2
She leaned back into her chair, and spread her empty hands wide, wide away from her body, draping them loosely over the ends of the arms – relaxed, open body-language signals for him to see. He, on the other hand, couldn't bring himself to do the same. Arms close in at his sides, backs of the fingers of his right hand running along the line of his jaw. His knees clamped together, hard. Couldn't help it.
God, he hated this – bug under a scope. He knew she'd notice.
So, he tried to change things up. Distract and delay. He let his eyes travel slowly down her shape again – studiously – her jaw, her long naked neck, her chest, where he could finally see her blouse snugged against her breasts; lingering there, then dropping his eyes slowly to her waist and her hips. Shapelier than he'd noticed before.
She hadn't said anything during that whole long look. Wasn't rattled, flustered, or pissed. He wondered what she'd be thinking, after all that?
Same open body language with her hands, neutral with the eyes. She was watching him now, no reaction.
This was gonna require something more, he thought.
"Maybe we should start?" she said.
"Uh-huh." Only half-listening. Planning.
Nothing happened, and Lucas rubbed the side of his jaw harder.
"Are you clear on the purpose of our meeting?" Lucas squirmed a bit in his chair, but then lifted his eyes to hers in a hard stare. Blue gray. Neutral.
"Just a formality. Departmental requirement when –-" stopped dead in his tracks for a moment. Then, "to return to work," he finished. She noticed the evasion. He couldn't say the words out loud.
Jules could almost feel him trembling inside, two feet away. Waves of heat rolled off him, touching the tips of her fingers – her hands arrayed like early-warning sensors there on the chair arms – between them.
No wonder. He'd had a really bad year already.
Wore it on himself like flashing neon lights.
When she'd read his file, secretly forwarded to her by his boss, Quentin Daniel, it'd become clear pretty quickly that Lucas was not the usual kind of cop. Something of a brawler, yes. Notes in his file suggested he didn't mind it at all, maybe even enjoyed a fight.
More concerning, over the past seven years, he'd accrued the highest number of officer-involved fatalities in the entire Minneapolis Police Department. Usually involved a gun. Sure, he'd been assigned to some of the worst of the worst of the city's fare: rapists, arsonists, gang-bangers, murderers, and then there'd been the recent string of serial killers, unparalleled in the city's modern history. But five dead?
It seemed Lucas had had this special knack for finding them – sadists, sexual deviants, psychotics, those who preyed on the unsuspecting, the unprepared. So, of course, whenever the dirtiest, ugliest, most gruesome crimes had washed up onto Daniel's desk, guess who they'd called in to solve them?
A steady diet of that would've made anyone nuts.
Over the years, Lucas had developed a large, loose network of informants, people he'd groomed like bonsai in a garden: dopers, prostitutes, thieves, criminals culled from all manner of scam artistry, barkeeps, drug-pushers. All like a collection of change in his pocket.
When things went down in town, he'd make his rounds. Sometimes they'd talk for money, sometimes because he'd squeezed them, sometimes because they'd owed him, and sometimes because he'd roughed them up enough and threatened them with worse.
Lucas wasn't afraid to use intimidation, a taste of his violence coming down to get their attention. He was big and quick, had a bad reputation as a brawler. He could flip into rage at a moment's notice, when it suited him. He used people like they used him.
He'd seen more than his fair share of dead people: kids, punks, dopers, hookers, innocents and guilty, civilians and cops. Except for the few people he cared about, it didn't seem to bother him much anymore. There were a few good people he could count on downtown. He wasn't above looking the other way for them, in the right situation.
His private life was just about as unusual.
Loved women and they liked him. Had trouble sticking to one.
He'd taken his long interest in history and had made it into a business, designing these intricate historical re-creations, on computers no less – games, sophisticated and highly lucrative as it turned out.
He'd made a fortune at it and then spent some of it on things that'd made him happy: a Porsche, expensive clothes, women, all kinds of gear and hardware. And on a cabin in the woods up on a lake in Wisconsin. Where he took himself when he needed to get away: when he was hurting from taking a beating; when he'd broken some rules; lost something or someone important.
More than a month now, he'd been up there alone – since the end of his last case.
And he was still this rattled.
"Maybe you can give me a run-down on this last case you worked, Lucas? Just wanna know if I have the facts right," she'd said.
The gray in his face, under the glow of his summer tan, went grayer. He slumped in his chair and felt like all the air had just been kicked out of his chest at once. And no amount of distract-and-delay was gonna help bring it back. His eyes stayed down.
Tired of it all. Just too damned tired of it all.