Eyes of Prey

better won’t tell us what she knows.”
     
    “I’d say twelve or thirteen of them are straight-out nutcases, and we didn’t want to bother you,” the dispatcher said, handing Lucas a stack of call slips. “I’ve marked those. Six ofthem wouldn’t identify themselves at all. You can judge for yourself, but they’re a waste of time . . . . There are a half-dozen you ought to get back to. People who knew the Bekkers or Armistead and say they might have a piece of information for you. None of them thought their information was particularly urgent.”
    “All right. Thanks.”
    “That last one, she said it was personal.”
    Lucas looked at it. Cassie Lasch.
    He thought about not calling. An easy way out, if you didn’t call for long enough. He went home and ate a microwave dinner, aware of the telephone out on the edge of his vision. He lasted an hour before he picked it up.
    “You didn’t call,” Cassie said.
    “I’m working. Give me a little time.”
    “How much time does it take to call? Where do you live?”
    “St. Paul.”
    “Why don’t I come over?” she asked.
    “Ah . . .” Lucas felt himself freeze for a moment, an impulse to push her away. He was looking at the kitchen table, piled with newspapers and unopened mail, books, some read, some not, a couple of unopened cereal boxes, a stack of unwashed bowls . . . .
    He wasn’t doing anything. He was barely alive.
    “You know where Mississippi River Boulevard is?”

CHAPTER
13
    Cassie was muscular and intense, and fought him, wrestling across the bed. When they were done, she lay facedown on the extra pillow, while he lay faceup, sweat evaporating from his chest, chilling him.
    “Jesus,” he said after a while. “That was all right. I was a little worried.”
    Her head turned. “About what?”
    “It’s been a while.”
    She propped herself up on one elbow. “Ah. A little depression?”
    “I guess,” he said, curiously ready to talk about it. He’d never talked about problems with Jennifer. “I had all the symptoms.”
    She crawled over him, reaching, switched on the bedside lamp. He winced and turned away from it.
    “Look here,” she said, showing her wrists to him. There were two whiter lines on the inside of each, parallel, transverse. Scars to be read as clearly as needle tracks.
    “What’s this shit?” he said. He took her wrists in his hands and stroked the scars with his thumbs.
    “What do they look like?”
    “Like you cut your wrists,” he said.
    She nodded. “You win the golden weenie. Fake suicide attempt—that’s what the shrinks say. Depression.”
    “The scars don’t look so fake,” he said.
    “I didn’t think so, either,” she said, pulling her wrists away. “Are there any cigarettes around here?”
    “No. I didn’t know you smoked.”
    “I don’t, except after sex,” she said.
    “Those were pretty heavy cuts. Tell me . . .”
    She sat up and pulled her knees under her chin, looking down at him. “This was five years ago. I was never in much danger. A lot of blood, and I had to go to counseling for a few months.”
    “What’s fake about that?” Lucas asked, rolling up on an elbow.
    “What the shrinks say is, I was living with this guy and he had a gun, and I knew where it was. And our apartment was on the seventh floor, I could have jumped. And I knew the guy was coming home pretty soon. So they say I really wanted to live and this was just an attempt to draw attention to my condition.”
    “But the cuts . . .”
    “Yeah. The shrinks are full of shit. They can tell you how to talk to someone else, how to deal with personal problems, but they don’t know what happens inside your head, unless it’s happened to them. I could have jumped out the window. I could have shot myself. But that’s not what I thought of. I had this, like . . .”
    “Fixation.”
    “Yeah. Exactly,” she said, smiling at him. “See, you know. The theater’s got a whole oral literature about killing yourself and knives are the way to do it. I fucked it up, did it all wrong—I should have cut myself lengthwise, or at the elbow, but I didn’t know that. I could have used little pieces of glass, you get a better cut that way, but I didn’t know that, either.”
    Lucas shuddered. “Glass. I saw that once. You don’t want to cut yourself with glass.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said wryly.
    “So you cut yourself . . . ?”
    “Yep. I just hacked and sat there and bled and