"Yeah, yeah…" O'Dell said impatiently.
"So unless he's invisible or living in the sewers, he's probably being protected," Lucas said, picking up the thread from Kennett. "He can't be a regular tenant somewhere. He'd have to pay rent and people'd see him on a regular basis. He can't risk landlords or nosy neighbors."
"And that means he's living with somebody or he's on the street," Kennett said.
"He's not on the street," Lucas said positively. "I can't see him living like that. He just wouldn't do it. He's… fastidious. Besides, he's got to have a vehicle. He didn't call a cab to haul these bodies around."
"Unless he drives a cab himself," said Huerta.
"Not much there," said Diaz, shaking his head. "We'll push the stolen one…"
"And it'd still be pretty risky," Lucas said.
"Yeah, but it answers a lot of questions: how he gets transportation, how he makes money and still keeps his face hidden," Kennett said. "If he worked a couple of hours a night, late, and picked his spots… maybe concentrated on the tourist and convention areas, you know, the Javits Center, places like that. He'd mostly be dealing with out-of-towners, which would explain Cortese. People trust cabbies. Like if he pretended he had a parcel, gets out and asks somebody where an address was…"
"I don't know," said Lucas.
They all stared at the map some more. Too much city; single buildings that would hold the populations of two or three small towns.
"But I still think you might be right, that he's living with somebody," Kennett said finally. "How he gets his money…"
"He's got skills," Lucas said. "He's got an M.D., he knows chemistry. A good chemist on the run…"
"Methedrine," said White, a bald man in gray knit slacks. "Ecstasy. LSD. It's all back, almost like the old days."
"Be a good reason to protect him, too," said Kuhn. "He'd be a cash cow."
"Assuming this isn't just bullshit, what does it get us?" O'Dell asked impatiently.
"We start looking for ways to put pressure on whoever he's living with or who's covering for him," Lucas said. "We need some heavy-duty contact with the media."
"Why?" said O'Dell.
"Because we have to move them around. Get them to do a little propaganda for us. We need to talk about how anybody who's hiding Bekker is an accessory to mass murder. We need some headlines to that effect. That their only hope is to roll over on him, plead ignorance, get immunity. We've got to chase him out in the open."
"I could call somebody," O'Dell said.
"We need the right emphasis…"
"We can figure something out," O'Dell said. "Are you still talking to the reporters this morning?"
"Yeah."
"Throw something in, then…"
When the meeting broke up, O'Dell lurched ponderously out of his chair, leaned toward Lucas, and said, "We'd like to sit in on the press thing. Me and Lily."
Lucas nodded. "Sure." O'Dell nodded and headed toward the front of the room, and Lucas turned to Fell. "We're going out this afternoon?"
"Yeah. They've got us looking for fences," she said. She had gray eyes that matched the touch of gray in her hair; she was five-six or so, with a slightly injured smile and nicotine-stained fingers.
"Could I get copies or printouts of all the Bekker files, or borrow what I can't copy?"
"Right here," she said, patting the stack of manila folders in her lap.
From the front of the room, where he was talking to Kennett, O'Dell called, "Davenport." Lucas stood up and walked over, and O'Dell said, "Dick has been telling me about your idea, the lecture thing, the Mengele. I'll call around this afternoon and set it up. Like for next week. We'll play it like it's been set for a while."
Lucas nodded. "Good."
"I'll see you in the hall," O'Dell said, breaking away. Out of the corner of his eye, as O'Dell spoke to him, Lucas could see Kennett's mouth tic. Disgust? "I've gotta pee."
When he was gone, Lucas looked at Kennett and asked, "Why don't you like him?"
The distaste that had flicked across Kennett's face had been covered in an instant. He looked at Davenport for a long, measured beat and then said, "Because he never does anything but words. Maneuvers. Manipulations. He looks like a pig, but he's not. He's a goddamn spider. If he had a choice between lying and telling the truth, he'd lie because it'd be more interesting. That's why."
"Sounds like a good reason," Lucas said, looking after O'Dell. "Lily seems to like him."
"I can't figure that," Kennett said. They both glanced down the room at Lily, who was talking with Fell. "That pig-spider business, by the way… I put my ass in your hands. If he knew I thought that, my next job'd be directing traffic out of a parking garage."
"Not really," said Lucas. Power equations weren't that simple.
Kennett looked at him, amused. "No. Not really. But the asshole could be trouble."
They were both looking toward Lily, and when she tipped her head toward the hall, Lucas started for the door. "You coming?" he asked Fell.
She looked up from one of her files. "Am I invited?"
"Sure. Gotta be careful, though…"
Reporters from three papers and two television stations were waiting, along with two TV cameras. The reporters were in a good mood, joking with him, chatting with each other about problems at the papers. They didn't think much of the story: the interviews were easy and loose, focused on a trap that Lucas had built for Bekker in Minneapolis, and on Bekker himself.
"Really quick," one of the television reporters said to Lucas as the talk was wrapping up, " 'cause we're not going to have much time… You know Michael Bekker. You even visited with him in his home. How would you characterize him? From your personal acquaintance? He's been called an animal…"
"To call Bekker an animal is an insult to animals," Lucas said. "Bekker's a monster. That's the only word I can think of that's even close to what he is. He's a real, live horror-show freak."
"Far out," said the reporter, a harried blonde in a uniform blue blazer. She asked her cameraman, "How'd that look?"
"Looked good, that's what they'll use. Let's get a reverse shot on you, reacting…"
When the reporters were gone, O'Dell, sitting spread-legged on a folding chair, the way fat men do, nodded approvingly. "That was good. You say Bekker's smart and hard to catch and that everything is being done." His heavy lips moved in and out a couple of times. "Like the blonde broad said, 'Far out.' "
CHAPTER
6
The Tropic of Sixth Avenue.
The sky was pink from the pollution haze boiling off the asphalt, and heat mirages made the light poles shimmy like belly dancers. Fell pushed the beat-up Plymouth through the cab traffic, one arm out the window, an unfiltered cigarette between her fingers, old-gold rock 'n' roll playing from a personal boombox in the backseat. The Doors, "Light My Fire."
"… don't have enough money to fix the air conditioner," she was saying, "but we get three computer terminals so we can do more paperwork, and they're not even new terminals, they're rehabs…"
Black and brown arms hung from the driver's windows of the amber taxis beside them, while the paler passengers slumped in back, simmering in their own juices.
"Why fences?" Lucas asked. They were looking for fences. Fell, he'd been told, specialized in burglary and industrial theft, down through the manufacturing district of Manhattan.
"Because Kennett was reading one of these nut-case medical papers Bekker is writing, and figured out that Bekker was taking measurements that you can only take with medical monitoring gear. One of the papers mentions blood pressure taken from a catheter at the radial artery. You gotta have the right stuff…"
"Check the medical-supply houses?"
"Yup, everywhere in North America and the major Japanese and European suppliers. Nothing. Checked the hospitals for stolen stuff and came up empty, but he had to get it somewhere… There are a couple of other guys checking secondary sources…"
They stopped at a traffic light. On the sidewalk, a fruit vendor sat in a plastic lawn chair with a wet rag on his forehead and took a continuous long peel off a red apple, using a thin-bladed stiletto with a pearl handle. A slow-moving, ratty-furred tiger-striped cat walked past him, stopped to look at the dangling peel, then hopped down into the gutter, took a last look around at the daylight world, and dropped into the sewer. Anything to get out of the heat.