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For Lucas, theafternoon after Weather’s call went like most days since the Long Island firefight: alone, bored, reading, watching television, suppressing the impulse to whine. He had friends, but they worked, and he wasn’t feeling social.
He’d talked to Virgil every few days since the shootings, but Virgil had recovered, lived a hundred miles away, had a girlfriend, two toddlers, a dog, and horses, all of whom needed tending, and was chasing small-town criminals while writing a second novel and nervously awaiting the publication of his first.
Too busy to talk much.
Weather was usually home by three o’clock so they could eat dinner with the kids, or go out, but this day she wouldn’t be back until late. He needed her to break up the feeling of loneliness, and to bend his mind away from the depression that had come sniffing around.
A run would be the thing, he thought, bored with the TV. He’d push it. Challenge the pain.
He put on a sweat suit, locked the house, and jogged north on the bike path across the street. He’d made most of a mile before he got back, happier, sweating, but his bad leg was on fire.
He popped another Vicodin, showered, and was back in the TV room when the kids got home from school, with Ellen, their live-in housekeeper, who’d gone to fetch them.
Gabrielle, the youngest, came to say hello. She had a cello lesson in two hours and hadn’t practiced, so she was going to do that. Sam followed her in, chewing on a peanut butter sandwich, and said he was hooking up with his friend Jedediah to shoot baskets.
Lucas: “Shoot baskets down his basement on NBA 2K?”
“We’re talking a lot about plays and strategy,” Sam said, tap-dancing around the question. “Mrs. Clark asked if I wanted to stay for dinner and I said I’d ask you.”
Right. He was talking about playing NBA 2K down the Clarks’ basement. Lucas said Mrs. Clark was okay to feed him, and off he went. Gabrielle was sawing away on her cello in the family room, and Ellen would take her to practice and bring her back.
At five o’clock that afternoon, a bank of gunmetal clouds drifted in from the southwest, and his weather app said it would rain later in the day. Despite the pain in his leg, he decided to go for another walk, and did that, shambling along, stopping to chat with a neighbor and the neighbor’s German shepherd. He could smell the rain coming, but it hadn’t yet arrived.
He made himself a microwave dinner and went back to the couch, switching between a John Connolly novel and West Coast baseball. Gabrielle got home from her cello lesson and talked on her cell phone to an endless list of girlfriends while she allegedly did homework.
Sam got home and hit the refrigerator, saying that Mrs. Clark had served her famous zucchini fettuccine—he stuck his index finger down his throat to illustrate his opinion of the food—and went to work on his math before he headed to bed.
As Sam went up to his room, the Sands were being murdered five miles away.
—
Lucas was watchingCNN at ten o’clock when his phone rang: Edie Lamb, U.S. Marshal for the Minnesota District. Lucas looked at the phone screen and said, “Huh.”
Lamb only called in off-hours when she wanted something. She wouldn’t be calling to console him at ten o’clock at night, unless she was drunk. She did drink a bit, and sometimes, when sufficiently hammered, wanted to share her philosophical ideas about a life well spent.
He clicked on his phone and said, “Hey, Edie. What’s up?”
Lamb: “How are you feeling?”
Lucas, wary about whatever was coming: “I hurt a little all of the time. I hurt a lot some of the time.”
“Gotta be tough,” Lamb said, in the tone she used for insincerity. Lucas and Lamb liked each other; she’d replaced a marshal who didn’t like Lucas at all. “Could you work?”
“Not if it involves fighting someone,” Lucas said. So she wasn’t calling about a life well spent. “Or long-distance running.”
“How about brain work?”
“Nothing wrong with my brain, except that I’m still a cop,” Lucas said. “I’d rather not travel.... What happened?”
“A federal judge and two of his three children were murdered a couple of hours ago in St. Paul. Close enough that you might have heard the sirens. They live up on Crocus Circle.” Still using the present tense, for the newly dead. Everybody did it.
“Not that close,” Lucas said. Crocus Circle was a wealthy twig off the slightly less wealthy Crocus Hill. He’d muted the television; now he picked up the remote and killed it. “Which judge?”
“Alex Sand...”
“Ho... man. Good guy, as far as I know,” Lucas said. “Since you’re calling, I’d guess the killer’s on the loose?”
“Yes. There’s a lot of verbiage being thrown around, but reading between the lies and bullshit, I’d say they haven’t got a clue who did it.”
