Prey: Night Prey Part 17

And she spoke to Lucas from time to time, distractedly, focusing on the work. "Her father was running a power line from a 220 outlet to a pump down by the lake using an extension cord. The connection where the two cords came together . . . started to pull apart. That's what they think. Lucy grabbed them to put them back together. They don't know exactly what she was doing, but there was a flash and she'd gotten hit on both arms, and around her back on her shoulder blades. . . . We'll show you. We're doing skin grafts where we can, and in some places we're expanding the skin to cover."

After a while, talk around the table turned to a book about a love affair that was dominating the best-seller lists. About whether the lovers should have gone off together, destroying a marriage and a family.

"She was living a lie afterwards; she was hurting everyone," one of the nurses declared. "She should have gone."

"Right. And the family is wrecked and just because she has a fling doesn't mean she still doesn't love them."

"This was not exactly a fling."

In the background, music oozed from a portable radio tuned to an easy-listening station; on the table, under Weather's gloved hands and knife, Lucy bled.

They harvested skin from Lucy's thigh to cover a part of the wound. The skin harvester looked like a cross between an electric sander and a sod cutter.

"This looks like it's going to hurt," Lucas said finally. "Hurt a lot."

"Can't help it," Weather grunted, not looking up. "These are the worst, burns are. Skin won't regenerate, but you've got to cover the wounds to prevent infection. That means grafts and expansions. . . . We put the temporary skin on because we couldn't get enough off her the first couple of times, but you can't leave the temporary stuff, she'll reject it."

"Maybe you should have told her it was going to hurt," Lucas said. "When you were talking to her outside."

Weather glanced up briefly, as though considering it, but shook her head as she continued to tack down the advanced skin on one of the expansions. "I didn't tell her it wouldn't hurt. The idea was to get her in here, quiet, with a minimum of resistance. Next time, I can tell her it's the last time."

"Will it be?"

"I hope so," Weather said. "We might need a touch-up if we get some rough scar development. Might have to release scar tissue. But the next one should be the last one for a while."

"Huh."

She looked at him, grave, quiet, over the top of her mask, her pink-stained fingers held in front of her, away from the girl's open wounds; the nurses were looking at him as well. "I don't do therapy," she said. "I do surgery. Sometimes you can't get around the pain. All you can do is fix them, and eventually the pain stops. That's the best I can do."

AND LATER, WHEN she was finished, they sat together in the surgeon's lounge for a few minutes and she asked, "What do you think?"

"Interesting. Impressive."

"Is that all." There was a tone in her voice.

"I've never seen you before as the commander in chief," he said. "You do it pretty well."

"Any objections?"

"Of course not."

She stood up. "You seemed disturbed. When you were watching me."

He looked down, shook his head. "It's pretty strong stuff. And it wasn't what I'd expected, the blood and the smell of the cautery and that skin harvester thing . . . It's kind of brutal."

"Sometimes it is," she said. "But you were most bothered about my att.i.tude toward Lucy."

"I don't know. . . ."

"I can't get involved," she said. "I have to turn off that part of me. I can like patients, and I like Lucy, but I can't afford to go into the operating room worrying that I'll hurt them, or wondering if I'm doing the right thing. I've worked that out in advance. If I didn't, I'd screw up in there."

"It did seem a little cold," he admitted.

"I wanted you to see that," she said. "Lucas, as part of my . . . surgeon persona, I guess you'd call it, I'm different. I have to make brutal decisions, and I do. And I run things. I run them very well."

"Well . . ."

"Let me finish. Since I moved down here, we've had some very good times in bed. We've had nice runs at night, and some fun going out and fooling around. But this is what I am, right here. What you saw."

Lucas sighed, and nodded. "I know that. And I admire you for it. Honest to G.o.d."

She smiled then, just a little. "Really?"

"Really. It's just that what you do . . . is so much harder than I thought."

Much harder, he thought again as he left the hospital.

In his world, or in Jan Reed's world, for that matter, very few things were perfectly clear: the best players were always figuring odds. Mistakes, stupidity, oversights, lies, and accidents were part of the routine. In Weather's world, those things were not routine; they were, in fact, virtually unforgivable.

The surgery was another thing. The blood hadn't bothered him, but he was bothered by that moment where the knife hovered above the uncut skin, as Weather made her last-minute decisions on how she would proceed. Cutting in hot blood was one thing; doing it in cold blood-doing it on a child, even for the child's own good-was something else. It took an intellectual toughness of an order that Lucas hadn't encountered on the street. Not outside a psychopath.

That was what she'd wanted him to see.

Was she trying to tell him something?

12.

LUCAS'S HEAD FELT large and fuzzy as he walked through the doors of City Hall and up to the chief's office. Lack of sleep. Getting older. Roux's secretary thumbed him through the door, but Lucas stopped for a second. "Check around and see if Meagan Connell's in the building, will you? Tell her where I am."

"Sure. Do you want me to send her in?"

"Yeah, why not?"

"Because she and the chief might get in a fistfight?"

