And, Lucas thought, he looked like George. That's what he had speculated, Lucas was sure of it. Lucas had done the same thing: the phony identikit photo he was circulating was a simplified sketch of Philip George.
What else? Loverboy had not gone to the funeral, because he wasn't sure whether George was there. He had done research on Lucas. He knew that Lucas had a daughter and did not live with her. After the Crows case, there'd been quite a bit of press attention to Lucas, to Jennifer and their daughter, so the research wouldn't have been difficult-he might, in fact, simply be operating on memory. But just in case, a check of the libraries again, the newspaper files? He'd talk to Anderson about it.
Lueas opened his eyes. "Sorry, I just had to try to get it down…"
"That's okay-that's how I remember lines," Cassie said.
"He's a smart sonofabitch," Lucas said. He stood up, found his underpants on a chair and pulled them on. "I've got to make a few notes."
She followed him down to the spare bedroom, looked at the charts hanging from the wall. "Wow. Mr. Brainstorm."
"Pieces of the puzzle," he said. A sheet of paper, folded in quarters, was lying on the bed. As Cassie looked at the charts on the wall, he unfolded it. The photocopy of the cyclops painting. "The thing is, we know Bekker is goofy, but everything points in some other direction…"
Cassie was still looking up at his charts, but somber now.
"Do you do this for all your cases?" she asked.
"The big complicated ones, yes."
"Have you ever had all the clues up there, posted, but not been able to figure them out until too late?"
"I don't know-I've never thought about it. You hardly get all the information you need to make a case, unless it's simple open-and-shut: you catch a guy red-handed, or five witnesses see a guy kill his wife," Lucas said. "If it's more complicated than that… I don't know. I've sent people to prison who claimed to be innocent and still claim they're innocent. I'm ninety-nine percent sure they're not innocent, but… you can't always know for sure."
"Wouldn't it freak you out if there was a key piece of information up there, you just didn't see it, and somebody got killed?"
"Mmm. I don't know. You can't blame yourself because a psycho kills people. I'm not Albert fuckin' Einstein."
"So what're you going to do next?" Cassie asked, still wide-eyed.
Lucas tossed the folded Xerox of the cyclops back on the bed. "What any good cop would do at three in the morning. Go back to bed."
Lucas set the alarm for seven. When it went off, he silenced it, slipped out of bed, leaving Cassie asleep, and went to the kitchen to phone Daniel. He caught the chief at breakfast and told him about the call from Stephanie's lover.
"Sonofabitch," Daniel sputtered. "So you're right. But why'd they kill George?"
"He said he didn't know. Actually, he said he'd speculated about it, but didn't want to talk about it. But I know what he was thinking: that he looks like George. And when you sort through all the implications of that, it points at Bekker," Lucas said, and explained.
Daniel listened and agreed. "Now what? How do we get to the guy?"
"We could maybe invent a crisis, put an ad in the paper, stake people out all over town, wire up my line, and when he calls-bam, we're tracing. We might get him."
"Hmph. Maybe. I'll talk to some of the techs about it. But what happens if he calls from Minnetonka?"
"I don't know. The thing is, he's smart," Lucas said. "If we fuck with him, he might just go back into the woodwork. I don't want to risk chasing him away. He can put the finger on a suspect, if we ever come up with one."
"Okay. So let's keep this tight between us," Daniel said. "I'll order a tap on your line and we'll monitor calls. I'll talk with Sloan and Anderson and Shearson and see if we can come up with some kind of pressure that'll get to him to call back."
"I could do that. I figure…"
"No. I don't want you chasing Loverboy. I want you focused on the killer or the killers-Bekker and whoever he's working with."
"There's not much there."
"You just keep pushing. Keep moving around. I got all kinds of guys who can do the pony work. I want you on the killer before he does it again."
CHAPTER 20
Not knowing the nature of neighborhood friendships around Bekker, and afraid to ask, the surveillance team decided not to seek a listening post among Bekker's neighbors.
Instead the team keyed on the intersections around the front and back of his house. From two parked cars, they could watch the front door directly, and both ends of the alley that ran behind his house. The cars were shuffled every hour or so, both to relieve the tedium and to lessen the possibility that Bekker might grow suspicious of one particular car.
Even so, a jogger, a woman lawyer, spotted one of the surveillance cars within an hour of the beginning of the watch on Bekker and reported it to police. She was told that the car belonged to an undercover detective on a narcotics study, and was asked to keep it confidential. Later that same day she saw a second car and realized that Bekker was being watched. She thought about mentioning it to a neighbor but did not.
The surveillance began in the evening. The next morning, four tired cops took Bekker to work. Four more monitored him in the hospital, but quickly understood that a perfect net would be impossible: the hospital was a warren of passageways, stairs, elevators and tunnels. They settled for containing him within the complex, with occasional eyeball checks of his location. While he was pinned, a narc stuck a transmitter under the rear bumper of his car.
The discovery of George's body was a sensation and a shock. Bekker watched, aghast, a TV3 tape of khaki-clad deputies marching through the brambles near the lakeside cabin, horsing out a litter. The body was covered with a pristine white sheet, wrapped like a chrysalis. A blonde newscaster, with a face as stylistically and cosmetically appropriate for the scene as a Japanese player's is for Noh, intoned a dirgelike report, with the gray skies hanging theatrically in the background.
Bekker, not a watcher of television, found a newspaper TV guide and marked the newscasts. The other stations were on the story, although none had TV3's film.
The next evening, fearing more bad news, he was nonplussed to find himself watching a seemingly interminable story about the recovery of a boxcar full of television sets from a warehouse someplace in Minneapolis. Television sets? He began to relax, switching channels, found television sets everywhere, and television reporters in flak jackets…
If anything important had happened, surely he wouldn't be seeing television sets…
He nearly missed it. He was switching through the channels when he found the blonde again, back in the studio and out of her flak jacket. She delivered another body blow: Davenport, she said, did not believe that Philip George was Stephanie's lover, believed that the lover was still at large, and was circulating an identikit picture of the man. Davenport, she said, was a genius.
"What?" Bekker blurted, staring at the television, as though it could answer him. Could Davenport be right? Had they missed with George? He needed to think. Nothing ephemeral. Needed something to reach him, something to focus. He opened the brass case, studied it. Yes. He lifted it to his face and his tongue flicked out, picking up the capsule the way a frog picks up a fly. Focus.
The flight was not a good one. Not terrifying, like the snake, but not good. He could manage it, though, steering between the shadows where Davenport hid. Goddamned Davenport, this case should be done, he should be free…
Bekker came back, the taste of blood on his lips. Blood. He looked down, found blood on his chest again, stirred himself. He'd been away again… What had happened? What? Ah… yes. The lover. What to do? To settle, of course.