Silent Prey (3 page)

He went back into the workroom, killed the monitors, their green screens blanking out. Nothing to see anyway, just horizontal lines. Bekker ignored the body. Cortese was simply garbage, a matter of disposal.

But before the death . . . A new gumball dropped, and Bekker froze beside the worktable, his mind sliding away.

Louis Cortese had been dark-haired, seventy-one and one-half inches tall, one hundred and eighty-six pounds, and thirty-seven years old—all of it carefully recorded in Bekker’s notebooks. He’d been a graduate in electrical engineering from Purdue University. Before Bekker’d cut off his eyelids, when Cortese had still been trying to ingratiate himself, still fending off the idea that he was about to die, he’d told Bekker that he was a Pisces. Bekker had only a vague idea what that meant, and he wasn’t interested.

Cortese’s body lay on a stainless-steel countertop, which had cost six hundred and fifty dollars at a restaurant-supply shop in Queens. The countertop, in turn, was fixed to an old wooden library table; Bekker’d had to cut down the legs to get the proper working height. Overhead, a rank of three shop lamps threw a flat, cold light on the table.

Because his research subjects would be alive, Bekker had fixed restraining rings to the table. A brown nylon strap was clipped to a ring just below Cortese’s right armpit, and ran diagonally from the armpit across the chest between the nipple and the shoulder, to another ring behind the neck, then from behind the neck, back across the opposite side of the chest to another ring below the left armpit; it held Cortese like a full nelson.
Additional straps crossed the body at the waist and knees and bound the wrists and ankles.

One of the hands was taped as well as bound: Bekker monitored blood pressure through a catheter placed in the radial artery, and the wrist had to be totally immobilized. Cortese’s jaws were spread wide, held open by a hard-rubber cone: the subject could breathe through the nose, but not through the mouth. His screams, when he tried to scream, sounded like a species of humming, though not quite humming.

Mostly, he’d been as silent as a book.

At the head of the table, Bekker had stacked his monitoring equipment in what a discount stereo store had called a home entertainment center. The arrangement was pleasingly professional. The monitors measured body temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat, and brain-wave activity. He also had a neuro-intracranial pressure monitor, but hadn’t used it.

The room around the equipment was also carefully finished: he’d worked on it for a week before he was satisfied. Scrubbed it with disinfectant. Installed an acoustic-tile ceiling and Formica wall panels in a smooth oyster-white finish. Put down the royal-blue carpet. Brought in the equipment. The monitors had been the hard part. He’d finally gotten them from Whitechurch, a dealer at Bellevue. For two thousand in cash, Whitechurch had taken them out of a repair shop, first making sure they’d been fixed . . . .

Sigh.

One of the monitors was telling him something.

What was it? Hard to concentrate . . .

Body temperature, eighty-four degrees.

Eighty-four?

That was too low. He glanced at the clock. 9:07 . . .

He’d been gone again.

Bekker rubbed the back of his neck, disturbed. He would go away, sometimes for an hour. It never seemed to happen at critical times, but still: he should have recognized it, the sigh when he came back. When he went away, he always came back with a sigh . . . .

He stepped to the tape recorders, looked at the counters. They were slightly out of sync, one of them at 504, the other at 509. He rewound them to 200 and listened to the first.

“ . . .
direct stimulus brings only a slight reaction, no more than one millimeter
 . . .”

His own voice, hoarse with excitement. He turned off the first recorder, turned on the second. “ . . .
no more than one-millimeter reflex in the iris followed by immediate release of
 . . .”

He turned off the second one. The recorders were working fine. Identical Sonys, with battery backup in case of power failure, they were better than the ones he’d used at the University of Minnesota.

Bekker sighed, caught himself, looked quickly at the clock, afraid that he’d been away again. No. 9:09. He had to clean up, had to get rid of Cortese’s body, had to process the Polaroid color-slide film in the cameras. And he had some ideas about the taking of the specimens, and those ideas should be noted. Many things to do. But he couldn’t, not at just this moment. The PCP hadn’t arrived, and he felt . . . serene. The session had been a good one.

Sigh.

