They spent an hour at it. Bekker had killed six people in Manhattan, their bodies found scattered around Midtown, the Village, SoHo and Little Italy. Working on the theory he wouldn't take them far, he was probably south of Central Park, north of the financial district. The zip codes on the envelopes he'd mailed to the medical journals suggested the same thing: three papers, three different zips: 10002, 10003 and 10013.
"He uses halothane?"
"That's what they assume," Fell said, nodding. "They found traces in three people when they were doing the blood chemistry. And that supposedly accounts for the lack of any sign of a struggle. The stuff is quick. Like one-two-three-gone."
"Where did he get it?"
"Don't know yet-we've run all the hospitals in Manhattan, northern Jersey, Connecticut. Nothing yet, but you know, nobody tracks exact amounts of the stuff. You could transfer some from one tank to another. If the tank wasn't gone, how could you tell?"
"Nnn. Okay. But how does he get close enough to whip it on them?" Lucas got up and went out into the hallway, came back with a cone-shaped throwaway water cup. "Stand up."
She stood up. "What?"
He thrust the cup at her face. "If I come at you like this, from the front, I can't get the leverage."
Fell stepped back and the cup came free.
"Even if they got some gas, they could get far enough back to scream," he said.
"We don't know that they didn't scream," said Fell.
"Nobody heard anything."
She nodded. "So if he hits them on the street, he must come up from the back."
"Yeah. He grabs them, pulls them in, claps it over their mouth…" He turned her around, clapped the cup over her mouth, his elbow in her spine, his hand hooked over her shoulder. "One, two, three… Gone."
"Do it again," she said.
He did it again, but this time, she grabbed his wrist and twisted. The paper cup crumbled and her mouth was open. "Scream," she said. He let go and she said, "That doesn't work too well, either."
"This woman… Ellen Foen." Lucas picked up the file, flipped it open. "Statements from her friends say she was very cautious. She'd had some trouble with street people-they hang out in the alley behind the place she worked, going through the dumpsters. She could look out through the glass port in the door while it was still locked, and she always checked before she went out. So if Bekker was there, she must have seen him."
"It was late."
"Nine o'clock. Not quite dark."
"Maybe he was dressed okay. He's not a real big guy-maybe she just wasn't worried."
"But with his face?"
"Makeup. Or… I don't know. It makes more sense to me that he's driving a cab. She gets in, he's got one of the security windows between himself and the backseat. He's got it sealed up somehow, and when she shuts the door, he turns on the gas. She passes out. I mean, I just can't see a woman, somebody supposedly cautious, letting a guy get that close to her. And even if he comes up from behind, she'd fight it. You're a hell of a lot bigger than Bekker, but you'd have a hard time holding a mask over my mouth, even from behind."
"Maybe that's why he picks small people, women," Lucas suggested.
"Even so, you just twist away. Even if he gets you, there'd be bruises-but the M.E. hasn't found any bruises. It's gotta be a cab, or something like it."
"But why did Foen take a cab? She was running across the street to get Cokes for everybody. Her boyfriend was supposed to pick her up at nine-thirty, when she got off."
"Maybe… fuck, I don't know."
"And look at Cortese. Cortese walks out of this club and across Sixth Avenue, down Fifty-ninth Street toward the Plaza. His friends saw him go in at the Sixth Avenue end. He apparently never arrived at the other end, because there was a phone message for him at the Plaza from nine o'clock on, and he never got it. So he gets picked up on Fifty-ninth between Fifth and Sixth. What happened in there? Why would he flag a cab? He only had to go a few hundred feet."
She shrugged. "I don't know. And it's dark in there, so maybe he got jumped. But you gotta be careful when you start looking for logic, man…"
"I know, I know…"
"It could be anything. Maybe Cortese left his friends because he was looking for a little action."
Lucas shook his head. "He sounds awful straight."
"So does Garber… I don't know."
"Keep reading," said Lucas.
She was watching him, he thought. Odd glances, wary. "Is there something wrong?" he asked finally.
After a moment, she asked, "Are you really here working on Bekker?"
"Well…" He spread his arms to the stack of paper on the table. "Yeah. Why?"
"Oh, the more I think about it, the odder it seems. We'll catch him, you know."
"Sure, I know," Lucas said. "I'm mostly here for the publicity thing. Take some heat off."
"That doesn't seem quite right either," Fell said. She studied him. "I don't know about you. You hang out with O'Dell. You're not Internal Affairs?"
"What?" He pulled back, surprised. "Jesus, Barbara. No. I'm not Internal Affairs."
"You're sure?"
"Hey. You know what happened to me in Minneapolis?"
"You supposedly beat up somebody. A kid."
"A pimp. He'd cut up a woman with a church key, one of my snitches. Everybody on the street knew about it and I had to do something. So I did. He turned out to be a juvenile-I guess I knew that-and I got hammered by Internal Affairs. There was nothing particularly fair about it. I was just doing what I had to do, and everybody knew it. I got fucked because fucking me was safer than not fucking me. But I'm not Internal Affairs. You can check, easy enough."
"No, no."
She went back to her papers, and Lucas to his, but a minute later he said, "Jesus, Internal Affairs."
"I'm sorry."
"Well…"
They took a break, walked two blocks down, bumping hips, and got a booth in a Slice-o'-Pie pizza joint, with gallon-sized paper cups of Diet Pepsi. She liked him: Lucas knew it and let the talk drift toward the personal. He told her about his onetime long-distance relationship with Lily; about the ambiguity now. About his kid.
"I wouldn't mind having a kid," Fell said. "My fuckin' biological alarm clock is banging like Big Ben."
"How old are you?" he asked.
"Thirty-six."
"Any fatherhood prospects on the horizon?"
"Not at the moment," she said. "All I meet are cops and crooks, and I don't want a cop or a crook."
"Hard to meet people?"
"Meeting them isn't the problem. The problem is, the guys I like, don't like me. Eventually. Like five years ago, I was going out with this lawyer dude. Not a big-time lawyer, just a guy. Divorced. Long hair, did a lot of pro bono. And pretty hip. You know."
"Yeah. Exactly. Nice neckties."
"Yeah. He was looking around to get remarried. I mighta. But then one day I was out decoying and this big asshole comes onto me really hard, gets me on a wall, whacks me-he's getting off on whacking me. And I go down and I've got this little hideout piece on my leg, this.25 auto, and he's just bending over to pick me up and I stick the piece in his teeth and his eyes get about the size of dishpans and I back him off, he's saying, 'Hold it, hold it…' "
"Where's your backup?"
"They're just running up. They put the guy on the wall and one of them says, 'Jesus, Fell, you're gonna have a mouse bigger'n Mickey'-the asshole'd whacked me right under the eye, right on the eye-socket bone, you know?" She rubbed her eye socket, and Lucas nodded. "Hurt like hell. And I say, 'Yeah?' And they got the guy leaning on the wall with his legs apart, and I say, 'Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag,' and I punted the sonofabitch so hard his balls had to take a train back from Ohio."
"Yeah?" Lucas laughed. Cop stories were the best stories, and Fell looked positively merry.
"So I tell this story to my lawyer friend and he freaks out. And he's not worried about my eye," she said wryly.
"He's worried about the guy on the wall?"
"No, no. He knew that happened. He didn't mind if somebody did it, he just didn't want me to do it. And I think what really bothered him was my quote: 'Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag.' I shouldn't have told him that. It really bothered him. I think he wanted to join a country club somewhere, and he could see me sitting out on the flagstone terrace with a mint julep or some fuckin' thing, telling the other country club ladies this, 'Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag.' "