The stress tightened him. He could feel the muscles pumping, his body filling out. Taste the blood… And suddenly, there was a flush of pleasure with a rash of pain, like being hand-stroked while ants crawled across you…
More good than bad. Much more.
CHAPTER
6
Weather wasn't home. Lucas suppressed a thump of worry: she should have been home an hour earlier. He picked up the phone, but there was nothing on voice mail, and he hung up.
He walked back to the bedroom, pulling off his tie. The bedroom smelled almost subliminally of her Chanel No. 5; and on top of that, very faintly of wood polish. She'd bought a new bedroom set, simple wooden furniture with an elegant line, slightly Craftsman-Mission. He grumbled. His old stuff was good enough, he'd had it for years. She didn't want to hear it.
"You've got a twenty-year-old queen-sized bed that looks like it's been pounded to death by strange women-I won't ask-and you don't have a headboard, so the bed just sits there like a launching pad. Don't you read in bed? Don't you know about headboard lights? Wouldn't you like some nice pillows?"
Maybe, if somebody else bought them.
And his old dresser, she said, looked like it had come from the Salvation Army.
He didn't tell her, but she was precisely correct.
She said nothing at all about his chair. His chair was older than the bed, bought at a rummage sale after a St. Thomas professor had died and left it behind. It was massive, comfortable, and the leather was fake. She did throw out a mostly unused second chair with a stain on one arm-Lucas couldn't remember what it was, but it got there during a Vikings-Packers game-and replaced it with a comfortable love seat.
"If we're going to watch television in our old age, we should sit next to each other," she said. "The first goddamn thing men do when they get a television is put two E-Z Boys in front of it and a table between them for beer cans and pizzas. I swear to God I won't allow it."
"Yeah, yeah, just don't fuck with my chair," Lucas had said. He'd said it lightly, but he was worried.
She understood that. "The chair's safe. Ugly, but safe."
"Ugly? That's genuine glove… material."
"Really? They make gloves out of garbage bags?"
Weather Karkinnen was a surgeon. She was a small woman in her late thirties, her blondish hair beginning to show streaks of white. She had dark-blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a wide mouth. She looked vaguely Russian, Lucas thought. She had broad shoulders for her size, and wiry muscles; she played a vicious game of squash and could sail anything. He liked to watch her move, he liked to watch her in repose, when she was working over a problem. He even liked to watch her when she slept, because she did it so thoroughly, like a kitten.
When Lucas thought of her, which he might do at any moment, the same image always popped up in his mind's eye: Weather turning to look at him over her shoulder, smiling, a simple pearl dangling just over her shoulder.
They would be married, he'd thought. She'd said, "Don't ask yet."
"Why? Would you say no?"
She'd poked him in the navel with her forefinger. "No. I'd say yes. But don't ask yet. Wait a while."
"Until when?"
"You'll know."
So he hadn't asked; and somewhere, deep inside, he was afraid, he was relieved. Did he want out? He'd never experienced this closeness. It was different. It could be… frightening.
Lucas was down to his underpants when the phone rang in the kitchen. He picked up the silent bedroom extension and said, "Yeah?"
"Chief Davenport?" Connell. She sounded tight.
"Meagan, you can start calling me Lucas," he said.
"Okay. I just wanted to say, uh, don't throw away your files. On the case." There was an odd thumping sound behind her. He'd heard it before, but he couldn't place it.
"What?"
"I said, don't throw away your files."
"Meagan, what're you talking about?"
"I'll see you tomorrow. Okay?"
"Meagan…?" But she was gone.
Lucas looked at the telephone, frowned, shook his head, and hung it up. He dug through the new dresser, got running shorts, picked up a sleeveless sweatshirt that he'd thrown on top of a hamper, pulled it on, and stopped with one arm through a sleeve. The thumping sound he'd heard behind Connell-keyboards. Wherever she was, there were three or four people keyboarding a few feet away. Could be her office, though it was late.
Could be a newspaper.
Could be a television station.
His line of thought was broken by the sound of the garage door going up. Weather. A small rock rolled off his chest. He pulled the sweatshirt over his head, picked up his socks and running shoes, and walked barefoot back through the house.
"Hey." She'd stopped in the kitchen, was taking a Sprite out of the refrigerator. He kissed her on the cheek. "Do anything good?"
"I watched Harrison and MacRinney do a free flap on a kid with Bell's palsy," she said, popping the top on the can.
"Interesting?" She put her purse on the kitchen counter and turned her face up to him: her face was a little lopsided, as though she'd had a ring career before turning to medicine. He loved the face; he could remember reacting the first time he'd talked with her, in a horror of a burned-out murder scene in northern Wisconsin: she wasn't very pretty, he'd thought, but she was very attractive. And a little while later, she'd cut his throat with a jackknife…
Now she nodded. "Couldn't see some of the critical stuff-mostly clearing away a lot of fat, which is pretty picky. They had a double operating microscope, so I could watch Harrison work part of the time. He put five square knots around the edge of an artery that wasn't a heck of a lot bigger than a broom straw."
"Could you do that?"
"Maybe," she said, her voice serious. He'd learned about surgeons and their competitive instincts. He knew how to push her buttons. "Eventually, but… You're pushing my buttons."
"Maybe."
She stopped, stood back and looked at him, picking something up from his voice. "Did something happen?"
He shrugged. "I had a fairly interesting case for about fifteen minutes this afternoon. It's gone now, but… I don't know."
"Interesting?" She worried.
"Yeah, there's a woman from the BCA who thinks we've got a serial killer around. She's a little crazy, but she might be right."
Now she was worried. She stepped back toward him. "I don't want you to get hurt again, messing with some maniac."
"It's over, I think. We're off the case."
"Off?"
Lucas explained, including the strange call from Connell. Weather listened intently, finishing the Sprite. "You think she's up to something," she said when he finished.
"It sounded like it. I hope she doesn't get burned. C'mon. Let's run."
"Can we go down to Grand and get ice cream afterwards?"
"We'll have to do four miles."
"God, you're hard."
After dark, after the run and the ice cream, Weather began reviewing notes for the next morning's operation. Lucas was amazed by how often she operated. His knowledge of surgery came from television, where every operation was a crisis, undertaken only with great study and some peril. With Weather, it was routine. She operated almost every day, and some days, two or three times. "You've got to do it a lot, if you're going to do it at all," she said. She'd be in bed by ten and up by five-thirty.
Lucas did business for a while, then prowled the house, finally went down to the basement for a small off-duty gun, clipped it under his waistband and pulled his golf shirt over it. "I'm going out for a while," he said.
Weather looked up from the bed. "I thought the case was over."
"Ehh. I'm looking for a guy."
"So take it easy," she said. She had a yellow pencil clenched between her teeth, and spoke around it; she looked cute, but he picked up the tiny spark of fear in her eyes.
He grinned and said, "No sweat. I'll tell you straight out when there might be a problem."
"Sure."