After the news, he spent an hour cleaning and squaring his meticulously neat apartment. He usually watched television at night or rental movies on his VCR. That night he couldn't sit still. Eventually he went downtown, from bar to bar, cruising the crowds. He saw a James Dean-wannabe at a fashionable disco, a young man with long black hair and wide shoulders, a T-shirt under a black leather jacket, a cruel smile. He was talking to a girl in a short white dress that showed her legs all the way to her crotch and from the top down almost to her nipples.

You think he's dangerous, he thought of the woman, but it's all a charade. I'm the dangerous one. You don't even see me in my sport coat and necktie, but I'm the one. I'm the One.

It was time to begin again. Time to begin looking. The need would begin to work on him. He knew the pattern now. In ten days or two weeks, it would be unbearable.

So far he had taken a salesgirl, a housewife, a real-estate agent. How about one out of the pattern? One that would really mess with the cops' minds? A hooker, like in Dallas? No need to hurry, but it was a thought.

He was drifting along, deep in thought, when a voice called his name.

"Hey, Louie. Louie. Over here."

He turned. Bethany Jankalo, God help him. One of the associates. Tall, blonde, slightly buck-toothed. Loud. And, he'd been told, eminently available. She was on the arm of a professorial type, who stood tall, sucked a pipe, and looked at the maddog with disdain.

"We're going to the Melange opening," Jankalo brayed. She had a wide mouth and was wearing fluorescent pink lipstick. "Come on. It's a lot of laughs."

Jesus, he thought, and she's an attorney.

But he fell in with them, Jankalo running her mouth, her escort sucking his pipe, which appeared to be empty and made slurping sounds as he worked it. Together they walked down a block, to a gallery in a gray brick building. There was a small crowd on the walk outside. Jankalo led the way through, using her shoulders like a linebacker. Inside, middle-aged professionals carried plastic glasses of white wine through the gallery while staring blankly at the canvases that lined the eggshell-white walls.

"Who dropped the pizza?" Jankalo laughed as she looked at the first piece. Her escort winced. "What a bunch of shit."

Some of it was not.

The maddog did not know about art; wasn't interested in it. On the walls of his office, he had two duck prints, taken from the annual federal waterfowl stamps. He'd been told they were good investments.

But now his eyes were opened. Most of the work was, indeed, very bad. But Larson Deiree did riveting nudes posed against bizarre Situational backdrops. Their contorted bodies caught in explicitly sexual offerings, the recipients of the offers, men in overcoats and broadbrimmed hats and wing-tip shoes, their faces averted, shown as alienated strangers. Power transactions; the women as unequivocal prizes. The maddog was fascinated.

"Have a wine and a cracker, Louie," Jankalo said, handing him a glass of pale yellow fluid and a stack of poker-chip-size crackers.

"Sort of like 'I argued before the Supreme Court in my Living Bra,' huh?" she asked, looking at the Deiree painting behind him.

"I…" The maddog groped for words.

"You what?" Jankalo said. "You like that?"

"Well…"

"Louie, you're a pervert," she said, her voice so loud it was virtually a shout. The maddog glanced around. Nobody was paying any attention. "That's my kind of man."

"I like it. It makes an argument," the maddog said. He surprised himself. He didn't think in those terms.

"Oh, bullshit, Louie," Jankalo shouted. "He's just hanging some snatch out there to hype the sales."

The maddog turned away.

"Louie…"

He thought about killing her. All in an instant, he thought about it.

It would have a certain artistic spontaneity to it. It would, in a way, follow the maxim that he not establish a pattern, because it would not be calculated and planned. And it would be amusing. Jankalo, he didn't doubt, would largely cooperate, right up to the moment the knife went in. He felt a stirring in his groin.

"Louie, you can be such an asshole," Jankalo said, and walked away. She had said, Louie, you're a pervert… my kind of man. An offer? If so, he'd let it dangle too long. She was headed back to her professor. The maddog was not good in social situations. He took a bite of cracker and looked around, straight into the eyes of Carla Ruiz.

He looked away.

He did not want to catch her eye. The maddog believed that eye contact was telling: that she might look him in the eye and suddenly know. They had, after all, shared a considerable intimacy.

He maneuvered so that he could watch her from angles, past others. The cut on her forehead looked bad, the bruises going yellow. The maddog was still badly bruised himself, green streaks on his back and one arm.

Maybe he should come back on her.

No. That would violate too many rules. And the need to do her had passed.

But it was tempting; for revenge, if nothing else, like the farmgirl he'd blown off the horse. The thought of killing made him tingle, pulled at him, like a nicotine addict who had gone too long between cigarettes.

The need would grow. Better start doing research Monday. At the latest.

Jennifer Carey was staring at him in the dark again.

"What?" he asked.

"What, what?"

"You're staring at me."

"How do you know I'm staring? You're looking the other way," she said.

"I can feel it." Lucas lifted his head until he could see her. She was sitting up, looking down at him. The thin autumn blanket had fallen around her hips and the flickering candle gave her skin a warm pink glow.

"I'm thirty-three," she said.

"Oh, God," he groaned into his pillow.

"I'm taking a leave of absence from reporting. I'll work half-time, producing. Do some free-lance writing."

"You can starve that way," Lucas said.

"I've got money saved." Her voice was level, almost somber. "I've been working since I was twenty-one. I've got that fund from my folks. And I'll still be half-time with the station. I'll be okay."

"What's this about?"

"It's about the old biological clock," she said. "I've decided to have a baby."

Lucas didn't say anything, didn't move. She grinned. "Ah, the nervous bachelor, already scouting escape routes."

There was another long moment of silence. "That's not it," he said finally. "It's just kind of sudden. I mean, I really like you. Are you bailing out? Should I be asking who the lucky guy is?"

"Nope. See, I figured you might not be interested in cooperating with my little plan. On the other hand, from my point of view, it's not that often you meet a guy who is intelligent, physically acceptable, heterosexual, and available. I decided I'd have to take things in my own hands, if you know what I mean."

Lucas was on his back staring at the ceiling. Looking down at him, she saw his stomach muscles tighten, and his chest lifted off the bed as though he were levitating, his head coming up, eyes wide.

"Jennifer…"

"Yeah. I'm pregnant."

He flopped back on the pillow.

"Oh."

She laughed. "You can be one of the funniest men I know."

"Why is that?"

"I tried to figure out what you'd say when I told you. I thought of everything except 'Oh.'"

He sat up again, his face deeply serious. "We ought to get married. Like tomorrow. I can fix the blood tests-"

She laughed again. "Yo. Davenport. Wake up. I'm not getting married."

"What?"

"Just a few minutes ago you said you liked me, not loved me. For one thing. Besides, I don't want to marry you."