Invisible Prey

night fooling around, and when the first round was done, Lucas rolled over on his back, his chest slick with sweat, and Weather said, “That wasn’t so terrible.”
    “Yeah. I was fantasizing about Jesse Barth,” he joked. She swatted him on the stomach, not too hard, but he bounced and complained, “Ouch! You almost exploded one of my balls.”
    “You have an extra,” she said. “All we need is one.” She was trying for a second kid, worried that she might be too old, at forty-one.
    “Yeah, well, I’d like to keep both of them,” Lucas said, rubbing his stomach. “I think you left a mark.”
    She made a rude noise. “Crybaby.” Then, “Did you hear what Sam said today…?”
     
    A ND LATER, she asked, “What happened with Jesse Barth, anyway?”
    “It’s going to the grand jury. Virgil’s handling most of it.”
    “Mmm. Virgil,” Weather said, with a tone in her voice.
    “What about him?”
    “If I was going to fantasize during sex, which I’m not saying I’d do, Virgil would be a candidate,” she said.
    “Virgil? Flowers?”
    “He has a way about him,” Weather said. “And that little tiny butt.”
    Lucas was shocked. “He never…I mean, made a move or anything…”
    “On me?” she asked. “No, of course not. But…mmm.”
    “What?”
    “I wonder why? He never made a move? He doesn’t even flirt with me,” she said.
    “Probably because I carry a gun,” Lucas said.
    “Probably because I’m too old,” Weather said.
    “You’re not too old, believe me,” Lucas said. “I get the strange feeling that Virgil would fuck a snake, if he could get somebody to hold its head.”
    “Sort of reminds me of you, when you were his age,” she said.
    “You didn’t know me when I was his age.”
    “You can always pick out the guys who’d fuck a snake, whatever age they are,” Weather said.
    “That’s unfair.”
    “Mmm.”
     
    A MINUTE LATER, Lucas said, “Virgil thinks that going to Dakota County was a little…iffy.”
    “Politically corrupt, you mean,” Weather said.
    “Maybe,” Lucas admitted.
    “It is,” Weather said.
    “I mentioned to Virgil that I occasionally talked to Ruffe over at the Star Tribune.”
    She propped herself up on one arm. “You suggested that he call Ruffe?”
    “Not at all. That’d be improper,” Lucas said.
    “So what are the chances he’ll call?”
    “Knowing that fuckin’ Flowers, about ninety-six percent.”
    She dropped onto her back. “So you manipulated him into making the call, so the guy in Dakota County can’t bury the case.”
    “Can you manipulate somebody into something, if he knows that you’re manipulating him, and wants to be?” Lucas asked, rolling up on his side.
    “That’s a very feminine thought, Lucas. I’m proud of you,” Weather said.
    “Hey,” Lucas said, catching her hand and guiding it. “Feminine this.”

8
    A NOTHER GREAT DAY, blue sky, almost no wind, dew sparkling on the lawn, the neighbor’s sprinkler system cutting in. Sam loved the sprinkler system and could mimic its chi-chi-chi-chiiiii sound almost perfectly.
    Lucas got the paper off the porch, pulled it out of the plastic sack, and unrolled it. Nothing in the Star Tribune about Kline. Nothing at all by Ruffe. Had he misfired?
     
    L UCAS NEVER LIKED to get up early—though he had no problem staying up until dawn, or longer—but was out of the house at 6:30, nudging out of the driveway just behind Weather. Weather was doing a series of scar revisions on a burn case. The patient was in the hospital overnight to get some sodium numbers fixed, and was being waked as she left the driveway. The patient would be on the table by 7:30, the first of three operations she’d do before noon.
    Lucas, on the other hand, was going fishing. He took the truck north on Cretin to I-94, and turned into the rising sun; and watched it rise higher for a bit more than an hour as he drove past incoming rush-hour traffic, across the St. Croix, past cows and buffalo and small towns getting up. He left the interstate at Wisconsin Exit 52, continuing toward Chippewa, veering around the town and up the Chippewa River into Jim Falls.
    A retired Minneapolis homicide cop had a summer home just below the dam. He was traveling in Wyoming with his wife, but told Lucas where he’d hidden the keys for the boat. Lucas was on the river a little after eight, in the cop’s eighteen-foot Lund, working the trolling motor with his foot, casting the shoreline with a Billy Bait