Broken Prey

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 cliché 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