"He is. You didn't like him?"

"It's not that. I just didn'tcare about him. Didn't even think about him when he was standing in front of me. He made himself into what he is. Not my fault. He wants to carry bags and hang out with pretty women, and that's what he does."

"Sounds bad," Lucas said.

"He doesn't think so." They sat in silence for a moment, then Jael said, "You and Marcy had a relationship."

"For six weeks or so. It was a little too intense."

She cocked her head. "Why would you walk away from intensity? Other people go their whole lives without intensity. They dream about it."

"like I said, this was a little too much. We were headed for a disaster."

"You mean, like, you'd strangle her or something?"

"No. But something was going to happen, and we'd wind up hating each other," Lucas said. "We didn't want to do that. Risk it."

"She's still sort of hung up on you," Jael said. "You know what would've been fun? For the three of us to go away. You and me and Marcy."

She said it so conversationally that Lucas was neither embarrassed nor surprised. He said, "I'm a little too Catholic for that. Marcy would be, too, if she was a Catholic."

"Oh, I don't think so," Jael said. "Not Marcy, anyway. I think she might be interested in the idea."

"Really?" She'd said it with some certainty, and now hewas surprised. He looked a question at her.

"No, no, we weren't playing. We hardly had a chance to talk," Jael said. "But you can sort of pick out people who like tofeel. Marcy's one of us."

"You mean, a little gay?" Lucas asked.

"No. That's not what I mean. You're one of us. I could tell from talking to you, and the way you look at women."

"I gotta stop talking about this," Lucas said. "Sure," she said. "It really makes me nervous."

"That's the Catholic part," she said. "You've probably been fighting it all of your life."

"Maybe," he said.

"You know," she said later, "I'm a little scared."

"I know. You should be."

"The way Plain was killed. He probably never had a chance even to say anything."

"The guy is nuts. But he's not some great force. We just haven't been able to find him. We will."

"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.