John Sandford - Silent Prey

"I just talked to Carter. Not a thing, nada."

"All right. Did you bring those files?"

"In the front room, on the floor," she said.

"I'd like to sit around and read for a while, then maybe go back and change clothes. I don't know, I'd like to be there when they get him…"

"Bullshit. You'd give your left nut to get him yourself. So would I."

"You'd give my left nut?" he asked, appalled.

"Well… you want a bagel with chive cream cheese and some juice?"

"Yeah, as a matter of fact."

They read the files and talked, and sometime after one o'clock Lucas chased her back into the bedroom, and they didn't make it back out until two.

"I'm going back to the hotel to change," he said, pulling on his jacket. "Why don't we get together at Midtown. Like four-thirty, for the daily roundup."

"All right…"

He looked at the floor by his feet, at a Xerox copy of the crime-scene photograph of Whitechurch, dead in the hospital. The few pitiful twenties stuck out from under his body like a comment on greed.

"Change oxen in midstream and you'll come to a bad end," he said.

"What?"

"An old English proverb my mom used to tell me," Lucas said.

"Bullshit," she said.

"You're calling my mom a liar?"

"Get out of here, Davenport. See you at four-thirty."

He took the elevator to the lobby, nodded at a guard who knew a one-night stand when he saw one, spotted a cab pulling up to the curb to drop a passenger, stopped and slapped his coat pocket where his wallet was.

"Dammit," he said.

"Hub?" The guard looked up from his desk.

"Sorry. Not you… I forgot something upstairs."

He went back up, knocked on the door. Fell, wrapped in a robe, let him in. "You got twenty bucks you can loan me?" he asked. "I got like two dollars left after last night. All the traveler's checks are at the hotel."

"Oh, jeez…" She went to her purse, opened it, took out a billfold. "I've got six bucks," she announced. Then she brightened and dug further. "And a cash card. There's a machine down the block. I'll trust you with my code and change it when you skip on me."

He looked at the cash card, looked down past it to the floor, at the Xerox of Whitechurch, the twenties under his body. The money, the money. Bekker.

"Get dressed," Lucas snapped. "Hurry the fuck up."

Three twenty-dollar bills had been found around and under Whitechurch's body. They drew the money from the evidence locker, under the watchful eye of the custodian.

"Consecutive?" Fell whispered. She was excited, barely controlled.

Lucas scanned the numbers, rearranged the bills on the countertop. "Two of them," he said. He took the numbers down on a notepad. "Let's go talk to the feds."

Terrell Scopes of the Federal Reserve had a procedure for everything, including the dispensing of information about serial numbers. "I can't just have people come in here…" He waved, a wave that seemed to suggest that they didn't quite meet a standard. Lucas was rumpled. Fell's hair was beginning to go haywire, standing around her head in a halo.

"If we take several hours to get the data and Bekker cuts the heart out of somebody, your picture'll be on the front page of the New York Times right along with his," Fell snarled, leaning across his desk.

Scopes, naturally pale, went a shade paler. "Just a minute," he said. "I'll have to make some inquiries."

After a while he came back and said, "Citibank…"

Citibank was more cooperative, but the process was a long one. "The money came out of a machine on Prince, all right, but exactly when, or where it went, that'll take a while to figure out," said a round-faced banker named Alice Buonocare.

"We need it in a hurry," said Lucas.

"We're running it as fast as we can," Buonocare said cheerfully. "There's a lot of subtraction to do-we have to go back to a known number and then start working through the returns, and there's a lot of stuff we have to do by hand. We're not set up for this kind of sorting… and there are something like twenty thousand items…"

"How about the pictures?"

"They're not really very good," Buonocare confessed. "If all you know is that he's got blond hair, there are probably a thousand blondes on the tape… It'd be easier to do the numbers, then confirm with the pictures."

"All right," Lucas said. "How long?"

"I don't know: an hour, or maybe two. Of course, that's almost quitting time."

"Hey…" Lucas, ready to get angry.

"Just kidding," Buonocare said, winking at Fell.

Three hours. A mistake was found halfway through the first run, a question of which numbers went where, and another machine on Houston Street.

"All right," one of the computer operators said at six o'clock. "Give us another twenty minutes and we'll have it down to one person. If you want to look right now, I can give you a group of eight or ten and it's ninety percent that he's in that group."

"How about the photos?"

"We'll get the tape up now."

"Let's see the ten accounts," Buonocare said.

The programmer's fingers danced across the keyboard and an account came up on the green screen. Then another, and another and more. Ten altogether, six men, four women. Two accounts, one man, one woman, showed non-Manhattan addresses, and they eliminated them.

"Can we get account activity on the other eight? For the last two months?" Buonocare asked over the shoulder of the computer operator.

"No problemo," he said. He rattled through some keys, and the first account came up.

"Looks routine…" Buonocare said after a minute. "Get the next one."

"Better find it in a hurry," Fell said. "I'm about to pee my pants."

Edith Lacey's account was the fifth one they looked at. "Oh-oh," Buonocare said. To the computer operator: "Get the rest of this up, go back as far as you can."

"No problemo…"

When the full account came up, Buonocare reached past the computer operator and pressed a series of keys, then paged down through an extensive account listing. After a moment, she ran it back to the top and turned to Lucas and Fell.

"Look at this: she started with a balance of $100,000 six weeks ago, and then started pulling out the max on her bankcard, five hundred a day, just about every day for a while. Even now, it's three or four times a week."

"That could be him," Lucas said, nodding, excited. "Let's get a picture up. You've got a name and address?"

"Edith Lacey…"

"In SoHo. That's good, that's right," Fell said, tapping the screen.

"How about the video…?"

"Let's get the reference numbers on those withdrawals…" Buonocare said. She wrote the number on a scratch pad and they carried it to the storage. The right cassette was already in the machine, and Buonocare ran it through, looking at the numbers…

"Here," she said.

The screen showed a blonde, her face down.

"Can't tell," Fell said. "I swear to God, I'm gonna pee in my pants."

"Let's try another withdrawal in that sequence," Buonocare said.

She ran the tape, stopped, started, searched. Found another blonde.

"Motherfucker," Lucas said, looking at the screen. "Nice to see you again, Mike."

"That's him?" Fell asked, peering at the screen. "He's so pretty."

"That's him," Lucas said.

Bekker was smiling at the lens, his blond hair pulled demurely away from his forehead.

Bekker awoke at noon. He wandered about the apartment, went to the bathroom, and stared at himself. Pretty. Pretty blonde. Too late for pretty blonde.

He cried, sitting on the edge of the tub, but he had to do it. He shaved his head. Hacked his fine silken hair to stubble with a pair of orange-handled scissors from Mrs. Lacey's sewing box, lathered it with shampoo, scraped off the stubble with a safety razor. Cut himself twice, the blood pink in the lather…