Del, who'd stayed back, said, "Gun by the bed."

Lucas stepped toward Lynn Olson, touched his cheek: cold. He was dead, and had been dead for a while. There was no question about Lil Olson. They could see the spray from the gunshot wound on the far side of her head where the slug had exited. Lucas knelt next to the gun, got his nose an inch away from it: a nine-millimeter. "I don't think that's the gun that was used on Plain," he said. "That was a pretty big crater in the concrete. I don't think a nine would do that."

"And I can't see the thread. Alie'e goes down, so somebody kills Plain. I can see that: revenge, especially after that photo spread. He's making a buck off Alie'e's death, and maybe some nut takes it the wrong way. Same thing with Corbeau: she's one of the sinners around Alie'e, one of the muff-divers. But the parents. I don't see the parents."

Lucas shook his head. From the hallway, they heard a voice. "Hello?"

Del went to the door, poked his head out. "Down here."

Two new Bloomington cops arrived a moment later, one in his twenties, the other graying, heavier. "Two dead," Lucas said. "We're gonna need the crime lab, big-time, and like right now."

The gray-haired one said, "I saw you on TV. On the Alie'e thing. Is this more of that?"

Lucas nodded. "These are Alie'e parents."

The cop exhaled, hooked his thumbs over his belt, took another long look as though memorizing the scene. "Gotta hand it to you," he said, as though it were Lucas's doing. "This is some weird shit." He looked at his younger partner. "Call it in."

Lucas said, "I just thought of something. I'm gonna have to I need Lynn Olsons billfold."

"Aw, man, I don't know," the older cop said. Crime scenes were not to be messed with.

"Yeah, I know, but I need it." Lucas stepped back inside the room, looked around, saw a plastic bag stuffed into an ice bucket, got it, and walked over to Olsons body. He could see the lump of the wallet in Olsons back pocket, carefully lifted the pocket flap, gripped the wallet through the plastic bag, and slipped it out. With the wallet inside the bag, be opened it, found the drivers license in a credit-card slot, and maneuvered it out.

"Could you call this in?" he asked the older cop. "Ask them to run Lynn Olson, DOB 2-23-44. He lives in Burnt River, Minnesota. We need cars registered to him."

Bloomington came back in thirty seconds. Olson had three cars: a new dark-blue Volvo, a two-year-old Ford Explorer, and a green 1968 Pontiac GTO.

"You guys got it," Lucas told the Bloomington cops. "We need to look for this car in the parking lot." And to Del: "Come on."

On the way down the stairs, Del said, "Marcy's gonna make it."

Lucas looked at him. "You didn't talk to anyone?"

"No, man. You bummed me out with that bad vibe. Butthis was the vibe. Not Marcy. You were getting a vibe from this."

"Del, you can't be smokin' that shit while you're working."

"Yeah, well, watch. She's good." He seemed marginally more cheerful.

They found the Olsons' car in a minute, the blue Volvo, much like Tom Olson's car but a decade newer. Lucas walked around to the passenger side, squeezing between the Volvo and a red Chevy Camaro. He saw the bullet hole before he got to the door, reached down and touched it. Hard to mistake, either by sight or feel. "That's Olympic-quality shooting," Del said. He knelt in the narrow space to look at the hole, while Lucas turned to look back up the parking lot. Three Bloomington squad cars rounded the corner of the hotel, one after another, lights flashing, like a Shriners parade.

"I better call Rose Marie," he said. "I left my phone in the car."

Del handed him the cell phone, and he punched in Rose Marie's number. "This is Lucas," he said. "How is she?"

Lucas listened, Del peering at him. Lucas took the phone away from his ear and told him, "She's still on the table."

"She's okay," Del said, but now he sounded uncertain.

Lucas said to Rose Marie, "Okay. We've had a development down here."

Chapter 16

While Del waited at the car, Lucas led the arriving Bloomington cops up the stairs to the Olsons' room, then violated the crime scene again. This time, over the Bloomington cops' protests, he took the Olsons' car keys off a dresser.

"The keys are completely out of the scene," he told them. "You won't get anything off the car keys But we need to look in their trunk."

"Yeah, but" the sergeant said uneasily. It was all against his training.

"Look, it's okay. I'll take the responsibility," Lucas said. "But I'd appreciate it if you could come down and watch while we open the car."

The sergeant agreed to walk along. Lucas opened the car trunk, found nothing but odd bits of traveling luggagea camera bag, a half-full laundry bag, two golf clubs and a couple of loose balls, an open box of plastic garbage bags, an empty cooler, and, under a purple Minnesota Vikings jacket, a gray-metal toolbox.

"Looking for a big gun?" Del asked.

"If this is what it looks like, if this is murder-suicide man, it'd make life easier," Lucas said. He dipped into the box of garbage bags, pulled one out, ripped a couple of chunks out of it, made mittens out of the chunks and opened the toolbox. The top of the box was a lift-out tray with a socketwrench and sockets. He lifted the tray out. Tools. "Nothing," he said.

Del had taken the keys out of the truck to open the passenger-side door. "I don't see anything."

Del stood up. "But the hole in the door This could clean up Marcy and probably Plain. Revenge shootings. Either that or"

"What?"

"What if Lynn Olson was trying to fuck his daughter, and something happened? He was drunk at the party and maybe Lansing I don't know."

"Where'd Plain come into it?" Lucas asked, thinking it over.

"Maybe he saw something?"

"Why wouldn't he tell us? He said he didn't like them much, the whole crowd around Alie'e."

"I don't know," Del said.

They stayed at the motel for an hour, watched the preliminary crime-scene work, and made arrangements for a statement for the Bloomington cops.

"You gotta do the gun right now," Lucas said as a crime-scene tech crawled over the room. "It may be the gun used to shoot Marcy Sherrill."

"We'll have it in a couple of hours, no more," the tech said. "Have they taken a bullet out of her?"

"I don't know." Lucas called to ask, and was told that both bullets that hit Sherrill had done clean pass-throughs. Another crime-scene team was at Jael Corbeau's studio, trying to recover a slug from what looked like a bullet hole in a wooden railing. Jael was still at the hospital.

A cluster of television camera trucks had appeared at a diner across the street. Bloomington was keeping them away from the motel, and a Bloomington cop had moved Lucas's Porsche back into the lot. As they left the motel, Lucas could see sudden movement among the cameramen, the cameras going up on their shoulders.

"We're about to go on TV," he said. Del dipped his head and stepped behind Lucas. At the car, he kept his head down, one hand over his face. As they pulled out of the parking lot, a TV truck pulled out behind them in pursuit. Lucas lost it on the interstate, cutting through evening traffic like a shark.

They'd made the phone checks: Sherrill was still on the table. She'd taken a lot of blood, but the prognosis had improved. Tom Olson was asleep. He'd been disoriented at the hospital, his body overcome with shock. He'd been sedated.

North of town, at James Bee's house, the cops had cleaned out the computers and the Rolodex. There'd been one cross-match between the Rolodex and the names on the party list from Silly Hanson's, and a competent Minneapolis cop named Loring was running down the cross. The cops at Bee's house also found three ounces of cocaine in a bedroom. Bee claimed it belonged to his wife, the blonde, who denied it. They were both being transported to the county jail.