Naked Prey

to sleep. Sleep was unlikely: He’d been feeling down for a month or more, anddepression was the enemy of decent sleep. The marriage was fine, the new kid was great. Nothing to do with that—his sense of the blue was a chemical thing, but the chemicals made sleep impossible. If he went down further, he’d check with the doc. On the other hand, it might just be the winter, which this year had started in October.
    He heard the shower start, and then Ellen, the housekeeper, banging down the stairs with the kid. The kid was named Samuel Kalle Davenport, the “Kalle” a Finnish name, for Weather’s late father. The housekeeper was a fifty-five-year-old ex-nurse who loved kids. The four of them together had a deal they all liked.
    After a few minutes, the shower stopped and Lucas sat up. He was awake now, no point in struggling against it. He climbed out of bed, remembered the clock, picked it up and turned off the alarm. As he did, Weather came out of the bathroom, rubbing her hair with a towel.
    “You getting up?” she asked cheerfully. She was a small woman, and an early bird. She liked nothing better than getting up before the sun, to begin the hunt for worms.
    “Uh,” Lucas said. He started for the bathroom, but she smelled so warm and good as he passed her that he slipped an arm around her waist and picked her up and gave her a warm sucking kiss on the tummy below her navel.
    She squirmed around, laughed once, and then said, severely, “Put me down, you oaf.”
    “Mad rapist attacks naked housewife in bedroom.” Lucas carried her back to the bed and threw her on it and landed on the bed next to her, hands running around where they shouldn’t be.
    “Get away from me,” she said, rolling away. “Come on, Lucas, goddamnit.” She whacked him on the ear, and it hurt, and he collapsed on the bed. She got out and startedscrubbing at her hair again and said, “You men get hard-ons in the morning and you’re so proud of them, just swishing around in the air. You can’t help showing off.”
    “Try not to use the word swish,” Lucas said.
    “Sex in the morning is for teenagers, and we aren’t,” she said.
    Lucas rolled over on his stomach. “Now you’ve offended me.”
    “Offend this,” she said. She’d spun her towel into a whip, and snapped him on the ass with it. That hurt, too, more than the whack on the ear, and he rolled off the bed and said, “Arrgh, naked housewife attacks sleeping man.”
    Weather, laughing, backed away from him, rewinding the towel, said, “Sleeping man snapped in the balls with wet towel.”
    Then Ellen, the housekeeper, called from the stairs, “You guys up?”
    They both stopped in their tracks, and Weather whispered, “Well, you are. What do you want me to tell her?”
    W EATHER WAS A surgeon, and she was cutting on somebody almost every morning. This morning, she had three separate jobs, all at Regions, all involving burns—two separate skin grafts, and a scalp expansion on the head of a former electric lineman, trying to stretch what hair he had left over the burn scars he’d taken from a hot line.
    She was bustling around the kitchen, in full imperial surgeon mode, when Lucas finally made it down the stairs. Ellen had the kid in a high chair, and was pushing orange vegetable mush into his face.
    “I’ll be home by three o’clock, Ellen, but I’ll be out of touch from seven-thirty to at least ten,” Weather was saying. “If there’s a problem, you know what to do. The manfrom Harper’s is coming over this morning to look at the front steps . . . ”
    The phone rang, and they all looked at it. Maybe a canceled operation? Lucas picked it up: “Hello?”
    “Lucas? Rose Marie.” The new head of the state’s Department of Public Safety.
    “Uh-oh.”
    “You got that right. How soon can you get in?”
    “Fifteen minutes,” Lucas said. “What’s up?”
    “Tell you when you get here. Hurry. Oh—is Weather still there?”
    “Just getting ready to leave.”
    “Let me talk to her.”
    Lucas handed the phone to Weather and at the same time said, “Rose Marie. Something happened, I gotta run.”
    Weather took the phone, said, “Hello,” listened for a moment, and then said, “Yes, Lucas gave it to me. I think we’ll start tonight. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I don’t think we’ll skip any of it, I was listening to the Japanese flute last night . . . ”
    While they were talking, Lucas went to the front closet and got his overcoat and briefcase. He