semen outside the body."
A Homicide detective stepped up beside Lucas and said, "C'mere and look at the weapon."
"I saw it when I came in," Lucas said. "The hammer?"
"Yeah, but Jack just noticed something."
They went out in the hallway, where the hammer, wrapped in plastic, was being delicately handled by another cop.
"What?" asked Lucas.
"Look at the head and the claw. Not the blood, the hammer," the second cop said.
Lucas looked, saw nothing. "I don't see anything."
"Just like the fuckin' dog that didn't bark," the cop said with satisfaction. He held the hammer up to a lamp, reflecting light from the shiny hammerhead into Lucas' eyes. "The first time you use a hammer, drive a nail or pull one, you start putting little nicks in it. Look at this. Smooth as a baby's ass. The goddamn thing has never been used. I bet the guy brought it with him, to kill her."
"Are you sure it was his? Not hers?"
The cop shrugged. "The woman's got about six tools-some screwdrivers, a crescent wrench and a hammer. One pack of nails and some picture hangers. They're still in the kitchen drawer. She wasn't a do-it-yourselfer. Why would she have two hammers? And a big heavy one like this? And how'd the guy just happen to get his hands on the second one?"
A bright light swept the front of the house and Lucas half turned.
"TV's here," said the first cop. He stepped away toward the front door.
"Tell everybody to keep their mouths shut. Daniel'll issue a statement in the morning," Lucas said. He turned back to the cop with the hammer.
"So he brought it with him," Lucas said.
"I'd say so."
Lucas thought about it, frowned, then clapped the cop on the shoulder. "I don't know what it means, but it's a good catch," he said. "If it's new, maybe we could check and see where they sell this Estwing brand…"
"We're doing that tomorrow…"
"So what do we know about her?" Lucas asked, pointing a thumb back toward the living room.
Armistead was an actress, the hammer-toting cop told Lucas. When she hadn't shown up for a performance, a friend had come to check on her, found the body and called the police. To judge from the body temperature, still higher than the rather cool ambient temperature of the house, she'd been dead perhaps four hours when the medical examiner's investigator had arrived, a few minutes after eleven. There was no sign of a burglary.