Night Prey

CHAPTER
11

Connell wanted to hear the interview with Lawrence, and to press the medical examiner on the Marcy Lane autopsy. Lucas let her go, looked at his watch. Weather would be leaving home in fifteen minutes; he couldn't make it before she left. He drove back to the Perkins where they'd met the squad, bought a paper, and ordered pancakes and coffee.

Junky Doog dominated the Strib' s front page: two stories, a feature and a harder piece. The hard story began, "A leading suspect in a series of midwestern sex slayings was arrested in Dakota County yesterday…" The feature said, "Junky Doog lived under a tree at a Dakota County landfill, and one by one cut off the fingers of his left hand, and the toes…"

"Good story." A pair of legs-nice legs-stopped by the table. Lucas looked up. A celebrity smiled down at him. He recognized her but couldn't immediately place her. "Jan Reed," she said. "With TV3? Could I join you for a cup?"

"Sure…" He waved at the seat opposite. "I can't tell you much."

"The camera guys said you were pretty good about us," Reed said.

Reed was older than most TV reporters, probably in her middle thirties, Lucas thought. Like all of the latest crop of on-camera newswomen, she was strikingly attractive, with large dark eyes, auburn hair falling to her shoulders, and just a hint of the fashionable overbite. Lucas had suggested to Weather that a surgeon was making a fortune somewhere, turning out TV anchors with bee-stung lips and overbites. Weather told him that would be unethical; the next day, though, she said she'd been watching, and there were far too many overbites on local television to be accounted for by simple jaw problems.

"Why is that?" she'd asked. She seemed really interested.

Lucas said, "You don't know?"

"No. I don't," she said. She looked at him skeptically. "You're gonna tell me it's something dirty?"

"It's because it makes guys think about blow jobs," Lucas said.

"You're lying to me," Weather said, one hand on her hip.

"Honest to God," Lucas said. "That's what it is."

"This society is out of luck," Weather said. "I'm sorry, but we're going down the tubes. Blow jobs."

Jan Reed sipped her coffee and said, "One of our sources says it's the serial killer. We saw Officer Connell there, of course, so it's a reasonable presumption. Will you confirm it?"

Lucas thought about it, then said, "Listen, I hate talking on the record. It gets me in trouble. I'll give you a little information, if you just lay it off on an unnamed source."

"Done," she said, and she stuck her hand out. Lucas shook it: her hand was soft, warm. She smiled, and that made him feel even warmer. She was attractive.

Lucas gave her two pieces of information: that the victim was female and white, and that investigators believed it was the work of the same man who killed Wannemaker.

"We already had most of that," she said gently. She was working him, trying to make him show off.

He didn't bite. "Well, what can I tell you," he said. "Another day in the life of a TV reporter, fruitlessly chasing down every possible scrap."

She laughed, a nice laugh, musical, and she said, "I understand you used to date a reporter."

"Yes. We have a daughter," Lucas said.

"That's serious."

"Well. It was," Lucas said. He took a sip of coffee. "Some time ago."

"I'm divorced myself," she said. "I never thought it would happen." She looked at her hands.

Lucas thought he ought to mention Weather, but he didn't. "You know, I recognized you right away-I thought you were anchoring."

"Yes-I will be. I've done a little already, but I only got here three months ago. They're rotating me through the shifts so I can see how things work, while I anchor on a fill-in basis. In another month, I'll start getting more anchor time."

"Smart. Get to know the place."

They chatted for a few more minutes, then Lucas glanced at his watch and said, "Damn. I've got to go," and slid out of the booth.

"Got a date?" She looked up at him, and he almost fell into her eyes.

"Sort of," Lucas said, trying to look somewhere else. "Listen, uh… see you around, huh?"

"No doubt," she said, sending him off with a bee-stung smile.

Weather had seen Lucas working at close range, as he broke a murder case in her small northern Wisconsin town. Lucas had seen Weather working as a coroner-doctors were scarce up north, and they took turns at the county coroner's job-but the only time he'd been around when she was working on a live patient, he'd been unconscious: he'd been the patient.

He had promised her he'd come and watch what she did, not thinking about it much. She'd become insistent, and they'd set the visit up a week earlier, before the Wannemaker killing. He could just squeeze it in, he thought.

