Easy Prey

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, I will 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. But somebody 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 lights, 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 man—that 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 that—just 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.
    But, Lucas thought, time passes.
    Time passes. He closed his eyes in the dark. And saw the scarred face and teasing eyes of Jael Corbeau; the slightly plump, intense face of Catrin; the shoulders, the too-big nose, the feel of Weather.
    Time passes, but sometimes it beats the shit out of you as it goes.

20
    WEDNESDAY. THE FIFTH day of Alie’e Maison.
    Lucas checked on Marcy. Black was slumped in a visitor’s chair, and when he saw Lucas, got up. He was a little shaky, unshaven. “Nothing happening, but she started to wake up. She went back down, but they say she