“Sorry, I thought you'd been back there in the stacks. Call me Lucas or Luke,” he corrected her, preferring it to “officer.”

She smiled in response, a smile that brightened both the room and, momentarily, his spirits.

Lucas again stared at the file, which she now defensively clutched to her chest. He noticed the absence of a wedding band on her finger, although she obviously liked rings. He saw a sapphire on her right hand, a purple birthstone gem on her left hand.

“You're the Cherokee guy, aren't you? The one everybody calls”-she corrected herself before saying Redskin- “Stonecoat?”

He instinctively turned the scarred side of his face from the light and her view, realizing she'd edited her own words, that she'd almost called him Redskin. “That'd be me, yes, Redskin,” he bluntly replied. “It's a nickname given me by my dead partner in Dallas, long before the flaming scar, but it's a tag that has followed me here, used liberally in the training sessions among the other rookies, who were ten years my junior. But then, you already know all about that, don't you?”

“Only what I've heard, Mr. Lucas Stonecoat.”

She said it as if she'd heard many tall tales about him, but he'd already become defensive, first straightening in his chair and then standing up so he could loom over her. She was a head shorter, even if he did have a forced slouch. “Okay, Dr. Sanger, so you've found me. But don't get your hopes up.”

“What?”

He stepped past her, into the shadows, which made a mosaic of his face. “I don't intend to become your guinea pig, Doctor, so-”

“What the hell're you talking about?”

“I don't intend to play twenty questions with you about my childhood or my accident or anything else that piques your curiosity, any more than I-”

“Hey, hold on there, Stonecoat!” she shouted, realizing where the conversation was going. “All I know is the Cold Room has a new guy, that Arnold Feldman's gone, thank God.”

“You didn't like Feldman?”

“And where'd you learn such big words as 'piqued,' anyhow?” She still managed a smile for him, but this only made him more nervous with her.

“Then you're… Oh? Well…” Lucas began to babble, “Listen… listen, maybe I did jump the-”

“You're really not to worry about me head-hunting for you, officer. I have plenty of head cases upstairs to keep me busy for the rest of the year, trust me, so-”

He smiled now, almost laughed. “Is that right? Well, hey, maybe I was a little-” he attempted a lame apology, thinking how pretty her silver-blond hair and blue-fire eyes were.

“-so I didn't come slumming down here for additional patients,” she forged ahead. “Don't need 'em, don't want 'em. Got a precinct full of 'em. You got that, Lucas?” She slapped down the file, sending dust bunnies flying in every direction below his desk lamp, and before storming out, added, “Maybe you ought to begin on your new duty with a can of Pledge and a dust rag.”

“Hey, hey,” he shouted after her, taking a few steps in her direction, bumping metal shelves with shoulders too wide for the aisle, causing her to slow at the door. Their eyes met for a moment. Masking his thoughts, which were vaulting toward a pinnacle he'd not felt in years, he simply said, “You forgot something.”

“What?”

“You… you forgot to sign that stuff back in. Do you mind?”

She glared at him now, the pretty eyes no longer inviting or smiling, her teeth set like an angry fox terrier's. The effect was cute, pretty even, he thought, but he dared not tell her such thoughts.

She yanked the clipboard from his outstretched hand, snatched a pen from her ear, located the right line, and scrawled her name with a shaking fist. He paid no attention to either the date or the ID number attached to the file-precisely what his superior had told him he must do. He instead concentrated on her name-Meredyth Sanger- trying to determine the origin of the melodic name. French, maybe, or Cajun? he wondered as she disappeared through the door.

He could hear the pulse of the city outside the ground-level window. Houston was the largest city in the state, fourth largest in the nation, with a population of 1,657,504.

The city had experienced phenomenal growth since the days of its riverboat-landing beginnings when it was called Buffalo Bayou and a pair of brothers named Allen in August of 1836 decided to sink roots. Eventually the area was named after General Sam Houston. Today the metropolis was the financial and industrial hub of the state, with the largest seaports in all of the Southwest and the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. Along with nearby Galveston, all things Texas-and many an item distinctly other than Texan in origin-could be found here. But this morning's traffic report from Eyewitness News Team 2 in Houston exposed it as the cattle town it had always been when it showed film of traffic backed up for mile upon mile on the Interstate due to an overturned semi that had sent its cargo of live beef, mostly nervous longhorn steers, roaming freely about downtown Houston.

From a law enforcement perspective, Houston was to be congratulated. The largest reductions in homicide rates in the country for 1995 had been in New York and Houston, both having seen a near one-third decrease in killings in 1995, while Dallas, Texas, unfortunately, was seeing an increase in homicides.

All the same, Lucas found Houston somewhat dizzying. He had grown up in nearby Huntsville, Texas, and the changes and growth of Houston since he'd left as a young man to take academy training in Dallas was astounding. He hardly knew his way around the city anymore. But there remained a few neighborhood bars he was familiar with, places where a man could step back into the past, if only for the time it took to drink a beer. At the moment, the thought of a drink was almost too much to bear.

THREE

Lucas had moved the desk closer to the door, and he had spent the past hour dusting off everything within reach before he announced to himself and the walls, “I gotta get outta here… Talking to myself.”

He had always talked to himself, just as his paternal grandfather always did, but he'd always done so with an audience of at least one other. As a detective, it was one of his most useful tools; but here, like this, it felt creepy and strange. It was one thing to talk to yourself with your partner listening in and making additions, deletions, and suggestions, or filling up your morning with a self-directed brainstorm while other detectives threw paper wads to plead for an end to what they called his Indian gibberish; but it was quite another matter altogether to talk to yourself in a closed, sealed, silent space.

He closed and locked the door and “set” the childishly florid, yellow-and-red first-grade cardboard clock on the window, indicating he'd be back at one, confident that no brass or hard-ass detective would come down here for anything within the next month.

A single flight of stone steps, more convenient to take than the elevator, led up to ground level. One doctor had told him to go easy, another to push the envelope and get all the exercise he possibly could. He wondered which was right. He also, more importantly, wondered if Meredyth Sanger had used the stairs. He imagined her storming up them, her legs pumping. Dr. Sanger-he liked the sound of it as it slipped off his mental tongue. He decided to follow in her footsteps, but on opening the stairwell door, he found the steps extremely tight and straight up. With his stiff hip, which over time was only going to get worse, he chose to wait for the dinosaur of an elevator.

He supposed it was a miracle that on the first day of his new assignment, consigned here in the bowels of the precinct, he'd actually seen a woman, and a good-looking woman at that.

When the elevator finally bellowed its way from upstairs, located him in the basement and deposited him on the first floor, Lucas Stonecoat looked out on a sergeant's desk crowded with people, all vying for attention and demanding help of the lone sergeant behind the wrought-iron cage. The bars made Sergeant Kelton look the part of the criminal. Still, Stanley Kelton, a veteran, remained unfazed by the madness around him. So far, Kelton was the only person in the building who didn't wince or pretend business around Lucas, save for Dr. Sanger, and maybe that was why he liked Kelton, and perhaps could get to like the lady shrink. But that, he told himself, was a truly stupid thought-a friendship with a head-banger named Sanger?

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