He touched the scar on his throat, thinking about Weather. Most of the scar had been caused by a Swiss Army knife that she'd used to open him up; the rest came from a. 22 slug, fired by a little girl…

Lucas left his car in a parking ramp three blocks from University Hospitals and walked down through the cool morning, among the medical students in their short white coats, the staff doctors in their longer coats. A nurse named Jim showed Lucas the men's locker room, gave him a lock and key for a locker, and told him how to dress: "There're scrub suits in the bins, three different sizes. The shoe covers are down there in the bottom bin. The caps and masks are in those boxes. Take one of the shower cap types, and take a mask, but don't put it on yet. We'll show you how to tie it when you're ready… Take your billfold and watch and any valuables with you. Dr. Karkinnen'll be out in a minute."

Weather's eyes smiled at him when he stepped out of the locker room. He felt like an idiot in the scrub suit, like an impostor.

"How does it feel?" Weather asked.

"Strange. Cool," Lucas said.

"The girl who was killed… was it him?"

"Yes. Didn't get much out of it. A kid saw him, though. He's white, he probably snorts coke, he drives a truck."

"That's something."

"Not much," he said. He looked down the hall toward the double doors that led to the operating rooms. "Is your patient already doped up?"

"She's right there," Weather said, nodding.

Lucas looked to his left. A thin, carefully groomed blond woman and a tiny redheaded girl sat in a waiting area, the little girl looking up at the woman, talking intently. The girl's arms were bandaged to the shoulder. The woman's head was nodding, as if she were explaining something; the little girl's legs twisted and retwisted as they dangled off the chair. "I need to talk to them for a minute," Weather said.

Weather went down the hall. Lucas, still self-conscious about the scrub suit, hung back, drifting along behind her. He saw the girl when she spotted Weather; her face contorted with fear. Lucas, even more uncomfortable, slowed even more. Weather said something to the mother, then squatted and started talking to the girl. Lucas stepped closer, and the little girl looked up at him. He realized that she was weeping, soundlessly, but almost without control. She looked back at Weather. "You're going to hurt me again," she wailed.

"It'll be fine," Weather said quickly.

"Hurt's bad," the girl said, tears running down. "I don't want to get fixed anymore."

"Well, you've got to get better," Weather said, and as she reached out a finger to touch the girl's cheek, the dam burst, and the girl began to sob, clutching at her mother's dress with her bandaged arms like tree stumps.

"This won't hurt so bad today. Just a little pinch for the IV and that's all," Weather said, patting her. "And when you wake up, we'll give you a pill, and you'll be sleepy for a while."

"That's what you said last time," the girl wailed.

"You've got to get better, and we're almost done," Weather said. "Today, and one more day, and we should be finished." Weather stood and looked at the mother. "She hasn't eaten anything?"

"Not since nine o'clock," the woman said. Tears were running down her cheeks. "I've got to get out of here," she said desperately. "I can't stand this. Can we get going?"

"Sure," Weather said. "Come on, Lucy, take my hand."

Lucy slipped slowly out of the chair, took one of Weather's fingers. "Don't hurt me."

"We're gonna try really hard," Weather said. "You'll see."

Weather left the girl with the nurses and took Lucas along to an office where she started going through an inch-high stack of papers, checking them and signing. "Preop stuff," she said. "Who was the girl last night?"

"A teenager from out of state. From Worthington."

Weather looked up. "Pretty bad?"

"You'd have to see it to believe it."

"You sound a little pissed," she said.

"On this one, I am," he said. "This girl looked like… she looked like somebody who did her first communion last week."

The routine of the operation caught him: precise, but informal. Everybody in the room except Lucas and the anesthesiologist was female, and the anesthesiologist left for another operation as soon as the girl was down, leaving the job in the hands of a female anesthetist. The surgical team put him in a rectangular area along a wall and suggested that he stay there.

Weather and the surgical assistant worked well together, the assistant ready with the instruments almost before Weather asked for them. There was less blood than Lucas expected, but the smell of the cautery bothered him; burning blood…

Weather explained quickly what she was doing, expanding and spreading skin to cover the burns on the girl's arms. Weather ran the show with quick, tight directions, and there were no questions.

