"Yeah. Don't worry."

He was whistling on the way back to the office, caught himself, and caught himself again. Man, she was married. And it didn't sound like a bad marriage, either. But there was something between the two of them, between himself and a woman he hardly knew anymore, and it had a lot to do with sex. The thought might have brought him down, but it didn't. When he got back to his office, he found another Post-it note on the door: Find me. Marcy.

Sherrill was at her desk in Homicide. She didn't ask about the lunch. She said, "No Trick."

"What?"

"The motel manager said he checked out this morning. He's driving a ten-year old lime-green Caddy with a trunk full of golf clubs and one suitcase. We got a license number."

"A real license number?"

"Yeah. Illinois tag. I ran it, and it comes up under a different name, a guy named Robert Petty, but it's a ten-year-old lime-green Caddy. I called Petty, and he said he sold it two weeks ago, and the guy was supposed to change plates. I guess Trick never got around to it."

"Goddamnit," Lucas said. "You put the tag out?"

"Yeah. Pretty much all over the five-state. And I called Del, and he's looking around. The hotel manager said Trick didn't seem to be in a hurryhe checked out about ten minutes before the checkout deadline, and they talked about the Vikings for a while. So"

"He may still be around."

Sloan came in, asked, "Have you seen it?"

He held up a copy ofThe Star, with Alie'e on the front. She was standing in a dark, cavernous space, with fire or sparks flying behind her; she was wearing what looked like men's underpants and a short, torn T-shirt that left her midriff bare. In yellow, inch-high block letters, a headline read, "Alie'e: The Last Shoot."

"Holy shit," Sherrill breathed. She took it from Sloan, and flipped it open to the portfolio in the middle of the issue. Alie'e in a dress the color of froth on the Caribbean Sea, walking down what looked like a line of fire. Another shot of her in the shorts-and-T-shirt ensemble, but this time with one exposed and apparently rouged nipple, and behind her, a giant man in a welder's helmet.

And on the page opposite, a close-up facial shot of a woman Lucas wouldn't have recognized, except for the film he'd seen on television the night before, and the scars. "Is that" Sloan asked.

"Jael Corbeau," Lucas said.

"Looks different," Sloan said.

"Lots better," Lucas said.

She'd been caught full-face, at night. Although the photo had the flash ambience of a news shot, it was obviously done in a studio: Everything was perfect, poised, balanced, designed. Corbeau was looking back over a bare shoulder; a single strand of dark pearls looped around her neck and dropped out of the bottom of the photo. Her hair was cropped and she was not quite snarling at the camera; her lipstick looked dark, maybe purple.

"Hot," Sherrill said. "If I was inclined to do a little muff diving, I'd take either one of them."

"What kind of talk is that?" Sloan asked.

"The kind that turns me on," Lucas said, bumping Sherrill in the arm with his elbow.

"You're not the only one," Sherrill said. She tapped the lap of the giant welder in the photo of Alie'e, the photo with the rouged nipple.

Lucas looked closer. "Is that"

"Unless it's a bigger-than-usual jackknife," Sherrill said. "Like, way bigger than usual."

Nothing was happening. Cops came back shaking their heads, looking for something else to do. Every person that they could find who'd been at the party had been interviewed. Nobody used any dope, nobody knew where it was coming from. Nobody had seen Alie'e after midnight, only a few people could remember Lansing at all.

After an end-of-the-day meeting in Rose Marie Roux's office, Lucas headed home. He changed into a sweatshirt and shorts, ran for forty-five minutes through the quiet Highland Park area of St. Paul. Feeling virtuous. And back home, he picked up the phone to find a message from dispatch: Call Carl Knox.

"Carl," he said. "Lucas Davenport."

"I got two names for you. And I've squeezed as hard as I'm going toI'm already nervous enough."

"What're the names?"

"Curtis Logan, spelled just like it sounds. He says he's an artist and he used to work in one of the art museums. He started by selling coke and ecstasy and speed to a few of the patrons, and his name got around. In certain groups."

"Okay. Curtis Logan." Lucas noted it on a legal pad.

"And James Bee. That's B-E-E, like in bumble."

"What's he do?"

"Certified financial adviser. Hooks up with rich people through a company called RIO Accounting. Same thing as Logan, mostly handles fashion drugs. Ecstasy, speed."

"What are we talking about in sales? Every once in a while? Or big time?"

"I don't know exactlyI wasn't doing an investigation, I was looking for a connection. But I got the feeling they're semi-big-time. And very careful."

"I owe you," Lucas said.

"Yeah. You do. And for Christ's sakes, don't do anything that'll make them think of me, when you ask about them."

Neither of the two names was on the party list; that would have been too much to expect, anyway. But if they could get the two of them, they might be able to develop a daisy chain of peddlers-to-the-rich, and a name might still be found

Del was still working. Lucas dialed his cellular number and pulled him out of a bar. "Got two names for you, but you've gotta go gentle."

"Like walking on cotton."

Lucas gave him the namesDel hadn't heard of either of themand said, "Call me if you get anything."

"Probably won't nothing happen until tomorrow," Del said. "I'll get on some banks, start doing some financials."

"We can't really afford a long-term look," Lucas said.

"I'll do it fast as I can, but I can't just go knock on their doors."

"Hear any more about Trick?"

"No, but people are talking about a big game. Maybe tomorrow night, or the next night. I haven't tracked it down yet, but that'd be a possibility."

"Call me when you get it."

That night he worked on his game, but there were no calls. A call came in the morning, though.

"You awake, sleepyhead?" Rose Marie Rouxand the words, on other days, might have brought up a smile; they didn't this morning, because of her tone of voice.

"What happened?" Lucas asked.

"Amnon Plain's dead."

"Dead?" he said stupidly.

"In St. Paul. Somebody shot him."

Chapter 12

Monday. The third day of the hunt.

There had been no premonition. Lucas was given to premonitionsmostly wrong, and usually involving a variety of plane crash scenarios, beginning as soon as he made a reservation for an airline flight. He also had premonitions involving criminal cases. Some were right. He'd been told by a shrink that his unconscious was probably pushing him to a logical connection that his conscious mind hadn't yet made. He didn't necessarily buy the mumbo-jumbo, but he didn't yet deny it, either. So he paid attention to premonitions, but in this instance, he hadn't had one. And even after he heard about Plain, he felt no foreboding about the rest of the day

Plain had been murdered in his apartment/studio at the Matrix Building in St. Paul's Lowertown, an out-of-the-loop business district of old converted warehouses occupied by artists and start-up businesses. The Matrix was one of the oldest and least updated: All the elevators were designed for freight, and stank of decades of crushed fruit and rotten onions, paint, beer, and card-board boxes. The hallways were littered with trash cans, most of them stuffed to overflowing. The Matrix had sold everything at one time or another: produce, hardware, dope, even wholesale leisure suits, sewn in St. Paul's only double-knit sweatshop.