cash to go far.
Antsy was still around; and he might also be calling on the beauteous Heather, looking for a little cash money-another reason to keep the surveillance going.
So, here Lucas was, observing the often- semi- naked or even fully naked Mrs. Toms every day or two, walking around in front of her open windows, one of the least body- conscious women Lucas had ever done surveillance on, waiting for the family to show up.
He picked up the pregnancy in the third month, the baby bump under her upscale Pea in the Pod maternity clothing.
Nobody had ever seen a boyfriend-so Siggy had been back, Lucas thought, and they’d missed him.
In addition to a salesman’s natural affability, and his willingness to use wire cutters on slow- pay retail dealers, Siggy had been a genuine family man. He’d be back again.
Just not today.
Lucas looked down at the laptop, where he’d been wrestling with bureaucratic ratshit. He was late with the annual personnel evaluations, and some time- serving wretch, deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy, whose life work involved collecting evaluation forms, was torturing him with e- mails and phone messages.
And what, really, could he say about Del? Or about Virgil? Or about Jenkins and Shrake?
The questionnaire asked if Del presented himself in a manner that conformed to standards of good practice as outlined in Minnesota state regulations. In fact, the last time Lucas had seen Del, he’s been unshaven, hungover, three months late for a haircut, and was wearing torn jeans, worn sneaks, and a sweatshirt that said,
Virgil, Lucas knew, drove around the state pulling a boat and trailer and almost daily went fishing or hunting on state time, the better to focus investigative vibrations-a technique that seemed to work.
Jenkins and Shrake carried leather- wrapped saps. Jenkins called his the Hillary- Whacker, in case, he said, he should ever encounter the junior senator from New York.
Should all of this go into a file?
Lucas sighed, stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and looked out the window. The last of the snow was being washed out by the rain, and only a few hard lumps of ice remained behind the curbs, where the snowplow piles had been. If the rain continued, the ice would be gone by morning. On the other hand, if the temps had been ten degrees lower, the storm would have produced twenty inches of snow, instead of two inches of rain.
He didn’t need that. He was done with winter. Until the middle of February, it seemed that the snow would keep coming forever. Not much at one time, but an inch or two, every third day, enough that he had to fire up the snowblower and clear off the driveway before his wife drove on the snow and packed it down.
In mid- February, it got warm. Two rainy weeks in the forties and fifties, and the snow was gone. That’s when the end- of- winter blues got him. March was a tough month in the Cities. Dress warm, and the day got warm and you sweated. Dress cool, and the day turned cold, and you froze. Cars were rolling lumps of dirt, impossible to keep clean. Everybody was fat and slow, and crabby.
Lucas had been playing winter ball in a cops- and- bureaucrats league at the St. Paul YMCA. Some of the bureaucrats were wolverines-hesitate on a shot and they’d have two fingers up your nose and one hand in your shorts. So he was in shape, the theory being that you wouldn’t get the winter blues if you worked out a lot.
But that was theory, and mostly wrong. He needed the sun, and for more than a week in Cancun.
Lucas had jet- black hair salted with streaks of gray, and his face was pale with the winter. He had strong shoulders and a hawk’s beak nose, blue eyes, and a couple of notable scars on his face and neck. Traces of the job.
His paternal ancestors, somewhere back through the centuries, had paddled wild fur out of the North Woods, mink and beaver and otter and martin and fisher, across Superior and the lesser Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence. A bunch of mean Frenchmen; and finally one of them said, “Screw this Canadian bullshit,” and moved to the States.
When that happened was not exactly clear, but Lucas’s father had suggested that when it did, the immigrant might have had a case of blended whiskey on his shoulder…
His mother’s side was Irish and Welsh, and a bit of German; but Lucas wasn’t a genealogist and mostly didn’t care who’d done what back when.
He picked up the glasses and looked through the window across the street at Heather Toms, who was in the kitchen making a smoothie, and doing a little dance step at the same time. She’d done her exercises every day, and while she’d once smoked the occasional cigarette, or maybe a doobie-always on the balcony, so the first baby wouldn’t get secondhand smoke- she’d quit with the pregnancy.
Lucas quite approved of the way she was conducting herself, aside from the aiding and abetting of her murderous husband and drug psycho brother- in- law.
Nothing was going to happen, he thought. Time to go home…
Lucas lived ten minutes from Heather’s apartment, west across St. Paul’s Highland district, in a new house on Mississippi River Boulevard, which wasn’t a boulevard. He and his wife, Weather, had designed and built the home themselves, to fit them. They’d done well, he thought, with a rambling two- story structure and ample garage, of stone and cedar shingles, and climbing ivy stretching up the siding.
He’d been home for fifteen minutes, yawning, listening to the rain in the quiet of the house, picking through a copy of
He checked his watch: she was early. He ambled through the house and met her coming through the door carrying two grocery sacks. She looked around and asked, “Where is everybody?” meaning their toddler son and the live- in housekeeper. Their ward, Letty, was at school.
“Same place you were, I guess-went to the supermarket.'
'Well, poop,” Weather said. She plopped the bags down on the food- prep island. “We’re gonna wind up with about thirty bananas.” Lucas snuggled up behind her and kissed her on the neck and she relaxed back against him, hair damp from the supermarket parking lot. She smelled like woman- hair and Chanel. She wiggled her butt once for his benefit, and then gave him an elbow and said, “We’ve got to talk.”
“ Uh- oh.”
“I saw Alyssa today,” Weather said, turning around. She was a Finn, through and through. A surgeon, a small woman with pale watchful eyes who saw herself as Management, and Lucas as Labor; or possibly saw herself as a Carpenter, and Lucas as Raw Lumber. “Actually, I didn’t so much see her, as she came to see me when I was working out. About you.”
“Ah…” He shook his head. “Nothing new on her kid?”
“Nothing new-but it’s not that. Did you see the story about the murder in Minneapolis, night before last?”
“The bartender,” Lucas said. There’d been two murders in Minnesota that day. Since one of the victims had been young, blond and female, with large, firm breasts, the bartender had gotten short shrift from television, even though his had been the more interesting crime, in Lucas’s opinion, and the blonde had been inconveniently placed in Lake Superior.
“He was a Goth,” Weather said. “He ran with the same group as Frances. Alyssa says the Minneapolis cops don’t have a clue, but came to talk to her because of the similarity of the killings. She said there was so much blood with Frances-”
“We’re not sure about that,” Lucas said. He looked in the sack of groceries, saw the white pastry bag, peeked inside. Cinnamon rolls. The small, tasty, piecrust kind. He took one out and popped it in his mouth. “Could have been a little bit of blood, but widely smeared.”
