When he came into the office, three other women were clustered around her, talking.

“Did you hear, Louis?” One of the women in the cluster was speaking to him. Margaret Wilson was her name. She was an attorney who specialized in personal-injury law, and though she was not yet thirty, was rumored to be one of the best-paid attorneys in the office. She had hazel eyes, large breasts, and heavy thighs. She laughed too much, the maddog thought; actually, she frightened him a bit. He stopped.

“Hear what?” he asked.

“That gay guy they arrested, that they thought was the maddog killer? He’s not the one.”

“Yes. I saw it on the news last night. That’s too bad. I thought they had him,” the maddog said, struggling to keep his voice level. The police press conference, the portions he’d seen on TV3, had delighted him. He took another step toward his office.

“They say he can’t get it up,” said Wilson.

He stopped again, confused. “Pardon?”

“Channel Eight, Annie McGowan? The reporter with the short dark hair-bob like the ice skater What’s-her-name? She talked to somebody in the police. They say he’s impotent and that’s what’s driving him to do it,” she said. Was she taunting him? There seemed to be an element of challenge in her tone.

“Well, they were wrong about the homosexual . . .” the maddog started tentatively.

“It’s all that pop psychology,” the maddog’s secretary said scornfully. “Everybody else says he rapes them. If he can’t get it up, how does he . . . ?”

“They never found any semen,” said Wilson. “They think he uses something.”

All the women looked at each other, and the maddog said, “Well,” and went into his office and shut the door. He stood there, just for a second, suffused with rage. Impotence? Uses something? What were they talking about?

There was a burst of laughter from outside, and he knew they were laughing about him. Uses something. Probably like old Louis there, I wonder what Louis uses? they were saying. They didn’t know who he was, what he was; they didn’t know the power. And they were laughing at him.

He walked to his desk, dropped his briefcase, sat down, and stared at the duck print on the wall. Three mallards coming into a cattail swamp at dusk. The maddog stared at it without seeing it, the rage growing. There was another burst of laughter from beyond the door. If he’d had a pistol with him, he would have stepped into the hallway and killed them all.

He left the office at eleven-thirty and drove home to watch the noon news. He watched TV3 by preference, believing that what little dignity was allotted to news coverage by television could best be found there.

But he might have to change channels if this McGowan had special sources. He left his car in the driveway and hurried inside. He was a little early and had time to make a cup of hot soup before the news came on. He sat in the overstuffed chair in the living room sipping the salty hot concoction, and when the news came up, McGowan’s was the lead story. It was apparently a rehash of the night before, with tape of McGowan interviewing the homosexual on the steps of the county jail and later repeating the impotence story. Her pretty, clear face was intent with the seriousness of her information; as the camera closed in on her face for the last shot, the maddog felt himself stir, even as the anger began to rekindle. He controlled it, breathing hard, and punched off the television. Annie McGowan. Her face hung in the bright afterimage of the television screen. She was an interesting one. Better than the blonde on TV3.

The morning copy of the Star-Tribune was still on the kitchen table. He checked it again. There was a large story on the release of Smithe, but there was no reference to the impotence allegations.

Why would the police tell McGowan that he was impotent? They must know he was not. They must know that it was wrong. Could it be an attempt to draw him out? Something to deliberately anger him? But that was . . . crazy. They would do anything to avoid angering him. Wouldn’t they?

He went back to work, the anger still roiling his mind. There was a temptation to find Heather, to take her immediately. But not yet, he decided as he sat with his books and his yellow pads. He could feel the strength building, but it had not reached the urgency that guaranteed the kind of transcendent experience he had come to require. To kill Heather now was to strike at the cops, but it would do something . . . unpleasant to his need for her. It would be, he thought, premature, and therefore disappointing. He would wait.

The maddog worked through the weekend, feeling the need for the girl developing, blossoming within him.

He enjoyed himself. The office was empty on Saturday afternoon and Sunday, leaving him alone, as he preferred to be. And he’d found an interesting case. Since it would go to trial, he would not handle it, but the senior trial attorney had passed it down through the assignment system, asking for research.

The defendant was named Emil Gant. He had been harassing his ex-wife and her current boyfriends. He followed them, exchanged words with them, finally threatened violence. The threats were believable. Gant was on parole, having served thirty months of a forty-five-month prison term on a conviction of aggravated assault. The woman was worried.

The current charge came after Gant was caught in his ex-wife’s garage. The woman was in her house alone, at night. A neighbor saw Gant sneak in through an open door. The neighbor called the woman, the woman called 911, and the cops arrived in less than a minute. Gant was found hiding behind a car.

Once he would have been charged with lurking. That charge no longer existed. He couldn’t be charged with assault because he hadn’t assaulted anyone. He couldn’t be charged with breaking and entering, because he hadn’t broken into the garage. He was finally charged with trespassing.

Actually, the prosecutors didn’t much care what he was charged with. A conviction on any charge would send Gant back to Stillwater State Prison for the remaining fifteen months of his original forty-five-month term.

But the maddog, studying the state trespassing law, found a tidy little loophole. The law had been designed to deal with hunters who were trespassing on farms without permission, not with criminal harassment. Nobody wanted to arrest thousands of hunters every fall. Most of them were voters. So the trespass laws had some special provisions.

Most important, the trespasser had to be warned and given a chance to leave—and refuse, or substantially delay—before the act of trespass was complete. The maddog looked over the police reports. Nobody had said anything to the man before the cops arrived. He was never given a chance to leave.

The maddog smiled and started writing the brief. This would never go to trial: Gant had not completed the basic elements of the crime under Minnesota law. So he had been caught hiding in a private garage just before midnight? So what? Nobody told him to go away . . . .

The maddog left the brief on his secretary’s desk before he left the office Sunday afternoon. On Monday morning he happened to get on an elevator with the chief trial attorney and his assistant. They nodded to the maddog and turned their backs on him, watching the numbers change.

Halfway up the assistant cleared his throat. “Got something for you on that Gant case,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” Olson was a sharp dresser. Gray suits, paisley ties, big white teeth in an easy grin. “I thought I already put a stamp on that turkey and mailed him back to Stillwater.”

“Not quite, O wise one,” the assistant said. “I got to thinking about the state trespass law and came in over the weekend to look it up. Sure enough. There’s a provision in there . . .”

The assistant then related, paragraph by paragraph, the maddog’s research. Olson was laughing by the time they got to the skyway level and he slapped the assistant on the back and crowed, “God damn, Billy, I knew there was a reason I hired you.”