And as they drove, he felt his awareness expanding; realized, with a tiny touch of distaste, that she probably smoked. There was the slightest odor of nicotine about her.

When they pulled into the driveway, his stomach began to clutch just as it had with the artist and the others. "Nice place from the outside, anyway," he said.

"Wait'll you see inside. They've done a beautiful treatment of the bathrooms."

She led the way to the front door, which was screened from the street by evergreens. The key opened the door, and they pushed in. The house was fully furnished, but the front room had the too-orderly feeling of long-prepared-for absence. The air was still and slightly musty.

"You want to wander around a minute?" Lewis looked up at him.

"Sure." He glanced at the kitchen, strolled through the front room, walked up three stairs to the bedroom level, looked in each room. When he came back down, she was clutching her purse strap in front of her, examining with some interest a crystal lamp on the fireplace mantel.

"How much are they asking?"

"A hundred and five."

He nodded and glanced toward the basement door at the edge of the kitchen.

"Is that the basement?"

"Yes, I believe so."

When she turned toward the door, he took the sock out of his pocket. She took another step toward the basement door. Swinging the sock like a mace, he slammed the Idaho baker into the back of her head, just above her left ear.

The blow knocked her off her feet and Vullion dropped on her back and slammed her again. This one was not like the bitch artist. She was an office worker with no strength in her arms. She moaned once, dazed, and he grabbed the hair on the crown of her head and wrenched her head straight back and shoved in the Kotex. He pulled on his gloves, took the tape from his side pocket, and quickly wrapped her head. As she finally began to struggle against him, he rolled her over, crossed her wrists, and taped them. She was beginning to recover, her eyes half-open now, and he dragged her up the stairs into the first bedroom and threw her on the bed. He taped her arms first, to the headboard, then her legs, apart, to the corner posts of the bed.

He was breathing hard but he could feel the erection pounding at his groin, the excitement building in his throat.

He stepped back and looked down at her. The knife, he thought. Hope there's a good one. He went down to look in the kitchen.

On the bed behind him, Jeannie Lewis moaned.

CHAPTER 4

The Twin Cities' horse track looks like a Greyhound bus station designed by a pastry chef. The fat cop, no architecture critic, liked it. He sat in the sun with a slice of pepperoni pizza in his lap, a Diet Pepsi in one hand and a portable radio in the other. He took the call on the portable just before the second race.

"Right now?"

"Right now." Even with the interference, the voice was unmistakable and ragged as a bread knife.

The fat cop looked at the thin one.

"Christ, the fuckin' chief. On the radio."

"His procedure is fucked." The thin cop was eating the last of a hot dog and had dribbled relish down the front of his sport coat. He brushed at it with an undersize napkin.

"He wants Davenport," said the fat one.

"Something must have happened," said the thin one. They were outside, on the deck. Lucas was on the blacktopped patio below, two sections over. He lazily sprawled over a wooden bench directly in front of the tote board and thirty feet from the dark soil of the track. A pretty woman in cowboy boots sat at the other end of the bench drinking beer from a plastic cup. The two cops went up the aisle to the top of the grandstand, down the staircase, and pushed through a small crowd at the base of the steps.

" Davenport? Lucas?"

Lucas turned, saw them, and smiled. "Hey. How're you doing? Day at the races, huh?"

"The chief wants to talk to you. Like right away." The fat cop hadn't thought of it until the last minute, but this could be hard to explain.

"They pulled the surveillance?" Lucas asked. His teeth were showing.

"You knew about it?" The fat cop lifted an eyebrow.

"For a while. But I didn't know why." He looked at them expectantly.

The thin cop shrugged. "We don't know either."

"Hey, fuck you, Dick…" Lucas stood up with his fists balled, and the thin cop took a step back.

"Honest to Christ, Lucas, we don't know," said the fat one. "It was all hush-hush."

Lucas turned and looked at him. "He said right now?"

"He said right now. And he sounded like he meant it."

Lucas' eyes defocused and he turned toward the track, staring sightlessly across the oval to the six-furlong starting gate. The jockeys were pressing their horses toward the gate and the crowd was starting to drift down the patio to the finish line.

"It's the maddog killer," Lucas said after a moment.

"Yeah," said the fat cop. "It could be."

"Has to be. Goddammit, I don't want that." He thought about it for another few seconds and then suddenly smiled. "You guys got horses for this race?"

The fat cop looked vaguely uneasy. "Uh, I got two bucks on Skybright Avenger."

"Jesus Christ, Bucky," Lucas said in exasperation, "you're risking two dollars to get back two dollars and forty cents if she wins. And she won't."

"Well, I dunno…"

"If you don't know how to play…" Lucas shook his head. "Look, go put ten bucks on Pembroke Dancer. To win."

The two cops looked at each other.

"Really?" said the thin one. "This is a maiden, you can't know…"

"Hey. It's up to you, if you want to bet. And I'm staying for the race."

The two internal-affairs cops looked at each other, looked back at Lucas, then turned and hurried inside to the nearest betting windows. The thin one bet ten dollars. The fat one hesitated, staring into his wallet, licked his lips, took out three tens, licked his lips again, and pushed them across the counter. "Thirty on Pembroke Dancer," he said. "To win."

Lucas was sprawled on the bench again and had started a conversation with the woman in the cowboy boots. When the surveillance cops got back, he moved down toward her but turned to the cops.

"You bet?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Don't look so nervous, Bucky. It's perfectly legal."

"Yeah, yeah. It ain't that."

"Have you got a horse?" The woman in the cowboy boots leaned forward and looked down the bench at Lucas. She had violet eyes.

"Just a guess," Lucas said lazily.

"Is this, like, a private guess?"

"We've all got a couple of bucks on Pembroke Dancer," Lucas said.

The woman with the violet eyes had a Racing Form on the bench beside her, but instead of looking at it, she looked up at the sky and her lips moved silently and then she turned her head and said, "She had a terrific workout at six furlongs. The track was listed as fast but it probably wasn't that good."

"Hmm," said Lucas.

She looked at the tote board for a few seconds and said, "Excuse me, I gotta go powder my nose."

She left, hurrying. The fat cop was still licking his lips and watching the tote board. The odds on Pembroke Dancer were twenty to one. Three other horses, Stripper's Colors, Skybright Avenger, and Tonite Delite, had strong races in the past three weeks. Pembroke Dancer had been shipped in from Arkansas two weeks earlier. In her first race she finished sixth.

"What's the story on this horse?" asked the fat cop.

"A tip from a friend." Lucas gestured over his shoulder with his thumb, up toward the press box. "One of the handicappers got a call from Vegas. Guy walked into a horse parlor a half-hour ago and bet ten thousand on Pembroke Dancer to win. Somebody knows something."

"Jesus. So why'd he lose his last race so bad?"