Elle raised an eyebrow. "Our boy is a famous games inventor. Didn't you know that?"

"No, I didn't," Lily said, looking at Lucas.

"He surely is," Elle said. "That's how he got rich."

"Are you rich?" Lily asked Lucas.

"No," Lucas said. He shook his head.

"He is, take my word for it," Elle said to Lily with a phony confidentiality. "He bought me a gold chain last year that has scandalized my entire wing of the residence."

"For a good German Catholic girl, I think the influence of the Irish is beginning to seep in," Lucas said.

"The Irish?"

"The blarney." Lucas turned to Lily and said in a stage whisper, "I'd never use a word like 'bullshit' around a nun."

They sat in a booth in the ice cream shop, Lucas and Lily side by side, Elle across the table. Elle ate a hot-fudge sun dae while Lily worked on a banana split. Lucas blew into a cup of coffee and thought about Lily's warm thigh next to his.

"So you're working on Andretti," Elle prompted them.

"There's some kind of conspiracy," Lily said.

"The Indian man who killed the people in Minneapolis, and the Indian man who killed Andretti?"

"Yeah," said Lucas. "Except we think that two different guys killed the people in Minneapolis. And now the judge in Oklahoma City…"

"I haven't heard…"

"Last night… I was wondering… what kind of group would we be dealing with? If there is a group."

"Religious," Elle said promptly.

"Religious?"

"There are few things in the world that can hold together a murder conspiracy. Hate by itself is not enough, because it's too unfocused and not intellectual enough. There has to be some positive energy, as it were. That usually comes from religion. It's difficult to be intellectual and murderous at the same time, without some complicated rationale."

"How about these groups that develop in prison?" asked Lily. "You know, a group of guys gets together and they start holding up armored cars…"

"… raising money for a cause. Which usually has some kind of quasi-religious doctrine behind it. Save the white race from mongrelization by blacks, Arabs, Jews, whatever. You see the same thing in the leftist radical groups and even the groups or pairs of psychotic killers you get from time to time. There's a religious aspect, there's a group feeling of oppression. Usually there's a messiah figure who tells the others that it's all right to kill. That it's necessary."

"One of my people in the Indian community said that Bluebird-"

"That was the man killed in Minneapolis?" Elle interrupted.

"Yeah. He said Bluebird was a man looking for religion."

"I'd say he found it," Elle said. She had been saving the maraschino cherry for last, and finally she ate it, savoring the sweetness.

"You know how they make maraschino cherries?" Lucas asked, covering his eyes with his hand as it disappeared.

"I don't want to hear," Elle said. She pointed her long spoon at Lucas' nose. "If there's a group doing these killings, there probably aren't more than a dozen people in it and that would be an extreme. More likely it's five or six. At the most."

"Six? Jesus," Lily blurted. "Excuse me, my language. But six?"

"What are the chances that it's three?" Lucas asked. "Bluebird and this guy in New York and the guy in Oklahoma?"

Elle tipped her head back and peered at the ceiling, calculating. "No. I don't think so, but then, who knows? But I have the sense… these men in New York and Oklahoma, they traveled some way to do the killings, if they came from here. If they know Bluebird. I have a sense that they were sent out… that they are on missions. Bluebird was apparently ready to die. That would be more typical of people who saw themselves as part of a process, rather than as a last chance to strike back."

"So there'll be more?"

"Yes. But there is a limit on size. There really is no such thing as a grand criminal conspiracy. Or at least no such thing as a secret one. I suppose Adolf Hitler and his henchmen were a grand criminal conspiracy, but they needed the collaboration of a nation to pull it off."

"So there'd probably be at least two or three more, and maybe six or eight," Lucas said. "Probably held together by some sort of religious mania."

"That's right," Elle said. "If you want to stop it, look for the preacher."

In the car going back to Lucas' office, Lily looked him over.

"I have the feeling I'm being looked over," Lucas said.

"You have interesting friends," Lily said.

He shrugged. "I'm a cop."

"You invent games and play them with nuns?"

"Hey, I'm a wild kind of guy." He looked at her over the top of his sunglasses, winked and turned back to the traffic.

"Oooh, Mr. Cool," she said. "It makes my thighs hot."

Lucas thought, Mine too. He glanced quickly at her and she turned away, a blush creeping up her neck. She knew what he was thinking, and she had been aware of him in the booth…

At home, Larry Hart wore cowboy boots, blue jeans and work shirts with string ties. The string ties always had a chunk of turquoise buried in a silver slide. He could have worn that outfit to work, with a jacket to complete it, but he never did. He wore brown suits, with neckties in shades of brown and gold, and brown wingtip shoes. In the dead of summer, with the temperatures climbing into the nineties, Hart would sweat through the tiny tinderbox apartments of his welfare clientele, always in a brown suit.

Lucas had once asked him why. Hart shrugged and said, "I like it." What he meant was, / have to.

Hart jammed himself into the cookie-cutter frame of a municipal executive. It never worked, as hard as he tried. There was no way a brown suit could disguise his heritage. He was broad-shouldered and powerfully built, with black eyes and gray-shot hair. He was Sioux. Hart had the biggest case load in Welfare. Some of his clients refused to talk to anyone else.

"Lucas, what's happenin', babe?" Hart asked. Lucas lounged in his office chair with his feet on the rim of a waste-basket, while Lily rolled back and forth, a few inches one way and then a few inches the other, in an office chair on casters. Hart stepped inside the tiny office and dropped his bulk on a corner of Lucas' desk.

"Larry Hart, Lily Rothenburg, NYPD," Lucas said, gesturing between them.

"Nice to meet you," Lily said, taking Hart in. "You've been out?"

"Yup. Down on Franklin…"

Hart had been working through Indian Country with the photos. He knew two of the men himself.

"Bear is down at Rosebud and so is Elk Walking," Hart said. "They're pretty tough, but they ain't crazy. I can't see them getting involved in anything like this."

"You didn't know anybody else in the pictures?" Lily asked.

"Not names, but I know some of the faces. There are a couple of guys I see down at the Indian Center. You were asking Anderson about one of them. I played basketball against him last year."

"Could we get the team rosters?"

"They're mostly pickup games," Hart said. "But if I ask around enough, I could probably find out who he is. There-are a couple more faces I've seen at powwows, at Upper Sioux and Flandreau, Sisseton, Rosebud, all over the landscape."

"All Sioux?" asked Lucas.

"I think all but one. Give me the pictures again, let's see…" Hart thumbed through the stack of photographs until he found the one he wanted. He poked a finger at a man's face. "This guy's Chippewa. I don't know his name, it's Jack something, maybe like Jack Bordeaux. I think he's from White Earth, but I'm not sure."

"So how do we find out about Lily's man?" Lucas asked.

"There're a couple of guys out in SoDak who'd probably know him. Deputies. I gave Daniel the names, he called them and they're driving down to Rapid City tonight. I'm catching a plane out at six o'clock. I should be in Rapid City by seven-thirty. I'll take the pictures along."