He glanced at the clock, felt a tiny thrill of fear. Nine twenty-five. He’d been gone again, frozen in one place; his knees ached from the unmoving stance. It was happening too much. He needed more medication. Street cocaine was good, but not precise enough . . . .

Then:
Dink.

Bekker turned his head. The intrusive sound came from a corner of his basement apartment. Almost a bell, but not quite. Instead of ringing, it simply struck once each time the old woman pushed the button.

Dink.

Bekker frowned, walked to the intercom, cleared his throat, and pressed the talk button. “Mrs. Lacey?”

“My hands hurt.” Her voice was shrill and ragged. Old. She was eighty-three, hard of hearing, nearly blind in one eye. Her arthritis was bad and growing worse. “My hands hurt so much,” she complained.

“I’ll bring a pill . . . in a few minutes,” Bekker said. “But there are only three left. I’ll have to go out again tomorrow . . . .”

“How much?” she asked.

“Three hundred dollars . . .”

“My golly . . .” She seemed taken aback.

“It’s very difficult to find these days, Mrs. Lacey,” Bekker said. And it had been for decades. She knew that. Morphine had never been street-legal in her lifetime. Neither had her marijuana.

A few days after he’d taken the job as a live-in helper—the old woman’s word, she didn’t need bathroom assistance—he’d shown her a
Wall Street Journal
story about bank failures. She’d read it, nearly whimpering. She had her Social Security, she had her savings, some $370,000, and she had her building. If any of them broke down . . .

Edith Lacey had watched the old street women as they went by, pushing their shopping carts along the broken pavement, guarding their bundles of rags. She knew them, she said, although Bekker didn’t believe her. She’d
look out and make up stories about them. “Now that one,
she
once owned a grocery on Greenwich . . .”

Bekker suggested that she spread her cash among three or four unrelated banks, so more would be insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

“Uncertain times,” he told her in his careful voice.

She’d talked to her only ambulatory friend about it. Bridget Land, who didn’t like Bekker, had thought that spreading the money among banks would be a good idea. And she’d volunteered to go with them: “To make sure everything is on the up-and-up,” she’d said, her eyes moving almost involuntarily toward Bekker. “At the banks, I mean.”

They’d moved the money in a single day, the two old women nervously guarding the cashier’s checks like mother hens. Edith Lacey carrying one inside her blouse, Bridget Land the other in a buttoned pocket,
just in case.
They’d focused so closely on the checks that neither had paid much attention to Bekker as he reviewed Edith’s applications for new accounts. Bekker had simply checked the “yes” box that asked if the applicants wanted automatic-teller cards. He picked up the mail each afternoon; a week after they’d moved the money to the banks, he’d intercepted the automatic-teller codes, and a week after that, the cards themselves. The cards were each good for five hundred dollars a day. During the first month, Bekker worked the accounts almost daily, until he had twenty thousand in cash.

“Get fruit,” the old woman ordered.

“I’ll stop at MacGuire’s,” he said on the intercom.

“Apricots.”

“Okay.” He started to turn away.

“Be sure to get apricots . . . .”

“Yes,” he snapped.

“You didn’t get them last time . . . .”

He was seized by a sudden urge to go up and choke her: not the urge that took him to his subjects, but an almost human desire to choke the shit out of a common nag. “I’m sorry,” he said, abjectly, hiding the sudden fury. “And I’ll
try
to get your pills.”

That would shut her up . . . .

Bekker turned away from the intercom and, through the dark living quarters, saw Cortese’s body in the bright light flowing from the operating room.
Might as well do it now.

From the kitchen, he brought a long roll of black polyethylene, sold as painter’s dropcloth. He unrolled it beside the dissection table, used a scalpel to cut it to the right length, then unfolded it. Unstrapped the body. Pulled the catheter from the wrist, pulled the temperature probe. The temperature was down to seventy-nine. Cooling quickly.

Bodies are hard to manipulate, and Bekker, with much experience, didn’t even try. He simply walked to the far side of the table and pushed. The body rolled out of the tray and fell on the plastic sheet with a meaty thwack. He walked back around the table, wrapped it, folded the extra length, tied it with clothesline. He took two extra loops at the waist, to use as a handle. He hauled the body through the living quarters and up the steps to the building’s reinforced back door, struggling with it. Even when you didn’t care if they were damaged, bodies were difficult. And Cortese had been hefty. He should go after smaller people . . . .