And she spoke to Lucas from time to time, distractedly, focusing on the work. "Her father was running a power line from a 220 outlet to a pump down by the lake using an extension cord. The connection where the two cords came together… started to pull apart. That's what they think. Lucy grabbed them to put them back together. They don't know exactly what she was doing, but there was a flash and she'd gotten hit on both arms, and around her back on her shoulder blades… We'll show you. We're doing skin grafts where we can, and in some places we're expanding the skin to cover."

After a while, talk around the table turned to a book about a love affair that was dominating the best-seller lists. About whether the lovers should have gone off together, destroying a marriage and a family.

"She was living a lie afterwards; she was hurting everyone," one of the nurses declared. "She should have gone."

"Right. And the family is wrecked and just because she has a fling doesn't mean she still doesn't love them."

"This was not exactly a fling."

In the background, music oozed from a portable radio tuned to an easy-listening station; on the table, under Weather's gloved hands and knife, Lucy bled.

They harvested skin from Lucy's thigh to cover a part of the wound. The skin harvester looked like a cross between an electric sander and a sod cutter.

"This looks like it's going to hurt," Lucas said finally. "Hurt a lot."

"Can't help it," Weather grunted, not looking up. "These are the worst, burns are. Skin won't regenerate, but you've got to cover the wounds to prevent infection. That means grafts and expansions… We put the temporary skin on because we couldn't get enough off her the first couple of times, but you can't leave the temporary stuff, she'll reject it."

"Maybe you should have told her it was going to hurt," Lucas said. "When you were talking to her outside."

Weather glanced up briefly, as though considering it, but shook her head as she continued to tack down the advanced skin on one of the expansions. "I didn't tell her it wouldn't hurt. The idea was to get her in here, quiet, with a minimum of resistance. Next time, I can tell her it's the last time."

"Will it be?"

"I hope so," Weather said. "We might need a touch-up if we get some rough scar development. Might have to release scar tissue. But the next one should be the last one for a while."

"Huh."

She looked at him, grave, quiet, over the top of her mask, her pink-stained fingers held in front of her, away from the girl's open wounds; the nurses were looking at him as well. "I don't do therapy," she said. "I do surgery. Sometimes you can't get around the pain. All you can do is fix them, and eventually the pain stops. That's the best I can do."

And later, when she was finished, they sat together in the surgeon's lounge for a few minutes and she asked, "What do you think?"

"Interesting. Impressive."

"Is that all." There was a tone in her voice.

"I've never seen you before as the commander in chief," he said. "You do it pretty well."

"Any objections?"

"Of course not."

She stood up. "You seemed disturbed. When you were watching me."

He looked down, shook his head. "It's pretty strong stuff. And it wasn't what I'd expected, the blood and the smell of the cautery and that skin harvester thing… It's kind of brutal."

"Sometimes it is," she said. "But you were most bothered about my attitude toward Lucy."

"I don't know…"

"I can't get involved," she said. "I have to turn off that part of me. I can like patients, and I like Lucy, but I can't afford to go into the operating room worrying that I'll hurt them, or wondering if I'm doing the right thing. I've worked that out in advance. If I didn't, I'd screw up in there."

"It did seem a little cold," he admitted.

"I wanted you to see that," she said. "Lucas, as part of my… surgeon persona, I guess you'd call it, I'm different. I have to make brutal decisions, and I do. And I run things. I run them very well."

"Well…"

"Let me finish. Since I moved down here, we've had some very good times in bed. We've had nice runs at night, and some fun going out and fooling around. But this is what I am, right here. What you saw."

Lucas sighed, and nodded. "I know that. And I admire you for it. Honest to God."

She smiled then, just a little. "Really?"

"Really. It's just that what you do… is so much harder than I thought."

Much harder, he thought again as he left the hospital.

In his world, or in Jan Reed's world, for that matter, very few things were perfectly clear: the best players were always figuring odds. Mistakes, stupidity, oversights, lies, and accidents were part of the routine. In Weather's world, those things were not routine; they were, in fact, virtually unforgivable.

The surgery was another thing. The blood hadn't bothered him, but he was bothered by that moment where the knife hovered above the uncut skin, as Weather made her last-minute decisions on how she would proceed. Cutting in hot blood was one thing; doing it in cold blood-doing it on a child, even for the child's own good-was something else. It took an intellectual toughness of an order that Lucas hadn't encountered on the street. Not outside a psychopath.

That was what she'd wanted him to see.

Was she trying to tell him something?