5

LUCAS WAS HALF AWAKE when he heard the whap of the Pioneer Press hitting the front porch, and the deliverywoman reversing her car out of the driveway. Ten minutes later, as he was about to go under again, having punched his pillow flat, the second deliverywoman came in, with two whaps: the Star-Tribune and the Wall Street Journal.

He tried to get back to sleep but was only marginally successful, slipping in and out of confused dreams that sometimes seemed like memories, sometimes like fantasies.

His problem was the empty bed. He'd slept by himself for years, and now, groaning through his later forties, he couldn't sleep without Weather beside him.

On the other hand…

The house was certainly neater than when the family was home.

THE FAMILY WAS IN LONDON. Weather had gotten a prestigious fellowship in maxillo-facial surgery, and had first thought to go alone. But she hated the idea of three months away from Sam, the baby. And Letty, their ward, started whining around about never getting to go anywhere, and the housekeeper wondered what she'd do if everybody left…

Finally, Weather decided to pick up the whole bunch of them and transplant them to London for the summer. "We don't have a money problem, so why not?" she asked.

"I'd be happy to take care of everybody, and you'd have the time to yourself,"Lucas had said. She was suspicious-he got along quite well on his own and often seemed to pull a loneliness around himself. And she really didn't want to be away from Sam…

So they packed it all up, everything they would need for three months, surgeon, baby, ward, and housekeeper, and at enormous cost, left for London, leaving him alone in the house.

He'd cluttered the place the first few days the family was gone. Then he'd picked it up and resumed his bachelor ways: he'd never been exactly tidy, but he kept things in their places. When the family was around, nothing was ever where it was supposed to be. The amount of junk that came in the door was befuddling: new clothes and electronics and DVDs and school supplies and Pampers and snack food and medical journals and what seemed like an endless pile of cardboard boxes and wrapping plastic and empty bottles.

That all stopped.

Still. The hole in his life seemed to be getting larger; and he waited every morning until she called from her office in London, to tell him about the day she'd had, and what the kids were doing.

WHEN THE PHONE RANG, he sat up, groggy, looked at the clock: too early. She never called this early. He picked up the phone, and Rose Marie Roux said, "Your secret serial killer is all over the front page of the Strib."

"What?"

"This guy really is a monster," she said, conversationally. She sounded as though she had a cup of coffee in front of her and a cigarette in her hand, which she probably did. Rose Marie Roux was the commissioner of public safety, and, indirectly, Lucas's boss. "Cutting their throats with a straight razor and scourging them with a wire whip? Where do you even get a straight razor these days?"

Lucas said, "Shit," scratched under his left armpit, and said, "They get straight razors from the same place they get lead pipes. The cliche mine. What else do they say?"

"Pretty well-written piece, if you have a taste for the Gothic," Rose Marie said. "You're still in bed, right?"

"Right."

"I'll read it to you." She did; and when she finished, she said, "This is gonna be trouble for my favorite cop. The newsies are in it now."

"I better call Sloan," Lucas said.

HE DIDN'T CALL SLOAN RIGHT AWAY. He went back to sleep, and the next time he cracked his eyelids it was two minutes to eight o'clock. He fumbled past the lamp, through the pocket junk that he dropped on the bed stand each night, past watch and wallet and lucky stone and cash receipts from the gas station, a small wad of currency and two dollars in change, and finally dug out the cell phone, turned it on and lay with it on his chest.

Two minutes later, right on time, it rang.

"Do anything good today?" he asked.

"Gave a lecture on the… on a facial muscle and the nerve that operates it," Weather said.

"I wish I'd been there. Did you show slides?"

"You're pulling my weenie."

"You don't have a weenie, unless you've grown one in London."

They talked for fifteen minutes: she told him about the work; he told her about the story in the Star-Tribune.

"The thing is, you like that," she said. "You like being in the newspaper."

"Only when I'm standing over the bad guy's body with my gun in my hand, wearing a new gray suit with a thin chalk stripe, and the Porsche in the background."

"You'll take it any way you can get it, buster. Maybe I should worry about you hanging out with newspaperwomen, again."

"Ah, I'm too pussy-whipped to do anything questionable."

"I beg your pardon…"

AS SOON AS THEY BROKE OFF, he said, "Sloan," and punched in Sloan's office phone from memory.

Somebody else answered. "Where's Sloan?" Lucas asked.

"Who is this?"

"Davenport."

"Hey, Lucas. This is Franklin. Sloan was talking to Anderson out in the hall a minute ago, let me go look. He's been calling you at the office and on your cell phone…"

Franklin dropped the phone and went away. Lucas looked at his cell phone's screen: sure enough, three missed calls. Then Lucas heard Franklin's voice again but couldn't make out what he said, then Sloan picked up: "We got some ink. This little fucking weasel from the Strib picked it up."

"I know," Lucas said. He yawned. "What do you think?"

"Are you still in bed? You sound like you're in bed."

"Yeah, yeah, so what do you think?"

"The chief is jumping up and down, which is what you get when you hire a small-town guy. He's scared to death that the city council might pee on him. Or even worse, the TV people," Sloan said.

"You worried?"

"Not yet. Not as long as he doesn't kill another one in town. I suppose you're gonna have the governor on your ass."

Lucas yawned again. "Don't know yet," he said when he had the yawn under control. "Dead people don't have any political clout, but it could come from somewhere else, I suppose."

"How about a sense of moral obligation?" Sloan said.

"Ah, you fuckin' Republicans, nothing ever makes you happy."

"Fuck a bunch of Republicans," Sloan said. "Anyway, I had Anderson send a whole book over to you by e-mail. You could have your secretary print it out for you before you get there. It's everything we got, plus some medium-rez pictures from the Larson scene.You can have your co-op guys put it all in the database."

"All right. I'll be over there by ten. Want to hook up, say ten-thirty?"

"You got the case now?"

"I'm giving it to myself," Lucas said. "If they want to put somebody else on it, too, that's okay."

"See you at ten-thirty," Sloan said. "By the way, I got my papers."

Lucas didn't immediately track the reference. "Huh?"

"My retirement papers. I got them. I'm filling them out," Sloan said. "Ah, for Christ's sake, Sloan, you aren't gonna quit."

"Yeah, I am. Talk to you at ten-thirty."

LUCAS CALLED HIS SECRETARY and told her to print out Sloan's murder file, and get it to the co-op group. Then he dressed, went downstairs, into a silent house, sat at the bar in the kitchen, and ate cholesterol-free, fat-free, carbohydrate-free, salt-free, puffed oatmeal air with a splash of fat-free milk. Still hungry, he went, feeling furtive, even though Weather was six thousand miles away, into Weather's home office, opened the file cabinet, picked up a stack of medical reports, found the gold box of Godiva birthday bonbons hidden under them, stole the two he figured would be least conspicuously missing, and let them melt in his mouth as he headed for the door.