"One: We took out Bluebird and cleared the only killings on our turf. Two: We got Hood with Lily's help. Three: We broke the names out of Liss and damn near nailed the Crows at their apartment. That's all good."

"But?" Lily asked.

"Something's going to happen," Daniel said, turning back toward the group around his desk. "And it'll happen here. I feel it in my bones."

"Maybe the Crows'11 call it off for a while, cool out," Lucas suggested. "Maybe they'll figure that if they lie low, the heat'll die down, give them a break."

Daniel shook his head. "No. The tempo's wrong," he said. "This has been a planned progression. They kill two people to establish a philosophical basis, then Andretti to grab major headlines, then the judge and the attorney gen-eral, major federal and state law officials. The next act is going to be something big. It won't get smaller."

Anderson arrived as Daniel was talking. He took a chair and nodded to Lucas and Lily.

"Got something?" Daniel asked.

Anderson cleared his throat. "It ain't good," he said.

South Dakota authorities had located Shadow Love's driver's license. The license showed an address at Standing Rock. Standing Rock cops said he hadn't lived there for years. They had no idea where he was. The news from the National Crime Information Center was both bad and good: there was plenty of information on Shadow Love, and it was all frightening. Most of it came from California, where he'd served two years on an assault charge.

"Two years? Must have been a hell of an assault," Lily said.

"Yeah. There was a race fight outside a bar. Shadow Love took some guy down and put the boot to him. Damn near kicked him to death."

"How about here in Minnesota?" Daniel asked. "He grew up here?"

"Yeah. Went to Central. We've got Dick Danfrey over at the school board now, looking through their records. He should be getting back anytime. We're looking for addresses, friends, attorneys, anything that might make a connection."

"Is he a psycho? Shadow Love?" asked Lucas.

"The California people did a pretty thorough psychiatric evaluation on him," Anderson said, shuffling through his papers. "They're going to fax the records to us. There were indications of schizophrenia. They say he talked to invisible friends and sometimes invisible animals. And the prison shrink said the other inmates were scared of him. Even the guards. And this was in a hard-core California prison."

"Jesus," Lucas said.

"We'll have a whole file on him later this afternoon," An- derson said. "Pictures, prints, everything. Pretty recent too. Last five years, anyway."

There was nothing on the Crows. "Zilch," Anderson said.

"Nothing?"

"Well, Larry's heard of them and he knows some stuff. Mostly rumors, or legend. Nothing that would track them."

"Where is Larry?" asked Daniel, looking around.

Sloan shrugged. "He's been pretty down in the mouth since that business with the Liss kid, and us putting the money on the street."

"What the fuck, he think we're playing tic-tac-toe or something?" Daniel asked angrily.

Sloan shrugged again and Lucas asked Anderson, "What about the feebs and the fingerprints? What about the truck?"

"The FBI's still running the prints, but they say if they're old… it could take a while. The truck has different plates front and back. When we checked, the plates were supposedly lost off trucks out in South Dakota. There was no theft report, because the owners thought they'd just bounced off. So we got more prints, but no IDs."

"What you're telling us is, we've probably got them in the system, pictures and all, but we don't have any way to figure out which ones they are?" Daniel asked.

"That's about it," said Anderson. "The feebs are giving top priority to picking out the prints…"

"Maybe you could check with State Vital Records. Look for a birth certificate on Shadow Love, see who the father is, if one is listed," Lucas suggested.

"I'll do that," Anderson said. He made a note on a file cover.

"What else?" asked Daniel. The question met with silence. "Okay. Now. Something's going to happen. It's given me the creeps. We gotta get these motherfuckers. Today. Tomorrow. God damn it. And when you see Larry, tell him I want his ass in here for these meetings."

Two kids found Hart's body. They were playing on the hillside in the late-afternoon shadows when they saw him, crumpled in the weeds. For a few seconds, the older of the two thought it was a bum; but the lump was so unmoving, so awkwardly piled on itself without regard to tendon or muscle strain that even the younger one quickly realized that it must be death.

They looked at the body for a moment, then the older boy said, "We better go get your mom to call the cops."

The younger boy stuck his thumb in his mouth; it was something he hadn't done for two years. When he realized what he was doing, he pulled his thumb out and thrust his hands in his pants pockets. The older one grabbed him by the shirt and tugged him up the hillside.

The first cop on the scene was a patrolman riding single in his squad. He stepped close enough to see the blood, leaned forward to feel the cold neck and backed away. If there was evidence around the body, he didn't want to destroy it.

Two Homicide cops arrived fifteen minutes later, but nobody had yet recognized Hart.

"Throat cut," one cop said. "Could be a Crow hit. That'd be bad. Look at his clothes-decent clothes, the guy's got some bread."

The second cop, the same bespectacled investigator who'd caught the Benton murderer, eased Hart's billfold out of his hip pocket, stood up, opened it and looked at the driver's license behind the plastic window.

"Sweet bleedin' Jesus," he said aloud, his face suddenly ashen.

His partner, who was on his knees, looking at the side of Hart's head, looked up when he heard the tone of his voice. "What?"

"This is Larry Hart, the guy working with the special squad on the Indian killings."

His partner stood up and said, "Gimme the license." His voice was tight, choked. He took the license and carefully pinched a lock of Hart's hair and tugged on it, rolling the dead man's face just slightly. He compared it to the photo on the license.

"Aw, fuck," he said. "It's him."

Lily picked up the bedside phone and said hello. It was Daniel: "Lily, is Lucas there?"

"Lucas?" she said.

"Lily, don't dog me around, okay? We got big fuckin' trouble."

"Just a minute."

Lucas was in the shower. She pulled him out, and wet as a duck dog, he took the phone. "Daniel," Lily told him quietly.

"Yeah?" Lucas said.

"Larry Hart's been hit," Daniel said, his voice shaky. "He's dead. Throat cut."

"Sonofabitch," Lucas groaned.

"What?" Lily stood up. She was wearing a slip and nylons, and she watched Lucas while she groped for her dress.

"When did it happen?" he asked. As an aside to Lily he said, "Hart's been killed."

"We don't know shit," Daniel said. "A couple of kids found him on the hill above the river by the Franklin Avenue bridge, about an hour ago. He'd been dead for a while. The last time anybody talked to him was about noon. Sloan saw him down on Lake. Sloan's down there now, trying to backtrack him."

"All right, I'll get down there," Lucas said.

"Lucas, this isn't what I thought was coming. This is something else. I still think we're going to get hit big. Hart's personal and it makes me feel like shit, but something else is coming." Daniel had started quietly, but by the time he finished, his voice was rising and the words were tumbling out in anger.

"I hear you," Lucas said.

"Find it, God damn it. Stop it," Daniel roared.

In the car on the way down, Lily said, "Why did they call my room, looking for you?"

Lucas accelerated through a red light, then turned and looked at her in the dark. "Daniel knows. He probably knew five minutes after we got in bed. I told you he was smart; but he'll keep his mouth shut."