Somebody moaned, a long, horrible, low-pitched sound, and he realized that it was coming from his own throat, and he reached out and touched her…
"Cassie…" He screamed it, and Del pivoted, grabbed him by the jacket and pushed him away like a linebacker working a blocking sled. Del himself screamed, "No, no, no…"
The manager, hands clenched in front of her, looked through the bedroom door and then staggered backward, still looking, her mouth hanging open. She ran to the doorway and began retching, and screaming, and retching again, and the stink of vomit overlay the smell of the butchery inside the bedroom…
Lucas strained against his friend, and Del said, "Stay the fuck out, Lucas, stay the fuck out, we need to process, Lucas she's dead, Lucas she's dead…" He pushed Lucas into a chair and picked up the phone.
"We got another one. We need everything you got, apartment six-forty-two. We got two of them, yeah, it's Druze…"
He looked at Lucas, who was back on his feet, ready to go after him. But Lucas walked away from the bedroom and did something that frightened Del more than any effort to look at Cassie: he stood staring at a wall from a distance of no more than a foot, expressionless, unmoving, his eyes open.
"Lucas?" No answer. "Davenport, for Christ's sakes…"
"You want to go to the hospital?" Sloan asked.
"What for?" Del had pulled him off the wall, stuffed him into the elevator, guided him to the lobby and held him there.
"Get some dope."
"No."
"You're totally fucked, man. You can't be like this," Sloan said. He was driving the Porsche, while Lucas slumped beside him in the passenger seat.
"Just get me home," Lucas said. The storm was back in his head, the storm he'd feared. Cassie's face. The things he could have done, might have done, that she might have done. Going around, thousands of options, millions of intricate possibilities, all leading to life or to death… Sybil's face popped into his head.
"We saved the life of a woman who's gonna die in a week…" he moaned.
"But we maybe got Bekker, the lawyers are looking at the tapes right now."
"Fuck me," Lucas said, dropping his chin on his chest. He had to cry, but he couldn't.
And then he said, "I went to a funeral home. If I'd come here…"
And then he said, "Every fuckin' woman I see gets hurt. I'm a goddamned curse on their heads…"
And then he said, "I could've saved her…"
"I gotta make a call," Sloan said suddenly, taking the car into a convenience-store parking lot. "Just take a minute."
Sloan called Elle Kruger, looking back over his shoulder at Lucas in the passenger seat of the Porsche. All he could see was the top of Lucas' head. The nun's phone was answered by a woman at a switchboard; Sloan explained that he was calling on a police emergency. The woman said she'd try to find Elle, and began switching. A moment later, she came back on to say that the nun was at dinner, and a friend would get her. She told Sloan to hold on.
"Lucas?" Elle asked when she picked up the phone.
"No, this is his friend Sloan. Lucas has a problem…"
When Sloan returned to the car, Lucas' eyes were closed, and he was breathing slowly, as though he were sleeping. "You okay?" Sloan asked.
"That fuckin' Loverboy. If he'd come in, he could've looked at the picture of Druze the minute I found it, and we could've busted him. But we had to go through this newspaper-ad bullshit…"
"Let it go," Sloan said. "Nothing we can do about it now." • • • Elle was waiting at Lucas' house with another nun and a small black car.
"How are you?" she asked.
He shook his head, looking down at the driveway. Meeting her eyes would be impossible, too complicated.
"I'll call my friend, get a sedative for you."
"I've got this stuff going around in my head…" he said. And the guns: he could feel the guns in the basement. Not heavy, not like last winter, but they were back.
"Let me call my friend." Elle took his arm, then his hand, and led him toward the door like a child, while Sloan and the other nun followed behind.
Lucas woke the next morning exhausted.
The sedatives had beaten him into a dreamless sleep. The storm in his head had dissipated, but he could feel it just over the horizon of consciousness. He slid tentatively out of bed, stood up, swayed, opened the bedroom door and almost fell over the couch. Sloan had pushed it up against the door and was struggling to get up.
"Lucas…" Sloan, in a T-shirt and suit pants, with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, looked tired and scared.
"What the fuck are you doing, Sloan?"
Sloan shrugged. "We thought it might be a good idea, in case you sleepwalked…"
"In case I started looking for my guns?"
"Something like that," Sloan admitted, looking up at him. "You look like shit. How do you feel?"
"Like shit," Lucas said. "I gotta get some dead kids dug up."
The blood seemed to drain from Sloan's face, and Lucas smiled despite himself, smiled as a widow might smile the day before her husband is buried. "Don't worry about it. I'm not nuts. Let me tell you about Bekker…"
CHAPTER 28
Daniel prowled around his office with his hands in his pockets. He'd pulled the shades but hadn't turned on the lights, and the office was almost dark.
"Homicide is satisfied," he said. "You know I don't clear murder cases on the basis of politics-and there's every indication that we got him. You got him. Bekker is something else."
Lucas was also standing, propped against a windowsill, arms crossed. "If Bekker kills another one and carves her eyes out, then what'll you do? The goddamned press'll be down here with pitchforks and torches."
Daniel threw up his hands in exasperation. "Look, I know this actress woman and you…"
"Doesn't have anything to do with it," Lucas said. His head still felt like a chunk of wood. Cassie did have something to do with it, of course. Revenge wouldn't be enough, but it would be something. "Druze may have killed her, but Bekker was behind it."
"Have you talked to the lab people since you came in?"
"No…"
"They looked at that jacket in Druze's closet. There was blood on the back of it. You can't see it, because the fabric was black and the blood was soaked in. But it was there, and they've done some preliminary tests. The blood is the same type as Stephanie Bekker's…"
Lucas nodded. "I think Druze killed Stephanie, all right…"
"And George. We got a taxi routing from the airport to the Lost River Theater the night George was done."
"What about Elizabeth Armistead? I'm not so sure about that one. I asked that night, or the next day, and everybody agreed Druze was at the theater most of the afternoon."
Daniel jabbed a forefinger at Lucas: "But maybe not every minute. He could've been gone half an hour and that would have been enough. And the woman who saw the guy at Armistead's said he was in some kind of utility-man getup. That sounds like an actor to me-we've got Homicide guys over at the theater right now, going through their wardrobe."
"What about the phone call?"
"Come on, Lucas. That so-called phone call doesn't make sense no matter how you cut it. And the kid out in Maplewood is pretty sure that Druze is the guy who did the Romm woman." Daniel took a manila folder from his desk and handed it to Lucas. "They found these in Druze's apartment."
Lucas opened the folder: inside were photographs of Stephanie Bekker and Elizabeth Armistead. The eyes had been cut out. "Where'd they get these?"
"Druze's file cabinet. Stuffed in the back."
"Bullshit," said Lucas, shaking his head. "I went through the file cabinet. These weren't there."
"Maybe he carried them with him."
"And puts them in the file cabinet before he goes upstairs to blow his brains out?" Lucas said. "Look, take this any way you want: as a continuing homicide investigation or just covering your political ass. We've got to stay with Bekker. We can tell the press that the case is cleared, but we've got to stay on him. We can start by exhuming these kids."