"I know exactly what you're saying," Cruz said.

"Wish Tate was here," Lane said. "He was a good ol" boy."

Cruz looked at her watch: "Goddamnit, time is really crawling."

Chapter 22

Lucas saw the cops standing at the back of the yard in the headlights of their own cars, the spinners on the car roof flicking scarlet light into the treetops at the back of the lot. A man and a woman stood with the cops, and they were all looking down into Swede Hollow, and then one of the cops started down.

Lucas parked and got out of the car and hurried toward the group, and the uniformed cop looked at him and held out a hand, and Lucas called, "Davenport, BCA."

The cop nodded and said, "Hey, Lucas," and Lucas recognized him but couldn't remember his name. Lucas looked at the woman standing next to the cop and recognized her as Juliet Briar, and he asked, "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I live here," she said.

"You live here?" Lucas looked from her to the cop, who asked, "What's going on?"

Briar asked, "Are you Lucas Davenport? Letty's dad?"

"What?" the cop asked.

Lucas said, "Where's Letty?"

Briar shook her head. "I haven't seen her. Is she coming?"

As they were talking, the cop below had skidded down the slope to the tree line and disappeared into the trees. Now he called back up, "Get an ambulance. Get an ambulance. Tell them to hurry."

The cop said to Lucas, "Keep an eye on them," and stepped away and called for an ambulance.

"What happened?" Lucas asked Briar.

"Randy was messing around and his chair went over the edge," she said, looking at the man with her, rather than at Lucas.

The guy nodded and then shrugged.

"Is that what happened?" Lucas asked him.

Ranch turned hollow yellow eyes to Lucas and opened his mouth, and then said, "I can't remember."

"You can't remember? It happened one minute ago," said the uniform cop, as he stepped back to them. Regions Hospital was just down the hill, and they heard a siren start.

"Uh, Randy and Ranch-this is Ranch-had been partying pretty-hard," Briar said.

"On what?" Lucas asked.

"Maybe ' a little amp," Briar said.

"A little? Or a lot?" the cop asked.

"Three zippies," she said.

Enough to kill the average pony Lucas thought. "What about you?" the cop asked her.

"They don't allow me. If I smoke, I can't work." She looked at Lucas. "Randy was going to take Letty and do stuff to her."

"Yeah? Did she know that?" Lucas asked.

"I think so," Briar said. "We mostly talked about my situation."

"Who's Letty?" the cop asked. "What's your situation?"

Lucas shook his head: "This is really screwed up. Letty's my daughter. I don't know where the hell she is…" He looked at Briar, then at Ranch. "If she's hurt'"

Briar stepped away from him.

The ambulance pulled into the yard, its headlights sweeping across them, as the second cop, the one who'd gone down the hill, climbed back using his hands as well as his feet to keep his balance. Red-faced and out of breath, he said, "He's alive, but his head looks funny. He might have broken his neck."

One of the paramedics walked over from the ambulance and looked over the edge. "Holy cripes," she said. "Maybe we ought to come up from the bottom."

The second cop shook his head. "He's less than halfway down, and it's even steeper below him. Gotta hurry, guys, he's hurt."

The paramedics got a lightweight carry stretcher, a backboard, a cervical extrication collar, and safety straps, and went over the edge with the second cop.

The St. Paul cop with Lucas asked, "What are we doing here?"

Lucas shook his head: "Not my case. We picked up Briar earlier today'"

He told the cop about the scene at the motel, and the cop listened to it all, and then said, "What about your daughter?"

"I'm looking for her. She was down at the convention, but she was supposed to be home hours ago."

Lucas looked at Briar again, but Briar said, "We haven't seen her. Honest. Not since day before last."

"How do you know her?" the cop asked. "How's she involved?"

"She's not," Lucas and Briar said simultaneously.

Briar said, "She works for a TV station. She found me downtown. She wanted to interview me."

Lucas said to the cop, "She was trying to do a story on young ' prostitutes. For Channel Three."

"Oh, yeah," the cop said. "I know her-the good-looking blond chick."

"She's fourteen," Lucas said.

The cop was unembarrassed: good-looking is good-looking. "You a young prostitute?" he asked Briar. "I'm just a kid," she said.

Ranch, naked except for his Jockey shorts, dug his hand in his pants, scratched himself and said: "Some pretty good pussy, though."

Lucas and the cop both turned to him, and Lucas asked, "What'd you say?"

"Pretty ' uh…"

"They raped me," Briar said. "Or, Ranch did. I think."

"You think?" the cop asked. "You're not sure?"

"Does it count if they do it in your butt?"

The cop rubbed his forehead and said, "Yeah, that counts." He said to Ranch, "Turn around." Ranch, head bobbing, turned around, and the cop cuffed him. "Hey, dude, that's pretty fuckin' ' rude."

Briar said, "Randy made him do it."

Lucas's phone rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket and checked the number: Letty.

"Where the fuck are you?" he snarled, without preamble.

"I'm at the Capitol," she said. "I didn't realize how late it was. I'm sorry-I'm going home now."

"You're at the Capitol?" He wasn't sure he believed her.

"Yeah. I did some tape on some political kids here. For the weekend. Frat boys for Obama."

Lucas felt as though he were strangling: "You get home. Get home. Goddamnit, Letty…"

"I'm going," she said meekly.

Too meekly, Lucas thought, but she'd hung up, and he wouldn't call her back in the presence of the St. Paul cop.

"That was her?" Briar asked brightly.

"Yeah. She's at the Capitol," Lucas said.

"Glad she's okay," Briar said.

The cop shook his head, but didn't press. He had enough problems, without picking at one that seemed to have solved itself. You could ruin a perfectly good evening, he believed, with one extra ill-placed question. He stepped away, got on his radio, and said, "We need another ambulance and we're gonna need a rape kit at Regions, better alert them…"

Down below, the paramedics were thrashing through the trees. The first cop, with Lucas, began talking to Briar about what had happened that evening, and Briar couldn't get through it-couldn't think of what to say, other than that they were partying and that Randy had been crazy in his wheelchair, and she told him about how Ranch had made the crank pipe. The cop asked, "Mind if we look inside?"

Briar said, "No, go ahead."

Lucas, who'd been looking down into the hollow, smiled to himself: there were a bunch of ill-considered words, he thought, though the cop could probably go in anyway. Now, there was no problem at all-he'd been invited.

"I heard that," he said to the cop, turning toward them, and the cop nodded to him. Lucas was looking right at Briar's back, and in the thin flickering lights from the house, saw what looked like stripes across her dress; but he recognized blood when he saw it.

"Hey…"

The cop picked up the tone and looked toward him. "Check her back," Lucas said. "She's bleeding." Briar started to weep, and sidled away from them. "He didn't mean nothing by it," she said. "He didn't mean nothing."