Naked Prey Read Free Page A

air. You can’t help showing off.”
    “Try not to use the word swish,” Lucas said.
    “Sex in the morning is for teenagers, and we aren’t,” she said.
    Lucas rolled over on his stomach. “Now you’ve offended me.”
    “Offend this,” she said. She’d spun her towel into a whip, and snapped him on the ass with it. That hurt, too, more than the whack on the ear, and he rolled off the bed and said, “Arrgh, naked housewife attacks sleeping man.”
    Weather, laughing, backed away from him, rewinding the towel, said, “Sleeping man snapped in the balls with wet towel.”
    Then Ellen, the housekeeper, called from the stairs, “You guys up?”
    They both stopped in their tracks, and Weather whispered, “Well, you are. What do you want me to tell her?”
    W EATHER WAS A surgeon, and she was cutting on somebody almost every morning. This morning, she had three separate jobs, all at Regions, all involving burns—two separate skin grafts, and a scalp expansion on the head of a former electric lineman, trying to stretch what hair he had left over the burn scars he’d taken from a hot line.
    She was bustling around the kitchen, in full imperial surgeon mode, when Lucas finally made it down the stairs. Ellen had the kid in a high chair, and was pushing orange vegetable mush into his face.
    “I’ll be home by three o’clock, Ellen, but I’ll be out of touch from seven-thirty to at least ten,” Weather was saying. “If there’s a problem, you know what to do. The manfrom Harper’s is coming over this morning to look at the front steps . . . ”
    The phone rang, and they all looked at it. Maybe a canceled operation? Lucas picked it up: “Hello?”
    “Lucas? Rose Marie.” The new head of the state’s Department of Public Safety.
    “Uh-oh.”
    “You got that right. How soon can you get in?”
    “Fifteen minutes,” Lucas said. “What’s up?”
    “Tell you when you get here. Hurry. Oh—is Weather still there?”
    “Just getting ready to leave.”
    “Let me talk to her.”
    Lucas handed the phone to Weather and at the same time said, “Rose Marie. Something happened, I gotta run.”
    Weather took the phone, said, “Hello,” listened for a moment, and then said, “Yes, Lucas gave it to me. I think we’ll start tonight. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I don’t think we’ll skip any of it, I was listening to the Japanese flute last night . . . ”
    While they were talking, Lucas went to the front closet and got his overcoat and briefcase. He took his .45 out of the briefcase and clipped it on his belt, and pulled the coat on, listening to Weather talk to his boss. Rose Marie subscribed to a theory that children became smarter if they were exposed to classical music as fetuses, continuing until they were, say, forty-five. She’d found a set of records made specifically for infants. Weather had swallowed the whole thing, and was about to start the program.
    “I’m going,” Lucas called to her, when he had his coat on.
    Weather said, “Wait, wait . . . ” and then, to the phone, “I’ve got to say good-bye to Lucas. Talk to you tonight.” She hung up and came over to Lucas and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the lips. “She said you’d be going out of town. So . . . ”
    “Oh, boy,” Lucas said. He kissed her again, and then went over and kissed Sam on the top of his head. “See you all.”
    R UNNING A FEW minutes later than the fifteen he’d promised, Lucas Davenport walked a long block down St. Paul’s Wabasha Street, toward the former store that housed the state Department of Public Safety. Lucas’s own office was a mile or so away, at the main Bureau of Criminal Apprehension office on University Avenue, so he’d had to find a space in one of the commercial parking garages. Around him, feather-like flakes of snow settled on the sidewalks, on the shoulders of passers-by, and drifted into the traffic, slowing and softening the usual hustle of the morning rush.
    L UCAS WAS A tall, athletic