The back door of the Lacey building was hidden from the street by a lean-to structure, designed as a car shelter.
He popped open the door, chain still on, and checked the lean-to. In the past, bums had sheltered there. Nothing but the Volkswagen, undisturbed. He dragged the body outside, and, with some difficulty, stuffed it into the passenger seat. When it was in, he stepped to the edge of the lean-to and peeked toward the street. Nobody. He went back inside, closed the door, and hurried down the stairs.

Bekker showered, shaved carefully, dressed, and put on his makeup. The process was intricate: The heavy base makeup covered his ruined face, but had to be carefully shaded into the clear skin at his temples without obvious lines. He took half an hour, working at it. He’d just finished when Mrs. Lacey rang again.

“What?”
Old hag
 . . .

“My hands,” she whined.

“I’m coming now,” he said. Maybe he should kill her, he thought. He allowed himself to feel the pleasure of the idea. But then he’d have to explain her absence to Bridget Land. Though he
could
eliminate Land . . . But that led into a maze of unresolvable questions and dangers: Did Land have other friends, and did they know she came to see Edith Lacey? If Land disappeared, would others come looking for her?

Killing her would be dangerous . . . . No, he would kill neither of them. Not yet. Lacey was the perfect front and Land was, so far, only a modest inconvenience. Bekker, thinking about them, got a bottle of pills from his bureau, shook one into the palm of his hand, went to the bottom of the stairs, flicked a light switch, and went up.

The stairs emerged into the back part of the first floor, then curled and went up to the second and third floors. The first floor had once been a plumbing-parts supply business, but had been vacant for years. During the day, a murky green light filtered through from the street. At
night, the grille-covered windows were simply dark panels on either side of the street door.

The old woman huddled on the second floor, where she’d lived with her two cats since her husband’s death. The second floor reeked of the three of them: cooked carrots, dope, and cat piss. Bekker hated the cats. They knew what he was and watched him from shelves, their eyes glittering in the gloom, as the old woman huddled in front of the television, wrapped in her tie-dyed shawl.

The third floor had once been part of the living quarters, when Mrs. Lacey’s husband was living, but now, like the first, was vacant.

Bekker climbed to the second floor, the smell of carrots and marijuana closing around him. “Mrs. Lacey?”

“In here.” She was a small woman, with thick glasses that enlarged her rheumy blue eyes. Her hair, wiry and gray, clung close to her head. She had a small button nose and tiny round lips. She was wrapped in a housecoat. She had four of them, quilted, in different pastel colors. She was waiting in the big chair in the living room, facing the television. Bekker went to the kitchen, ran a glass of water and carried the pill out to her. A cat ran from under her chair and hid in the next room, looking back at Bekker with cruel eyes.

“This’ll help. I’ll get more tomorrow.”

“Thank you.” She took the pill and drank greedily from the glass.

“You have your pipe and lighter?”

“Yes.”

“You have enough of your tea?”

“Yes, thank you kindly.” She cackled. She’d washed out of the bohemian life of the forties, but she still had her tea.

“I’m going out for a while,” he said.

“Be careful, it’s dangerous this late . . . .”

Bekker left her in her chair and went back down the stairs and carefully checked the lean-to again. Nobody.

The Lacey building fronted on Greene Street. The buildings on either side ran all the way back to Mercer, but the Lacey building filled only half the lot. The back lot, overgrown weeds and volunteer sumac, was closed off with a ten-foot chain-link fence. Before Bekker had arrived, vandals and bums had been over and through it and had broken the lock on the gate. After Bekker had bought the Volkswagen, he’d had the fence fixed and a long twisty strand of razor wire laid along the top.

Now he backed the Volkswagen out of the lean-to, wheeled it to the fence, hopped out, opened the gate, drove through, stopped once more, and locked the gate again.

New York,
he thought.

Bagels and lox/Razor wire and locks.

Bekker giggled.

“Door,” said Thick. He was standing by the window, the M-15 at his shoulder.