"He pretended to be freaking out?"
"Yeah. Pretended. He’s a cold fish," Bonet said. "I’ll tell you what, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it, and he deliberately set me up with that talk on the ’net about how to kill McDonald. I mean, he started it, I didn’t. And then he fed me to you."
"Why do you think he might have done it?" Sherrill asked.
"Because of the way he plays with guns all the time," she said. "I think if you pretend to be killing people long enough, pretty soon you want to try it. Don’t you think?"
Lucas’s and Sherrill’s eyes locked: they’d both killed people in gunfights. "I don’t know," Lucas said finally. "Maybe."
Sherrill said, "What do you mean, plays with guns?"
"He’s always out shooting. You know, rifles and pistols and sometimes he goes out to Wyoming and shoots prairie dogs. He calls them prairie rats. Or prairie pups. And he does that whole paintball thing. You know, runs around in the woods in camouflage clothes with other guys and they shoot each other."
"Robles," Lucas said.
"Yeah. He doesn’t come off that way, does he?"
"Have you ever done the paintball thing with him?"
"No-he doesn’t even know that I know about it. But I know a friend of his, and he saw us together, and he told me. I thought it was weird."
"Huh." Lucas rubbed his chin, then looked at Sherrill. "What do you think?"
"I think I should check with Amoco," Sherrill said. "And maybe start talking to people about Robles."
Lucas pointed a finger at Bonet: "If this checks out, we’ll forget about it. But you keep your mouth shut about what happened. And what you told us. You don’t talk to Robles about it, or anyone else. And remember what’s at stake here. I’m talking about mom."
"Okay," she said, solemnly. A tear started in one eye.
"Okay," Lucas said. And to Sherrilclass="underline" "Call Amoco."
On the way back to his office, Lucas bumped into an assistant public defender heading toward Homicide. She was carrying two briefcases, apparently full of briefs, which bumped alternately against her thighs as she walked. Her hair stood out from her round face in an electrocution halo. Her face was drawn with lack of sleep.
"on your way to see marcy sherrill?" lucas asked.
She stopped and said, "Yeah. But if you’re not done with the rubber hoses, I could wait. Maybe catch a nap."
"We’re all done. We beat the truth out of her and she’s innocent," Lucas said. "We’re turning her loose in a few minutes."
"Really?" The lawyer yawned and said, "God, I’ve gone to bed with men who’ve said less pleasant things to me."
"Yeah, well… sleep tight."
"Won’t let the bedbugs bite," she said with another yawn, and humped the briefcases on down the hall toward Homicide. Had to see for herself.
Lucas sat in his office, his feet on his desk, and added up the accusations. After a while he picked up the phone and called Sherrill. "All done?"
"Yeah. She checked out with Amoco. She’s gotta do some paperwork, then she’s outa here."
"Who’s loose? Besides you."
"Tom Black is sitting in a corner, reading Playgirl," she said. From somewhere behind her, her regular partner shouted, "I am not." Black was gay, but still mostly in the closet.
"Why don’t you guys come on down? I’ll tell you about it," Lucas said.
"Almost time to quit."
"It’ll take ten minutes, and we won’t do anything until tomorrow."
Black, pretending to be disgruntled, slumped in one of Lucas’s two visitor’s chairs, while Sherrill looked out the window at the street.
Lucas was saying, "… if somebody accused, say, Sloan of deliberately setting out to murder somebody, and actually doing it, I’d say, ‘Nope, he couldn’t do that.’ The idea might occur to him, but someplace along the way, he just wouldn’t do it."
"So?" Sherrill asked.
"We’ve got too many people to worry about, all of them with motives. So what we do is, we go around to people who know them well, and ask for a confidential assessment. Could they do it? Would they do it? What would have to be on the line for them to do it?"
Black cocked his head to one side and thought about it for a moment: "That’s weird."
"And it could ship us off in a completely wrong direction," Sherrill said. "You’ve already decided Bone didn’t do it, because you like him."
"No," Lucas said, shaking his head. "I do like him, but I haven’t decided anything about him."
"But if you like him, you’re sort of predisposed not to believe bad stuff."
Black ticked a finger at her: "Psychobabble," he said.
"Sorry," she said. Then, "What about O’Dell and the kaffiyeh? Who’s gonna check that?"
"I’ll ask her," Lucas said.
"Tomorrow?"
"Yeah." He yawned. "Tomorrow."
NINE
Mary Washingtoncalled at nine-thirty, and when Weather Karkinnen picked up the phone, Mary said, "Oh good, you’re still up," and Weather rolled her eyes and lied: "Just barely."
"Henri asked about you again today. He’s interested," Washington said.
"Oh, my God, Mary, why don’t you go after him?" Exasperation, but also a little tingle of pleasure?
" ’Cause I’m ‘Let’s have a couple beers and go bowling,’ and Henri’s ‘Let’s have a couple of glasses of champagne and talk about monoclonal antibodies.’ "
"Well, thanks for the news," Weather said.
"Would you go out with him if he called?"
Henri was six three and had big eyes and long black eyelashes, was thin as a beanpole, balding, and spoke with a French accent. People who knew him well said he was almost too smart: Weather liked him. "I don’t know, Mary," she said. "I’m still pretty messed up."
"I think I’m gonna suggest he give you a ring," Washington said.
"Mary…" Like being trapped in a high school locker room.
"Then maybe you can introduce me to one of those cops you know; somebody who bowls."
Weather had been reading The Wall Street Journal when Mary called. When she got off the phone, she yawned, tossed the paper in the recycling pile, and headed for the bedroom.
Weather was sleeping again, finally. Her problem had been no less difficult than Lucas’s, but hers had less to do with errant brain chemicals. Her problem was plain old post-traumatic shock. She’d pulled the academic studies up on MedLine, knew all the symptoms and lines of treatment, recognized the symptoms in herself-and was powerless to do anything about them.
The unbreakable barrier was Lucas Davenport.
She’d never really been in love with anyone before Lucas. But she’d been in love with him, all right-she’d recognized all those symptoms too. Then the shooting…
There’d always been something in Lucas that was hard, brutal, and remote. She’d been sure she could reach it, smooth it out. He needed that as much as she did: he didn’t know it, but his taste for the street, his taste for violence, was killing him, in ways that weren’t obvious to him. But she’d been wrong about reaching him: the violence was essential to him, she now believed.
The shooting in the hallway, which Lucas had set up, had all the earmarks of that immutable trait. He’d risked his own life, he’d risked hers, and he’d absolutely condemned Dick LaChaise to death, all on his own hook, without consulting anyone, without even much thinking about it. He’d just done it. When the Lucas Davenport machine was in gear, nobody had a way out-and when LaChaise had agreed to walk down the hall with Weather, he was dead no matter what else happened.
Weather could never quite put her finger on exactly how she objected to the killing of Dick LaChaise. Intellectually, she knew that she might easily have been killed by La-Chaise if Lucas hadn’t done what he’d done. Further, a Chaise was an undoubted killer, who deserved anything he got. She could say to herself-intellectually-All right. It worked.