"So what happened?" Lucas asked. "You sounded a little tense."

"The woman you called about. I went down to see her. She has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis…"

"Lou Gehrig's disease…"

"Right. She's almost completely incommunicado. Her brain works fine, but she can't move anything but her eyes. She'll be dead in a week or two. And Bekker is trying to kill her."

"What?" Lucas grabbed Merriam by the arm.

"This absolutely defeats me: a goddamn doctor," Merriam said, pulling away. "But you have to see for yourself. Come along."

Lucas trailed behind him as they went down a flight of stairs.

"I went down to find her this morning and stopped to ask at the nursing station," Merriam said over his shoulder. He pushed through a door at the bottom of the stairs. "The duty nurse had worked overnight, and was working an extra half-shift because somebody was sick. Anyway, I mentioned that I was there to see Sybil and asked if Dr. Bekker had been around. The nurse said-you'll have to take this with a grain of salt-she said she didn't see him but she'd felt him. Late last night. She said it occurred to her that dirty old Dr. Death was around, because she shivered, and she always shivers when she sees him."

"She calls him 'Dr. Death'?"

" 'Dirty old Dr. Death,' " Merriam said. "Not very flattering, is it? So then I went down to talk to Sybil. She's going by inches, but the nurses say she's got an inch or two left…"

Merriam led him past the nurses' station and down the hall, past an exit door and three or four more rooms, then glanced inside a room and turned. Sybil lay flat on her back, unmoving except for her eyes. They went to Merriam, then to Lucas, and stayed with him. They were dark liquid pools, pleading.

"Sybil can't talk, but she can communicate," Merriam said simply. "Sybil, this is Lieutenant Davenport of the Minneapolis Police Department. If you understand, say yes."

Her eyes moved up and down, a nod, and stayed with Merriam.

"And a no," Merriam prompted.

They moved from side to side.

"Has Dr. Bekker been coming here?" Merriam asked.

Yes.

"Are you afraid of him?"

Yes.

"Are you afraid for your life?"

Yes.

"Have you tried to communicate with your eye switch?"

Yes.

"Did Dr. Bekker interfere?"

Yes.

"Is Dr. Bekker trying to kill you?" Lucas asked.

Her eyes shifted to him and said, Yes. Stopped, and then again, Yes, frantically.

"Jesus Christ," said Lucas. He glanced at Merriam. "Has he been interested in your eyes? Said anything about…"

Her eyes were flashing up and down again. Yes.

"Jesus," he said again. He leaned across the bed toward the woman. "You hang on. We'll bring in a camera and an expert interrogator, and we're going to get you on videotape. We're going to slam this asshole in prison for so long he'll forget what the sun looks like. Okay?"

Yes.

"And excuse the 'asshole,' " Lucas said. "My language sometimes gets away from me."

No, her eyes said, sliding from side to side.

"No?"

"I think she means, Don't apologize, 'cause he is an asshole," Merriam said from beside the bed. "That right, Sybil?"

She was like a piece of modeling clay, unmoving, still, except for the liquid eyes:

Yes, she said. Yes.

"I'll have somebody here in a half-hour," Lucas said, when they were outside her door.

"You'll have to talk to her husband, just to make sure the legalities are right," Merriam said. "I'll see the director about this."

"Tell him the chief is going to call. And I'll have one of our lawyers talk to her husband. Can they get all the information from here at your desk?"

"Sure. Anything you need."

Lucas started away, then stopped and turned.

"The kids you think he killed. Did he go after their eyes? I mean, was there anything unusual about their eyes?"

"No, no. I was there for the postmortems, their eyes weren't involved."

"Hmph." Lucas started away again, stopped again.

"Don't let anyone close to her."

"Don't worry. Nobody gets in there," Merriam said.

Lucas called Daniel from a pay phone and explained.

"Sonofabitch," Daniel crowed. "Then we got him."

"I don't know," Lucas said. "But we got something. The lawyers will have to figure out if it'll hold up in court. And it doesn't tie him to these other things."

"But we're moving," Daniel insisted. "I'll send a tape unit over there right now, and Sloan to talk to her."

"Can we put a guy on her door?"

"No problem. Around the clock. You think we should stick a surveillance team on him again?"

Lucas considered, then said, "No. He'll be hyperaware of anything like that. We've got Druze going… Let's see what happens."

"All right. What are you doing?"

"I got a couple more ideas…"

A male duck cruised a female across the college pond, as Elle Kruger and Lucas climbed the sidewalk toward the main buildings. Spring, but a cold wind was blowing. Well off to the west, over Minneapolis, they could see darker clouds, and the blurring underedges that said it was raining.

"The eye fixation could have been created by some kind of traumatic incident, but that seems somewhat unlikely," Elle said. "It's more likely that he's always had a feeling of being watched, and this is his reaction…"

"Then why weren't the kids cut up?"

"Lucas, you're missing the obvious," the nun said. "No good for a gamer."

"All right, tell me the obvious, Sister Mary Joseph, ma'am," he said.

"Maybe he didn't kill the children."

Lucas shook his head. "Thought of that. But Merriam gets these vibrations, and it fits with what he's doing with this Sybil, and the interest in the eyes fits with these other killings. Could be a coincidence, but I doubt it."

"As I said, it is possible that he developed the fixation between killings."

"But not likely."

"No."

They walked with their heads down, climbing the hill, and Lucas said, "Would it make any difference when he did the eyes? I mean, could he do them later?"

Elle stopped and looked up at him. "Well. I don't know. This woman who died at the mall-her eyes weren't done until after death."

"Neither were George's, the guy they dug up in Wisconsin. He probably wasn't done for twenty-four hours…"

"That's your answer, then. He does it after death, but apparently it doesn't have to be right away. What are you thinking?"

"Just that if a kid dies and there's going to be a postmortem, you might not want to do the eyes right away. Especially if you had another shot, later."

"Like at the funeral home?"

"Sure. Anytime after the postmortem. He's a pathologist, he's right there with the bodies. He could do the eyes there, right in the hospital, or at the funeral home during a visitation. Who watches a dead body?"

"Do they do anything with the eyes at funeral homes? Would anybody notice?" Elle was doubtful.

"I don't know," Lucas said. "But I can find out."

"What time is it?" she asked suddenly. "I've got a four-o'clock class."

Lucas looked at his watch. "It's just four now."