He came to, what might have been a half minute later, his hands over his head, his entire body electric with pain.
A woman said, a rough excitement riding her voice, “Look at this kid. Really. Look at this—”
He fainted again.
Lucas Davenport knew he was stinking the place up, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d snarled at his wife, growled at his daughter, snapped at his son, and probably would have punted the baby had she crossed his path.
Okay, he wouldn’t have kicked the baby.
He was out trying to run it off without much luck.
His problems were both strategic and tactical.
The strategic difficulty derived from a case the year before, when a madman’s body dump had been found down an abandoned cistern south of the Twin Cities. The killer had kidnapped a sheriff’s deputy and had been beating and raping her, and was about to kill her, when Lucas arrived. The madman had been killed in the ensuing fight. The deputy had eventually left the sheriff’s department and had moved to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, where she was working as an investigator.
Catrin Mattsson was doing all right. She was still screwed up and admitted it, but drugs and shrinks were moving her around to the place where she could live with herself. She’d become friends with his wife and daughter, and would occasionally drop around for dinner and a chat.
Lucas had taken it differently. He wasn’t bothered by the fact that the killer had died in the fight. He didn’t worry about the secret that he and Mattsson shared, about what exactly had happened down in that basement in the final half second of the confrontation.
He worried about the world. Everything seemed off-kilter. Everything. That was bad.
He’d once suffered through a clinical depression and had sworn he wouldn’t go through that again, not without drugs, or whatever else the docs said he had to do. Even then, depression was to be feared—and he could feel it sniffing around outside his door, looking for a way in.
He’d never been a particularly cheerful guy, but he’d done all right—he had an interesting job, a great family, good friends, even made a bundle of money a few years before, on a computer simulation system.
Which had nothing to do with depression.
William Styron’s book Darkness Visible, which he’d read while going through his own depression, had argued that depression is a terrible word for the affliction. Should be called something like mindstorm. Still, Lucas’s intuition told him that mindstorms didn’t just show up: they needed something to chew on.
His problem was that he’d looked a little too deeply into the souls of a lot of bad people; done what he could to track them down. He’d been largely successful, over the years, but there was apparently a never-ending line of assholes, who would continue to show up after he was long gone. He was beginning to feel helpless.
Not only helpless, but unhelped.
The bureaucrats at the BCA didn’t much like him. They didn’t mind his catching criminals, as long as it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience; as long as it didn’t shred their overtime budget. As long as nothing required them to go on TV and sweat and do tap dances.
Lucas had always simply dismissed bureaucrats. They were the guys who were supposed to fix overtime budgets and do tap dances and take the blame for the clusterfucks, because they were always sure to be there when credit was being taken.
No more. Now it was all about keeping your head down, while figuring ways to push the budget up. About not pissing anyone off. About, Hey, people get killed from time to time, that’s just the way of the world, let’s not bust a budget about it . . .
It was getting him down, because he made his living by hunting killers, and had always thought it was a righteous thing to do. Important, intelligent people were now saying, you know, not so much.
That was the strategic part of his problem.
? ? ?
TACTICALLY, A LAWYER named Park Raines was running legal rings around the BCA, and if he won out, a killer named Ben Merion was going to walk. Even more annoying, Raines was actually a pretty good guy, ethically sound, and he’d take it to the hoop right in your face and not go around whining about foul this and foul that.
Still, Lucas didn’t like being on the losing side in a murder case and the prospect was churning his gut.
Park Raines’s client, Ben Merion, lived in the town of Sunfish Lake, probably the richest plot of land, square foot for square foot, in Minnesota. On the last day of February, he’d hit his wife, Gloria Merion, on the head, with a carefully crafted club, and had then thrown her down the stairs in their $2.3 million lakeside home, where her head had rattled off the wooden railings—railings that fit the depressive fracture in her skull exactly perfectly.
The fall hadn’t quite killed her, though it had knocked her out, so Merion put his hand over her mouth and pinched off her nose until she stopped breathing.
Lucas’s group had run the investigation, and over a couple of months, he and his investigators determined that the Merion marriage was on the rocks; that Ben Merion had signed a prenup that said he’d get nothing in a divorce, but would inherit half if she predeceased him; that in case the house and ten million in stock wouldn’t work for him, he’d taken out a five-million-dollar insurance policy on her three months before she was murdered—or died, as Park Raines put it. As icing on the BCA’s cake, Merion had a girlfriend named Connie Sweat, or, when working at the Blue Diamond Cutter Gentleman’s Club, Honey Potts, and his wife had found out about it.
Two of Lucas’s investigators, Jenkins and Shrake, had further determined that Ben met Gloria while remodeling her house—he was a building contractor—and as Shrake put it, “He spent more time laying pipe than laying tile, if you catch my drift.”
“So what?” Lucas said.
“Well, that staircase had a custom set of balusters. Those are like the spokes in a railing—”