The maitre d' was a chubby man with a neatly clipped black mustache and a Las Vegas manner. "Hello, Weather," he said. His eyes shifted to Lucas' throat and refused to lift any higher. "Two? No smoking?"

"Yeah, two," Lucas said.

"A booth," said Weather.

When he left them with the menus, Weather leaned forward and muttered, "I forgot about Arlen. The maitre d'. He'd like to get me in bed. Not actually leave Mother and the Kids, you understand, just do a little Mm-hmm with the lady doctor, preferably in some place like Hurley, where we might not get caught."

"What are his chances?" Lucas asked.

"Zero," she said. "There's something about the Alfred Hitchcock profile that turns me off."

The salad came with a French dressing redolent of catsup, sprinkled with a handful of croutons.

"I remember the news stories when you left Minneapolis. Very strange, all those stories about a cop. A lot of people at the ER knew you, I guess. They were all pissed. It made an impression on me."

"I used to come in there quite a bit," Lucas said. "I'd have these street guys working for me, and they'd get messed up and not have anybody to call. I'd go over and try to fix them up."

"Why'd you leave? Tired of the bullshit?"

"No…" He found himself opening up, told her about the internal games played in the department.

And the lure of money: "When you're a cop, you're always running into rich assholes who treat you like some kind of servant. Guys who oughta be in jail, but they're driving around in Lexuses and Cadillacs and Mercedes," he said, toying with his wine. "People tell you, yeah, but you're doing a public service, blah blah blah, but after twenty years, you realize you wouldn't mind having a little money yourself. Nice house, nice car."

"You had a Porsche. You were famous for it."

"That was different. A rich guy has a Porsche, he does it because he's an asshole. A cop has a Porsche, it's like a comment on the assholes," he said. "Every cop in the department liked me driving a Porsche. It was like a fuck-you to the assholes."

"God, you have a rich ability to rationalize," she said, laughing at him. "Anyway, what're you doing now? Just consulting?"

"No, no. Actually, I write games. That's where I made my money. And I've started another little sideline that…"

"Games?"

"Yeah. I've done it for years, now I'm doing it full time."

"You mean like Monopoly?" she asked. She was interested.

"Like Dungeons and Dragons, and sometimes war games. They used to be mostly on paper, now it's mostly computers. I'm in a semipartnership with this college kid-he's a graduate student in computer science. I write the games and he programs them."

"And you can make a living at this?"

"Yeah. And now I've started writing simulation software for police crisis management, for training dispatch people. Most of that's computers, dispatch is. And you get in a crisis situation, the dispatchers are virtually running things for a while. This software lets them simulate it, and scores them. It's kind of taking off."

"If you're not careful, you could get rich," Weather said.

"I kind of am," Lucas said gloomily. "But goddamn, I'm bored. I don't miss the bullshit part of the PD, but I miss the movement."

And later, over walleye in beer batter:

"You can't hold together a heavy-duty relationship when you're in medical school and working to pay for it," Weather said. He enjoyed watching her work with her knife, taking the walleye apart. Like a surgeon. "Then a surgical residency kills you. You've got no time for anything. You sit there and think about men, but it's impossible. You can fool around, but if you get serious about somebody, you can get torn apart between the work and the relationship. So you find it's easiest, if you meet somebody you might love, to turn away. Turning away isn't that hard if you do it right away, when you first meet."

"Sounds lonely," Lucas said.

"Yeah, but you can tolerate it if you're working all the time and you're convinced that you're right. You keep thinking, if I can just clear away this last thing, if I can just make it through next Wednesday or next month or through the winter, then I can get my life going. But time passes. Sneaks past. And all of a sudden your life is rushing up on you."

"Ah… the old biological clock," Lucas said.

"Yeah. And it's not just ticking for women. Men get it just as bad."

"I know."

She rolled on: "How many men do you know who decided that life was passing them by, and they jumped out of their jobs or their marriages and tried to… escape, or something?"

"A few. More felt trapped but hung on," said Lucas.

"And got sadder and sadder."

"You're talking about me, I think," she said.

"I'm talking about everybody," Lucas said. "I'm talking about me."

After a carafe of wine: "Do you worry about the people you've killed?" She wasn't joking. No smile this time.

"They were hairballs, every one of them."

"I asked that wrong," she said. "What I meant to ask was, has killing people screwed up your head?"

He considered the question for a moment. "I don't know. I don't brood about them, if that's what you mean. I had a problem with depression a couple of years ago. The chief at the time…"

"Quentin Daniel," she said.

"Yeah. You know him?"

"I met him a couple of times. You were saying…"

"He thought I needed a shrink. But I decided I didn't need a shrink, I needed a philosopher. Someone who knows how the world works."

"An interesting idea," she said. "The problem isn't you, the problem is Being."

"My God, that does make me sound like an asshole."

"Carr seems like a decent sort," Lucas said.

"He is. Very decent," Weather agreed.

"Religious."

"Very. You want pie? They have key lime."

"I'll take coffee; I'm bloated," Lucas said.

Weather waved at the waitress, said, two coffees, and turned back to Lucas. "Are you a Catholic?"

"Everybody asks me that. I am, but I'm seriously lapsed," he said.

"So you won't be going to the Tuesday meetings, huh?"

"No."

"But you're going over tonight, to talk to Phil." She made it a statement.

"I really don't…"

"It's all over town," Weather said. "He's the main suspect."

"He's not," Lucas said with a touch of asperity.

"That's not what I heard," she said. "Or everybody else hears, for that matter."

"Jesus, that's just wrong," Lucas said, shaking his head.

"If you say so," she said.

"You don't believe me."

"Why should I? You're going to question him again tonight after Shelly gets out of the Tuesday service."

The coffee came and Lucas waited until the waitress was gone before he picked up the conversation. "Is there anything that everybody in town doesn't know?"

"Not much," Weather admitted. "There are sixty people working for the sheriff and only about four thousand people in town, in winter. You figure it out. And have you wondered why Shelly's going to Tuesday service when he should be questioning Phil?"

"I'm afraid to ask," Lucas said.

"Because he wants to see Jeanine Perkins. He and Jeanine have been screwing at motels in Hayward and Park Falls."

"And everybody in town knows?" Lucas asked.

"Not yet. But they will."

"Carr's married."

"Yup. His wife is mad," Weather said.

"Uh…"

"She has a severe psychological affliction. She can't stop doing housework."

"What?" He started to laugh.

"It's true," Weather said solemnly. "It's not funny, buster. She washes the floors and the walls and the blinds and the toilets and sinks and pipes and the washer and drier and the furnace. And then she washes all the clothes over and over. Once she washed her own hands so many times that she rubbed a part of the skin off and we had to treat her for burns."