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a hint of the underlying masculinity. He had beautiful, thick hair, and wonderful shoulders, and his brown eyes were so expressive that when he concentrated on her, Carmel felt weak.
    But it was the hands that did it. And did it one afternoon in a nice lawyer bar with lots of plants in copper kettles, and antique dressers used as serving tables. There’d been three or four of them sitting around a table, different firms, no agenda, just gossip. He’d been laughing, with those great white teeth, and he’d looked deep into her a few times, all the way, she felt, to the bottom of her panty hose. But the main thing was, he’d been drinking something light and white, a California chardonnay, maybe, and he kept turning the wineglass in those strong fingers and Carmel had begun to vibrate. They’d been together two dozen times since, but always in social situations, and never too long.
    She thought, though, that he must know, somewhere in his soul. Now with this call . . .
    She took fifteen minutes with her makeup—made it invisible—and after applying the lightest touch of Chanel No. 7, she went down to the parking garage and climbed into the Jaguar.
    She forgot all about her resolution to stay away. Hale Allen needed her.

FOUR

    Lucas felt light: psychologically light . Nothing left to lose.
    He hadn’t spoken seriously with a woman since his breakup with Marcy Sherrill. And he felt good: he’d been working out, shooting some hoops, running through the neighborhood, though he could feel it in his knees if he did more than five miles. Age coming on . . .
    Money in the bank. All bills paid. The job under control, except for the Cultural Commission. Even that had a calming effect on him. Like a boring concert, where the music never changed, the commission gave him three hours a week in which he had to sit still, his brain in neutral, his motor idling. He couldn’t get away with sleeping during the meetings, but he’d managed to catch up on his reading.
    Earlier in the year, before the Forty Days and Forty Nights, he’d felt himself on shaky ground, poised between sanity and another bout of depression. Marcy Sherrill had changed that, at least. He felt as good as he could remember, if somewhat detached, disengaged, floating. His oldest childhood friend, a nun who was also a professor at St.
    Anne’s College, had gone on a summer mission to Guatemala, giving thanks for a successful recovery from a terrible beating; half of his friends were on vacation. Crime, improbably, was down across the board.
    And it was summer: a good one.
    Lucas had been working four days a week, spending the three-day weekends at his cabin in Wisconsin. Five years past, a North Woods neighbor, a flat-nosed guy from Chicago, had stocked a pond with largemouth bass. Now the pond was getting good. Every morning, early morning, Lucas would walk a half-mile over to the Chicago guy’s house, push an old green flat-bottomed johnboat into the water, and throw poppers and streamer flies at the lily pads until the sun got high. The weight of the world dissolved in the mirror flashes of the smooth black water, the smell of the summer pollen, hot in the sun—the sun on his shoulders—and the stillness of the woods. B ARBARA A LLEN had been killed on a Thursday. Lucas tucked the memory of her sightless, upside-down body into a large mental file stuffed with similar images, and closed the file. On Thursday night, he left for the cabin. He missed Friday’s paper, but saw a Pioneer Press in a Hayward store window on Saturday morning: the main page one story was headlined “Husband Questioned in Heiress Slaying.”
    On Sunday, the Star-Tribune’s front-page piece started under a headline that said “Allen Murder Baffles Police” while the Pioneer Press went with “Allen Murder Puzzles Cops.” Lucas said to himself, “Uh-oh.”
    On Monday morning, he walked, whistling, into City Hall and bumped into Sherrill and Black. “You were gonna keep me