Lester and Anderson were in visitor's chairs. Lonnie Shantz, Roux's press aide, leaned on the windowsill, arms crossed, an accusation on his jowly ward heeler's face. Roux nodded when Lucas arrived. "They're p.i.s.sed over at the Strib," she said. "Have you seen the paper?"

"Yeah. The big thing on Junky."

"With this killing last night, they think we sandbagged them," Shantz said.

Lucas sat down. "What can you do? The guy's flipped out. Any other time, it might've held them for a few days."

"We're not looking good, Lucas," Roux said.

"What about the St. Paul cop?" Shantz asked. "Anything there?"

"I'm told that St. Paul had a shrink talk to him," Lester said. "They don't think he's capable of it."

"Beat up his wife," Shantz suggested.

"The charges were dropped. More like a brawl. His old lady got her licks in," Anderson said. "Hit him in the face with a Mr. Coffee."

"I heard it was an iron," Lucas said. "Where was he last night, by the way?"

"Bad news," Lester said. "His old lady moved out after the last big fight, and he was home. Alone. Watching TV."

"s.h.i.t," Lucas said.

"St. Paul's talking to him again, pinning down the shows he saw."

"Yeah, yeah, but with VCR time delays, he could have been anywhere," Shantz said.

"Bulls.h.i.t," said Anderson.

Shantz was talking to Roux. "All we'd have to do is leak a name and the spousal-abuse charge. We could do it a long way from here-I could have one of my pals at the DFL do it for me. h.e.l.l, they like doing favors for media, for the paybacks. TV3'd pee their pants with that kind of tip. And it really does smell like a cover-up."

"They'd crucify him," Lester said. "They'd make it look like the charges were dropped because he's a cop."

"Who's to say they weren't?" Shantz asked. "And it would take some of the heat off us. Christ, this killing over at the lakes, that's a G.o.dd.a.m.n disaster. The woman's dead and the guy's a cabbage. Now we get this serial a.s.shole again, knocking off some country milkmaid, we're talking firestorm."

"If you feed the St. Paul guy to the press, you'll regret it. It'd kill the Senate for you," Lucas said to Roux.

"Why is that?" Shantz demanded. "I don't see how . . ."

Lucas ignored him, spoke to Roux. "Word would get out. When everybody figured out what happened-that you threw an innocent cop to the wolves to turn the attention away from you-they'd never forget and never forgive you."

Roux looked at him for a moment, then shifted her gaze to Shantz. "Forget it."

"Chief . . ."

"Forget it," she snapped. "Davenport is right. The risk is too big." Her eyes moved to her left, past Lucas, hardened. Lucas turned and saw Connell standing in the doorway.

"Come on in, Meagan," he said. "Do you have the picture?"

"Yeah." Connell dug in her purse, took out the folded paper, and handed it to Lucas. Lucas unfolded it, smoothed it, and pa.s.sed it to Roux.

"This is not bulls.h.i.t; this could be our man. More or less. I'm not sure you should release it."

Roux looked at the picture for a moment, then at Connell, then at Lucas. "Where'd you get this?" she asked.

"Meagan found a woman yesterday who remembers a guy at the St. Paul store who was there the same time Wannemaker was there. He's not on our list of names and this fits some of the other descriptions we've had. A guy last night who definitely saw him says he has a beard."

"And drives a truck," said Connell.

"Everybody who drives a truck has a beard," Lester said.

"Not quite," Lucas said. "This is actually . . . something. A taste of the guy."

"Why wouldn't I release it?" Roux asked.

"Because we're not getting enough hard evidence. Nothing that can tie him directly to a killing-a hair or a fingerprint. If this isn't a good picture of him, and we do finally track him down, and we're sc.r.a.ping little bits and pieces together to make a case . . . a defense attorney will take this and stick it up our a.s.s. You know: Here's the guy they were looking for-until they decided to pin it on my client."

"Is there anything working today? Anything that'd give us a break?"

"Not unless it comes out of the autopsy on Lane. That'll be a while yet."

"Um, Bob Greave got a call from TV3-a tip on a suspect," Connell said. "It's nothing."

"What do you mean, nothing? What is this, Lucas?" Roux asked.

"Beats me. First I heard of it," he said.

"Get his a.s.s down here," Roux said.

GREAVE CAME DOWN carrying a slip of yellow paper, leaned in the doorway.

"Well?" Roux said.

He looked at the paper. "A woman out in Edina says she knows who the killer is."

Lucas: "And the bad news is . . ."

"She called TV3 first. They're the ones who called us. They want to know if we're going to make an arrest based on their information."

"You should have come and told us," Roux said.

"We've been sitting here beating our heads against the wall."

Greave held up a hand. "You have to understand, the woman doesn't have any actual proof."

Roux said, "Keep talking."

"She remembers the killer coming back from each of the murders, washing the blood off the knife and his clothes, and then raping her. She repressed all this until yesterday, when the memories were liberated with the help of her therapist."

"Oh, no," Lucas groaned.

"It could be," Shantz said, looking around.

"Did I mention that the killer is her father?" Greave asked. "Sixty-six years old, the former owner of a drive-in theater? A guy with arteriosclerosis so bad that he can't walk up a flight of stairs?"

"We gotta check it," Shantz said. "Especially with the TV all over it."