On the way back home, under the night sky, he thought about Andi Manette. Maybe this break was for the better. He'd been fucking her a lot, he could use the rest.
Tomorrow, though, he'd need her-need one of them, anyway.
He could feel that already.
CHAPTER 11
Lucas got up a few minutes after Weather, struggling with the early hour, the morning light pale in the east windows. Weather put breakfast together while Lucas cleaned up. When he was dressed, Lucas got the ring from his sock drawer, fiddled with it, then dropped it in his pants pocket as he had almost every day for a month.
In the kitchen, Weather was standing at the sink, humming to herself as she sliced the orange heart out of a cantaloupe. Lucas still felt like he'd been hit in the forehead with a gavel.
"Anything good today?" he asked. His morning voice sounded like a rusty gate, but she was used to it.
"Not especially interesting," she said. "The first one is a woman with facial scarring from an electrical shock." She touched her cheek in front of her ear, to indicate where the scarring was. "I'm going to take out as much of the scar as I can-all of it, I hope."
"Sounds like she needs a plastic surgeon," Lucas said. He pushed two slices of bread into the toaster and started looking for the cinnamon.
"Sometimes I am a plastic surgeon," Weather said. "We do have that child coming up; that will be interesting. Six operations, probably. We're going to have to rotate her skull backwards…"
He liked watching her talk, her enthusiasm for the work, even when he had no idea of what she was talking about. He'd seen a half-dozen operations now, gowning up and learning where to stand, how to stay out of the way. The precision of it astonished him as did her easy way of command, and he found himself thinking that he could have done the work and been happy with it.
Although there was an odd, steely ego that went with surgeons, Weather had it-she ran the operating room like a sergeant major might-and so did George Howell, Weather's mentor. Howell was a fiftyish reconstructive surgeon who often stopped by when Weather was working, and Lucas usually felt a small, controllable urge to stuff the guy in a sewer somewhere, though Howell was a good enough.
"Are you listening?" Weather asked.
"Sure," Lucas said, peering down into the toaster. "It's just that I'm near death."
"There's something wrong with your metabolism," she said. "How can you be doing six things at three o'clock in the morning, but you can't add two and two at six o'clock in the morning? You should have a physical. How long has it been?"
Lucas rolled his eyes. "Having some guy shine his flashlight up my asshole isn't gonna improve my addition," he said. He looked glumly out the kitchen window. A robin hopped in the yard, peering this way and that for worms. "Christ, where's my.45 when I need it?"
Weather, up from the table, stopped to look outside, saw the robin and said, "I'd turn you in to Friends of Animals. You'd have bird lovers over here at five in the morning, making dove calls on the front porch."
"More fodder for the.45," he said. They ate together, talking about the daily routine, then Lucas kissed her good-bye, patted her on the ass, and went to lie facedown on the couch.
Sherrill and Black were finishing at Manette's office. Lucas stopped by at eight o'clock, still feeling that he was out of his time zone. Black was the same way, grumping at his partner, shaking his head at Lucas. "Six guys. No women. Anderson has the rundown on all of them. They'll all be in today's book. We're looking at all of them, and the FBI's going through its records. Now we're going back and looking at the second choices… the not-so-looney tunes."
"How about the six?"
"Severe goofs," Black said.
"Severe," Sherrill repeated. Like Weather, she was fairly chipper; in fact, seemed to soak up chipperness from Lucas and her partner. "I'd still like to know what we're doing about the sex cases."
"We'll get to them," Lucas promised. "We just don't want the media up in smoke. Not any more than they already are."
"I think Channel Three set new records in stupidity last night," Sherrill said. "The stuff they were saying was so stupid it made my teeth hurt."
"I don't understand what those guys are about," Black said. "I really don't."
"Making money," Lucas said. "That's all they're about."
As Lucas was leaving Manette's office, the receptionist, who'd been so flustered the first day, held up a hand, then looked both ways into the inner offices, a furtive look that Lucas recognized instantly. He continued out into the hall, looked back, caught her eye, and turned left. At the end of the hall was an alcove with Coke, coffee, and candy machines. A second later, she found him there, sipping a Diet Coke.
"I feel not so good, talking to you," the woman said. She wore a name tag that said "Marcella," and her voice was tentative, as though she hadn't made up her mind.
"Anything might help," Lucas said. "Anything. There are two kids out there."
She nodded. "It's just that with all the arguments and lawyers, it makes me feel… disloyal. Nancy doesn't have to know?"
Lucas shook his head. "Nobody will know."
The woman glanced nervously back at her office again. "Welclass="underline" Andi's files are complete, but only for here."
Lucas frowned, gestured with the cup of Coke. "Only for here? I was told that this is the only place that she worked."
"On her own. But when she was doing her post-doc work, at the U, she did lots of people in the Hennepin County jail. You know, court-ordered evaluations. Most of them were juveniles, but that was so long ago that lots of them would be adults by now."
"Did she ever mention anyone in particular?"
"No, she really couldn't, because, you know… confidentiality. But they scared her-she'd talk about that sometimes-about how a guy'd get her up against a door, or he'd hiss at her like a cat, and she could feel them getting ready to come at her. The sex ones scared her, especially. She said you could feel the hunger coming across the room. She said some of them would have attacked her right there, in the jail interview rooms, if they hadn't been restrained. I think the people she saw there… those are the worst ones."
"Well, Jesus, why didn't somebody say something?" Lucas asked.
The woman looked down at the floor. "You know why, Mr. Davenport. Everybody hates you getting these records. I'm not even sure you should. You might be undoing a lot of work. But then there's Andi, and I keep thinking about the girls."
"Okay. You've been a help, Marcella," Lucas said. "I'm serious. This is all between you and me, but if something comes out of it, and you approve, I'll let Miz Manette know you helped."
Lucas let her get back into the office while he finished the Diet Coke, then returned himself.
"What?" Sherrill asked, when she saw him coming back.
"I think we've been euchred-there's a whole other set of records. Criminal stuff. C'mon, we're way behind."
The university might have objected on grounds of patient privacy, but the chief called the governor, the governor called three of the Regents, and the Regents called down to the university president, who issued a statement that said, "Given the circumstances-that we may have a monster preying on innocent women and girls, and helping oppress all genders and races by making the streets unsafe-we have agreed to provide the City of Minneapolis limited access to limited numbers of psychological records."
"How limited?" Lucas asked the records section supervisor at the university. He'd gone with Black and Sherrill because his title added weight.
"Limited to what you ask for," the supervisor said wryly.
"These guys will do the asking," Lucas said, tipping his head at Black and Sherrill. "We really appreciate anything you can do."
Lucas learned about the fire at Irv's Boat Works while he ate a late breakfast at his desk. The fire was reported in a routine, four-inch filler in the Star-Tribune: fire strikes minnetonka boat rental. The article quoted a fire marshaclass="underline" "It was arson, but there was no attempt to hide it, and we don't have a motive as yet. We're asking the public…"