"Soon, I hope. I don't like being cooped up. I'm thinking of heading out to New York, as soon as I can get Plain taken care of."
"You could leave that to your father."
She shook her head. "Dad couldn't handle it."
"So New York's an idea," Lucas said. "But you wouldn't have any protection."
"I could stay in a hotel. How could he find me?"
"Something to think about," Lucas said.
Downstairs, as Lucas was leaving, Hutton asked, "Learn anything new?"
It wasn't meant as a double entrendre, but Lucas turned it into one. "A little more than I wanted," he said.
On the way home, he called St. Anne's, and got Elle on the line. "I know it's cold, but I could take you for an ice cream."
"Never too cold for an ice cream," she said. "I'll walk over, meet you there."
The ice cream shop was across the street from St. Anne's, and was recognized as the local nun hangout. Elle was sitting with three other nuns in a booth near the front of the shop when he walked in, and she laughed and said something to one of the other women and then stood up, and led the way toward the backa scene, Lucas thought, virtually identical to millions that had taken place in bars that night, if you took away the odor of spilled milk, and, of course, the nuns.
"Get a break?" she asked, and added, "I told Jim to make you a chocolate malt."
"That's fine. We've got a couple of things working. I think we've got an eye on the guy who killed Alie'e, and we've booby-trapped everybody the second guy might be going after."
"You're sure there's a second guy."
"I think so. And he's the guy who's bothering me. The homicide people have a candidate. Tom Olson."
"Ohhh no."
"The thing is, they have a theory," Lucas said. "The theory is, the same kind of mental pressures that made him an ecstatic also made him a multiple personality, and one of those personalities is a psychotic who made a run at Jael Corbeau but got chased off, killed Plain, came back after Jael Corbeau but shot Marcy instead, and then killed his parents."
"You say theory"
The malt came. He took it, shucked the straw, and told her what they had: the police shrink, the prediction on the apparent double suicide. At the end, she was shaking her head. "I would love to talk to this man. If you convict him and send him to the state hospital, Iwill go see him. Multiple personalities are so rare. They're rarer than than supernovas."
He smiled at the comparison. "Now, if I knew how rare supernovas are"
"On the basis of pure chance, you'd say that the chances of Tom Olson being a multiple personality are nil," Elle said. "Just like your chances of winning the lottery. Butsomebody will win the lottery."
"So he could be."
"I would really like to talk to him," Elle said.
"If he is disassociating, whatever that means, what's going to happen?"
"He'll break down. He could go so far down that he essentially becomes vegetative and might not ever recover. Probably wouldn't. He'd probably die in a bed."
"That bad."
"That bad."
They made desultory small talk for a few minutes: about her fall classes at the school, about students developing a new interest in the Old Testament. "Amnon and Jael. They knew who they were," she said.
"Terrific," he said. Then: "I've talked to Weather a couple of times at the hospital."
Her eyes shifted away, quickly, furtively, and then back. She knew about guile, but she wasn't instinctively good at it. She had to plan. "What?" he asked.
"Nothing."
"Elle, God bless me what?"
"God bless me?"
"What?"
"I can't. I don't really want to talk about Weather."
"She called you," Lucas said. "She called and asked about me."
Elle wouldn't look at him. "I can't talk to you. Everything that's been said by everybody is in confidence."
"Aw, man, this could be a problem," Lucas said.
Now she sat up. "Why? You don't have another relationship."
"Some things have come up lately."
"Lucas if you have any chance of recovering with Weather, you'd be a moron not to take it."
"Oh boy," he said. "Mmman-oh-man."
After he left Elle, he went home, turned out the fights, and sat in the dark in the living room. Tried to make sense of the Alie'e case. Tried to make sense of his relationship with Weather.
Weather had become entangled in one of Lucas's cases, and had been taken hostage by a crazy peckerwood killer on a revenge trip. She'd talked him into surrendering, but Lucas hadn't known that. He'd set up an ambush involving a police sniper, who'd fired a high-powered varmint bullet down a hospital corridor, exploding the peckerwood's head like a pumpkin. The idea had been to get him out in the open, to get his weapon pointed in some direction other than Weather's head, and then take him out. The plan had worked to perfection.
Except for one small item: Weather had been looking at Lucas, straining toward him, full of a kind of strange goodwill toward her captor, who'd seemed to be not an entirely bad manthat in one minute, and in the next, the man's brains were literally blown across her face, with fragments of bone.
She was a surgeon, and no stranger either to blood or death; nor was she a sentimentalist. But this was something else, and when it was done, she'd been unable to talk to Lucas. She'd known the trouble was a kind of psychological reflex, a kind of phobia, a mental tic, but knowing it didn't help. She drifted away went faster than that, actually. Walked away. Hurried away. Didn't hate him, nothing like thatjust couldn't deal with his nearness, and the constantly played sound/sight/feel of the slug going through a man's brain three inches from her own.
But, Lucas thought, time passes.
Time passes. He closed his eyes in the dark. And saw the scarred face and teasing eyes of Jael Corbeau; the slightly plump, intense face of Catrin; the shoulders, the too-big nose, thefeel of Weather.
Time passes, but sometimes it beats the shit out of you as it goes.
Chapter 20
Wednesday. The fifth day of Alie'e Maison.
Lucas checked on Marcy. Black was slumped in a visitors chair, and when he saw Lucas, got up. He was a little shaky, unshaven. "Nothing happening, but she started to wake up. She went back down, but they say she was close to the surface. She should wake up today."
Lucas looked in. Marcy had always been the most active person in the office, always had something rolling, something moving. She didn't look right, propped in the bed. She looked thinner, gaunt, wasted. He patted Black on the shoulder and said, "Take it easy."
The main offices of the Atheneum State Bank were off University Avenue three blocks from the state capitol building in St. Paul, in a redbrick building with four white wooden pillars out front. The neighborhood started trending up when the porno movies moved out and the hookers had been pushed farther west, away from the state legislators. The upward trend had stalled, and now the whole strip had a shabby, going-nowhere ambiance, like a squashed paper cup outside a convenience store.
The taps on four of Rodriguez's phonesone home, two business, and a cellwere in place, along with taps on the home and cell phones used by Bill Spooner, an assistant vice president in the commercial loans department.
Lucas and Del drove to the bank in a beat-up city car, trailed by an assistant county attorney named Tim Long. From the parking lot, Lucas called Rose Marie. Rose Marie, who had been waiting for the call, phoned the bank president and asked him to make time for a quick talk with Lucas. She got back to Lucas and said, "He's waiting. Be a little carefuclass="underline" He's one of those hail-fellow types who's always ready to help a member of the legislature, and never forgets when he has."
Lucas said to Del, "See if you can find Spooner's car."
Del nodded. "Crunch him," he said.
Lucas and Long went inside, spoke to the bank president's secretary. She went back into his office and popped out a minute later, followed by the president himself. "Already? I just talked to Rose Marie a couple of minutes ago."