Chosen Prey

look like . . . that I’d look like, like a Renaissance burgher?” He crossed his hands, thumbs under his chin as though he were strangling himself, to show her the line of the sweater. “It frames the face, you see, but it also isolates it.”
    “I see,” she said. “Well, if the person were tanned or sunburned, I think there’s a possibility that the head would look wooden. You’d look like a wood carving on a pedestal.”
    “Hmm,” he said. Actually, that sounded interesting. “Let’s walk some more,” he said.
    In fact, he had the money in his pocket from his mother’s house; and Saks and Neiman Marcus were right around the corner. On the way to the mall, he stopped and looked in the window of a jewelry store, where they were featuring small men’s rings set with star sapphires. He’d never considered a ring, but they had a certain look.
    “In here,” he said. “Just on a lark.”
    He paid two thousand dollars for a gold ring that perfectly fit his right pinkie. “My mother’s favorite color was blue,” he told her. He teared up again, wiped them away, and they mushed on to Saks.
    The men’s store was on the first level. He led her down to the first level—and there they found the most marvelous thigh-length leather jacket, smooth-finished with kangaroo-hide details, on sale, $1,120.
    He looked at it and said, “Oh my God, forty-long.” Her eyes were on him, and he said, reverently, “It’s exactly my size.”
    “Oh my God,” she said.

21
    W EATHER SAID IT was no big deal, just friends getting together for a beer and a little seafood, but she got to Lucas’s place early and spent three hours dusting and vacuuming, and made it smell like nobody lived there but forest elves and evergreens. She was also wearing the engagement ring.
    “Sort of stinky right now,” she said, “but when you cook up the wild rice and mushrooms the spices’ll make this place smell like . . .” She couldn’t think of anything. “Good,” she said. “You don’t have enough beer, by the way, and when you’re at the store, get a couple bottles of pinot noir—everybody drinks that, right? Something nice and buttery.”
    “Buttery,” he said.
    “Yes. Ask the clerk. Maybe three bottles. You better get some paper towels, and some regular napkins—you’re all out of those.”
    “Never had any,” he said.
    “What’d you use?”
    “Toilet paper,” he said.
    She put her fists on her hips. “I’m not exactly, precisely, in the right mood for humor, with the house being the wreck that it is. You wanna go to the store?”
     
    S LOAN HAD TRADED his usual brown suit and wing tips for khakis and a brown sweater with oxblood loafers. Del did his best to look neat, in jeans that had been ironed, brothel-creeper boots, and a blue fleece pullover. Their wives looked like cops’ wives: carefully dressed in sweaters and slacks, a little too chunky, with skeptical eyes.
    Lucas had set up the charcoal grill in the back, heaped it with charcoal and a half-pint of starter fluid, stood back, and touched it off; he and Del and Sloan all smiled at the foom the fluid made when it ignited, and the resulting fireball. When the charcoal was going, he put the iron pot on top and poured in enough water to cover the lobsters.
    “Teach the little fuckers to come back to life as lobsters,” Lucas said.
    “The only problem is, he’s too chicken to put them in. I’ve got to do that,” Weather said.
    “Damn things bite,” Lucas said. “Did we get some crackers?”
    “Those little round ones?” Del asked hopefully.
     
    T HEY TALKED ABOUT cases, but not the gravedigger case. They talked about medicine, but not Randy. Weather talked about a skull reconstruction that she was working toward, and how image-manipulation technology allowed her to image a skull three-dimensionally, work out the reconstruction to the millimeter, and fit all the bones together at the end. “Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way, and there’s some fudging, but it’s light-years past five years ago. . . .”
    Del’s wife had a story about another plastic surgeon who got into an instrument-throwing fit. “He’s usually a nice guy—must be something going on.”
    Weather knew him and pitched in. “He was talking about quitting surgery and going into investment banking—he got really deep in investments. I think it was pretty risky. He told me if I wanted to kick in a quarter-mil, he could make it a mil in a year. I