"Jesus, I'm getting mugged," Lucas said. "What do you think you're doing, kid, whopping on your old man…?"

The phone rang. Lucas glanced at his wrist, but he'd taken his watch off. It was late, though, after midnight. Jennifer stepped down the hall to the phone. A second later, she was back.

"It's for you."

"Nobody knew I was here," Lucas said, puzzled.

"It's the shift commander, what's-his-name… Meany. Daniel told him to try here."

"I wonder what's going on?" Lucas padded down the hall to the phone, picked it up and said, "Davenport."

"This is Harry Meany," said an old man's voice. "The chief said to track you down and get your ass in here. He'll see you in his office in half an hour."

"What happened?"

"I don't know. Lester and Anderson are already here and Sloan's on his way."

"You've got nothing going?" Lucas asked.

"Not a thing," Meany said. "A 7-Eleven got knocked off over on University, but that's nothing new. Nobody hurt."

"Hmph." Lucas scratched his chin, considering. "All right, I'll be down."

Lucas hung up and stood with his hand on the phone, staring blankly at the picture hung above it, a hand-colored print of an English cottage. Jennifer said, "What?"

"I don't know. There's a meeting. Daniel, Lester, Anderson, Sloan. Me."

"Huh." She posed with her hands on her hips. "What are you working?"

"Not much," Lucas said. "We're still getting rumors about guns going out of here, but nothing we can pin down. There's been a lot of crack action. That's about it."

Jennifer nodded. She had been TV3's top street reporter for ten years. After Sarah had arrived, she'd taken a partial leave of absence and begun working as a producer. But the years on the street were still with her: she had both an eye and a taste for breaking news.

"You know what it sounds like?" she asked, a calculating look on her face. "It sounds like the team Daniel set up last year. The Maddog group."

"But there's nothing going on," Lucas said. He shook his head again and walked to the bathroom.

"You'll let me know?" she called after him.

"If I can."

Lucas suspected that early city fathers had built the Minneapolis City Hall as an elaborate practical joke on their progeny. A liverish pile of granite, it managed to be both hot in the summer and cold in winter. In the spring and fall, in the basement, where his office was, the walls sweated a substance that looked like tree sap. Another detective, a lapsed Catholic like Lucas, had suggested that they wait for a good bout of sweating, carefully crack his office wall in a likeness of Jesus and claim a holy stigmata.

"We could make a buck," he said enthusiastically.

"I'm not real big in the Church anymore," Lucas said dryly, "But I'd just as soon not be excommunicated."

"Chickenshit."

Lucas circled the building, dumped the Porsche in a cops-only space. The chief's corner office was lit. As he walked around the nose of the car and stepped onto the curb, a Chevy station wagon pulled up behind the Porsche and the driver tapped the horn. A moment later, Harrison Sloan climbed out of the wagon.

"What's happening?" Lucas asked.

Sloan shrugged. He was a thin man with soft brown puppy eyes and a thin mustache. He might have played an RAF fighter pilot in a World War II movie, a pilot named Dicky. He was wearing a sweatsuit and tennis shoes. "I don't know. I was asleep. Meany called and told me to get my ass down here."

"Same with me," Lucas said. "Big mystery."

As they pushed through the outer doors, Sloan asked, "How's the hand?"

Lucas looked down at the back of his hand and flexed it. The Maddog had broken several of the bones between his wrist and knuckles. When he squeezed hard, it still hurt. The doctors said it might always hurt. "Pretty good. The strength is back. I've been squeezing a rubber ball."

"Ten years ago, if you'd been hurt like that, you'd have been a cripple," Sloan said.

"Ten years ago I might have been quick enough to shoot the sonofabitch before he got to me," Lucas said.

City Hall was quiet, smelling of janitor's wax and disinfectant. The soles of their shoes made a rubbery flap-flap- flap as they walked down the dim hallways, and their voices rattled off the marble as they speculated about Daniel's call. Sloan thought the hurried meeting involved a political problem.

"That's why the rush in the middle of the night. They're trying to sort it out before the newspapers get it," he said.

"So why Lester and Anderson? Why bring Robbery-Homicide into it?"

"Huh." Sloan nibbled at his mustache. "I don't know."

"It's something else," said Lucas. "Somebody's dead."

The outer door of the chiefs office was open. Lucas and Sloan stepped inside and found Quentin Daniel in the dark outer office, poking at his secretary's desk. Daniel was a broad man with the open, affable face of a neighborhood butcher. Only his eyes, small, quick, probing, betrayed the brain behind the friendly face.

"Stealing paper clips?" Sloan asked.

"You can never find any goddamn matches when you need them, and nobody smokes anymore," Daniel grumbled. He was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type, but he looked alert and almost happy. "Come on in."

Frank Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, and slat-thin Harmon Anderson, a computer savant and Lester's assistant, were perched on side chairs opposite Daniel's desk. Lucas and Sloan took empty chairs and Daniel settled behind the desk.

"I've been on the phone all evening. Frank and Harmon have been here for most of it," Daniel told Lucas and Sloan. "There's been a killing in New York City. A commissioner of welfare. A little after five o'clock this evening, their time. He was a prize Italian named John Andretti. Either of you guys hear of him?"

Lucas and Sloan both shook their heads. "Nope," said Sloan. "Should we?"

"He's been in the Times quite a bit," said Daniel, with a shrug. "He was a businessman who was getting into politics. Had some different ideas about welfare… Anyway, he's got big family money. Construction, banking, all that. Went to Choate. Went to Harvard. Went to Yale Law. He had these great teeth and this great-looking old lady with great-looking tits and four great-looking kids and nobody in the family pushes dope or drinks too much or fucks anybody else's husband or wife, and they all go to church on Sunday. His old man had him set to run for Congress this fall and then maybe the Senate in four years. You know, the New York media were starting to call him the Italian John Kennedy…"

"So what happened?" Lucas asked.

"He got himself killed. In his office. There were three witnesses. This guy comes in, he's got a pistol. He backs everybody off, then steps around behind Andretti. Before anybody can say 'Boo,' this guy-he's an Indian, by the way-he grabs Andretti, pulls his head back and slits his throat with a weird-looking stone knife."

"Oh, fuck," said Lucas. Sloan was sitting in his chair with his mouth open. Anderson watched them in amusement, while Lester looked worried.

"That's exactly right," said Daniel. He leaned forward, took a cigar from a brand-new humidor, held it under his nose, sniffed, then put the cigar back in the humidor. " 'Oh, fuck.' The Indian also shot one of Andretti's aides, but he'll be okay."

Anderson picked up the story. "The Andretti family went berserk and started calling in debts. The governor, the mayor, everybody is getting in on the act." Anderson was wearing plaid pants, a striped shirt and shiny yellow-brown vinyl shoes. "The New York cops are running around like chickens with their heads cut off."

"Andretti was one of the best-connected guys in New York City," Daniel added. "He's got twenty brothers and sisters and cousins and his old man and his old lady. They got an ocean of money and two oceans of political clout. They want blood."