Free Silent Prey by John Sandford Page B

punctuation mark on a pale oval Welsh face. She sat next tohim, perching, shook hands quickly and turned back to the front of the room.
    “John O’Dell’s coming over, he’s going to sit in,” one of the cops was telling Kennett. Kennett nodded, dragged a chair around to face the others and said, “Somebody tell me we’ve got something new.”
    After a moment of silence, Diaz, a tall, gaunt detective, one of the lieutenants, said, “About the time Bekker would’ve got here, a cab disappeared. Three months old. One of them new, round Caprices. Poof. Gone. Stolen while the driver was taking a leak. Supposedly.”
    Kennett’s eyebrows went up. “Never seen again?”
    “Not as far as we can tell. But, ah . . .”
    “What?”
    “One of the guys checked around. The driver doesn’t know anything from anything. Went into a bar to take a leak, comes out, and it’s gone. But the thing had been in two accidents, and the driver says it was a piece of shit. Says the transmission was shot, there was something wrong with the suspension, the front passenger-side door was so tight you could barely open it. I’d bet the sonofabitch is in a river someplace. For the insurance.”
    Kennett nodded but said, “Push it. We’ve got nothing else, right?” He looked around. “Nothing from the Laski surveillance . . . ?”
    “No. Not a thing,” said another of the lieutenants.
    “Um . . .” Lucas lifted a finger, and Kennett nodded at him.
    “Lily told me about the Laski scam, and I’ve been thinking about it.”
    The cops at the front of the room turned in their chairs to look at him. “Like what?” asked Kennett.
    “I don’t think Bekker’ll go for it. He’d think of Laski as a wrong-headed colleague, not somebody he’d hit.Maybe somebody he’d debate. He’s an equal, not a subject.”
    “We got nothing else going for us,” snapped Carter, the sunburned cop. “And it’s cheap.”
    “Hey, it’s a smart idea,” Lucas said. Laski was a Columbia pathologist who had agreed to analyze Bekker’s medical papers for the media. He had condemned them, attacked their morality and science, attacked Bekker as a sadist and a psychotic and a scientific moron—all of it calculated to bring Bekker in. Laski, his apartment and his office were covered by a web of plainclothes cops. So far, Bekker hadn’t touched any of the trip wires. “That’s why I was thinking about it. About variations.”
    “Like what?” prompted Kennett.
    “Back in the Cities, Bekker subscribed to the Times, and I bet he reads it here. If we could set somebody up to give a lecture, some kind of professional speech that would pull him in . . .”
    “Don’t tease me, darlin’,” Kennett said.
    “We have some guy lecture on the medical experiments done by Dr. Mengele,” Lucas said. “You know, the Nazi dude . . .”
    “We know . . .”
    “So he lectures on the ethics of using Mengele’s studies in research and the ethics of using Bekker’s stuff,” Lucas said. “And what might come out of their so-called research that’s valuable. And we make an announcement in the Times. ”
    The cops all looked at each other, and then Huerta said, “Jesus Christ, man, half the fuckin’ town is Jewish. They’d go batshit . . . .”
    “Hey, I don’t mean any goddamn anti-Semite fruitcake lecture,” Lucas said. “I mean some kind of, you know, soft, intellectual, theory thing. I read about thisMengele ethics debate somewhere, so there’s something to talk about. I mean, legit. Maybe we get somebody Jewish to front it, so nobody gets pissed off. Somebody with credentials.”
    “You think that’d do it?” Kennett said. He was interested.
    “Bekker couldn’t resist, if he heard about it. He’s nuts about the topic. Maybe we could arrange for this guy, whoever we get, to have a controversy with Laski. Something that would get in the papers.”
    Kennett looked at the others. “What do you think?”
    Carter tipped his head,