She owed him this information…
"Sybil, are you in there? Hello, Sybil, I know you're there."
At two, Bekker was home, MDMA burning low in his mind, under control. The episode with Sybil had, ultimately, been unfulfilling. A nurse had come down the hall, gone into a nearby room. He'd left then, thinking it better not to be seen with Sybil. As far as he knew, he hadn't been. He'd gone from her bedside to his office, popped the ecstasy, hoping to balance the disappointment, turned off the lights and left.
He drove past the front of the house on the way to the alley. As he passed, he saw a man, there, at the end of the street. On the sidewalk. Turning his head to watch Bekker go by. Large. Watching. Familiar.
Bekker slowed, stopped, rolled down the window. "Can I help you?" he called.
There was a long moment of silence, then the man sauntered out into the street. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket and boots.
"Mr. Bekker, how are you?"
"You're a police officer?"
"Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis police."
Yes. The man at the funeral, the tough-looking one. "Is the police department camped on my porch?" Bekker asked. Safe now-the man wasn't a mugger or revenge-bound relative-the sarcasm knit through his polite tone like a dirty thread in a doily.
"No. Only me," the cop said.
"Surveillance?"
"No, no. I just like to wander by the scene of a crime now and then. Get a feel for it. Helps me think…"
Davenport. A bell went off in the back of Bekker's mind. "Aren't you the officer that the FBI agent called a gunman? Killed some ridiculous number of people?"
Even in the weak illumination from the corner streetlight, Bekker could see the flash of the cop's white teeth. He was smiling.
"The FBI doesn't like me," the cop said.
"Did you like it? Killing all those people?" The interest was genuine, the words surprising Bekker even as they popped out of his mouth. The cop seemed to think about it for a moment, tipping his head back, as though looking for stars. It was cold enough that their breath was making little puffs of steam.
"Some of them," the cop said after a bit. He rocked from his toes to his heels, looked up again. "Yeah. Some of them I… enjoyed quite a bit."
Bekker couldn't quite see the other man's eyes: they were set too deep, under heavy brow ridges, and the curiosity was almost unbearable.
"Listen," Bekker heard himself say, "I have to put my car in the garage. But would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?"
CHAPTER 12
Lucas waited at the front door until Bekker got the car in the garage and walked through the house to let him in. Bekker turned on the porch light as he opened the door. In the yellow light, his skin looked like parchment, stretched taut over the bones of his face. Like a skull, Lucas thought. Inside, in the soft glow of the ceiling fixtures, the skull illusion vanished: Bekker was beautiful. Not handsome, but more than pretty.
"Come in. The house is a bit messy."
The house was spectacular. The entry floor was oak parquet. To the left was a coat closet, to the right a wall with an oil painting of a British Isles scene, a cottage with a thatched roof in the foreground, sailboats on the river beyond. Straight ahead, a burgundy-carpeted staircase curled up to the right. Off the entryway, a room with glass doors, full of books, appeared to the right, under a balcony formed by the stairs. To the left was the parlor, with Oriental carpets, a half-dozen antique mirrors and a stone fireplace. Beautiful and hot. Seventy-five or eighty degrees. Lucas unzipped his jacket and crouched to press his fingers against the parlor carpet.
"Wonderful," he said. The pile was soft as beaten egg whites, an inch or more deep, and as intricately woven as an Arabian fairy tale.
Bekker grunted. He wasn't interested. "Let's go back and sit in the kitchen," he said, and led the way to a country kitchen with quarry-tile floor. Stephanie Bekker had been killed in the kitchen, Lucas recalled. Bekker seemed unaffected by it, pulling earthenware cups from natural oak cabinets, spooning instant coffee into them.
"I hope caffeine is okay," he said. Bekker's voice was flat, uninflected, as though he daily drank coffee with a cop who suspected him of murder. He must know…
"Fine." Lucas looked around the kitchen as Bekker filled the cups with tap water, stuck them in a microwave and punched the control buttons. The kitchen was as carefully crafted as the rest of the house, with folksy, turn-of-the-century wallpaper, dark, perfectly matched wood, and touches of flagstone. While the rest of the house felt decorated, Lucas thought, the kitchen felt lived in.
Bekker turned back to Lucas as the microwave began to hum. "I know nothing at all about cooking," Bekker said. "A little about wine, perhaps."
"You're handling your wife's death pretty well," Lucas said. He stepped up to a small framed photograph. Four women in long dark dresses and white aprons, standing around a butter churn. Old. "Are these, what, ancestors?"
"Stephanie's great-grandmother and some friends. Sit down, Mr. Davenport," Bekker said, nodding at a breakfast bar with stools. The microwave beeped, and he took out the cups, the coffee steaming hot, carried them to the bar and sat down opposite Lucas. "You were saying?"
"Your wife's death…"
"I'll miss her, but to be honest, I didn't love my wife very much. I'd never hurt her-I know what the police think, Stephanie's idiot cousin-but the fact is, neither of us was much of a factor in the other's life. I suspected she was having an affair: I simply didn't care. I've had female friends of my own…" He looked for reaction in Lucas' face. There was none. The cop accepted the infidelity as routine… maybe.
"And that didn't bother her? Your other friends." Lucas sipped at the coffee. Scalding.
"I don't believe so. She knew, of course, her friends would have seen to that. But she never spoke to me about it. And she was the type who would have, if she cared…" Bekker blew on his coffee. He was wearing a tweed jacket and whipcord pants, very English.
"So why not a divorce?" Lucas asked.
"Why should we? We got along reasonably well, and we had this"-he gestured at the house-"which we couldn't maintain if we split up. And there are other advantages for two people living together. You share maintenance chores, run errands for each other, one can take care of business when the other one is gone… There wasn't any passion, but we were quite well adapted to each other's habits. I'm not much interested in marriage, at my age. I have my work. She couldn't have children; her fallopian tubes were hopelessly tangled, and by the time in vitro came around, she was no longer thinking about children. I never wanted any, so there wasn't even that possibility." He stopped and seemed to reflect, took a sip of the scalding coffee. "I suppose other people wouldn't understand the way we were living, but it was convenient and comfortable."
"Hmp." Lucas sipped his own coffee and looked the other man straight in the eyes. Bekker gazed placidly back, not flinching, and Lucas knew then that he was lying, at least about part of it. Nobody looked that guiltless without deliberate effort. "I suppose a prosecutor could argue that since you had no interest in each other, and it made no difference to you whether she lived or died, her death would be very… convenient. Instead of having half of this"-his gesture mimicked Bekker's-"you'd have all of it."
"He could… if he were particularly stupid or particularly vicious," Bekker said. He flashed a smile at Lucas, a thin rim of white teeth. "I invited you for coffee because of the people you've killed, Mr. Davenport. I thought you'd likely know about death and murder. That would give us much in common. I study death as a scientist. I've studied murder, both the victims and the killers. There are several men who consider themselves my friends out at Stillwater prison, serving life sentences. From my research I've drawn two conclusions. First: Murder is stupid. In most cases, it will out, as somebody British once said. If you're going to commit murder, the worst thing you can do is plan it and commit it in league with another person. Conflicts arise, the investigators play one against another… I know how it works. No. Murder is stupid. Murder plotted with someone else is idiotic. Divorce, on the other hand, is merely annoying. A tragedy for some couples, perhaps, but if two people genuinely don't love each other, it's mostly routine legal procedure."