"It probably did, but they just never told us," Catrin said.

"Yeah." Lucas took a step back. "So think about it."

"One of the things I'm thinking about," she said, "is sleeping with you. But I've got to decide whether to do it before I walk, just to try it out, to see if I've got anything left or just go ahead and walk out, and sleep with you later."

Lucas was offended. "Like I don't have a say in it."

She regarded him for a minute, then shook her head. "Not much. You already want to sleep with me. If I really wanted to force it, I could press up against you and you'd get all kinds of Catholic guilt and everything, and you'd go raving up and down the house waving your arms, and then you'd do it."

"Jesus, I'm a piece of meat."

"Not that," she said. She reached out with an index finger and pushed against his chest. "You're just one of those guys who likes to sleep with women. You need the comfort. And you're not seeing anyone now. So I could do it, if I wanted to I just have to think."

He took another step back. "Well let me know."

Now she laughed, and for a moment she looked like she was nineteen again. "I will."

From his cab, Lucas used his cell phone to call his friend Bone; fifteen minutes later, Bone's secretary pushed him past a panel of waiting middle managers in the bankers outer office.

Bone was looking at two computer monitors at the same time. He turned away from them when Lucas came in and said, "Sometimes I feel like I've got so much radiation going through my skull, you could put a roll of film behind my head and get an X ray."

"How's your ankle?"

"Hurts. Should be okay by next week." They played pickup basketball twice a week. Bone had once been a suspect in a case Lucas had worked. Now he was not only a friend, but his banker connections could get Lucas useful financial information. "I got that stuff on your guy."

"Confidentially."

"Of course. But there wasn't much."

"Would you loan him money?"

Bone leaned back. "There are two things you look at before you loan a guy money: history and security. He never had much security, but, boy, his history is good."

"Too good?"

"No such thing as toogood," Bone said. "It just can't be toobad ."

"What if you depend on a hundred percent tenancy in your apartment buildings to meet your financing? And then make it? Is that too good?"

"He can't be doing that," Bone said. He rocked forward and shuffled through the papers, looked from one to another, punched a few numbers into one of his computers, and pushed a key. Then he said, "Jeez, that's a little tight, isn't it?"

"He's greasing it with dope money," Lucas said.

"Ah."

"What I need to knowthis'll never get to a second person, past mewould the guy who's making his loan know about this? About the dope?"

Bone spun his chair around until his back was to Lucas. He was looking at a walnut bookcase full of financial manuals, a few computer guides, the complete works of Joseph Conrad, and a tattered multivolume set of Proust'sRemembrance of Things Past. A copy of the Oxford Study Bible was jammed sideways on top of the Proust. After a minute, without turning back, Bone said, "He'd have to knowsomething ."

"But maybe not the dope?" Lucas asked of the chair.

Bone spun the chair around. He had a lean, wolflike face. He grinned, showing his teeth. "Maybe not, because there's another good possibility that bankers don't like to talk aboutthe other possibility is, he found a guy at the bank and either bribed him to okay the loan, or kicked back part of the loan itself."

"But whatever happened, the bank guy would have to know."

"I don't see how he could avoid it, if his IQ's over eighty," Bone said. Then: "I hope I haven't screwed anybody here."

"You might be reading about it," Lucas said. "This Rodriguez"

Bone was a smart guy. He knew Lucas wouldn't be on a routine errand. "Alie'e?"

"You might be reading about it," Lucas said again.

Del called to suggest they meet in St. Paul. Lucas checked on Marcy by phone, then got his car and headed across the river. Rodriguez's office was in the Windshuttle Building, hooked by Skyway to Galtier Plaza. Lucas dumped the Porsche in the Galtier parking garage and found Lane and Del loitering in the Skyway.

"He's down there now, talking to his secretary. See the Temps office? Look one window to the left, the guy in the pink shirt. That's him." Lane handed Lucas a pair of miniature Pentax binoculars, and Lucas looked down through the Skyway windows at the man in the pink shirt.

Rodriguez was ordinary. At six-two or six-three, he had thinning brown hair and a gut. He didn't look Latino; he looked like an everyday Minnesota white guy. He was intent on the secretary's computer screen. He said something to her, looked at a printer, looked back at the computer, tapped the screen, then turned back to the printer as a piece of paper rolled out.

As he turned back and forth, Lucas got a good view of his face. "You're sure this is the guy?"

"This is the guy," Lane said.

"He looks like a city councilman." Lucas turned to Del, "What'd the BCA say?"

"He had a fairly heavy juvenile record in Detroit, burglary mostly. They think he was running dope early on, just deliveries on his bike, then got his nose into it. He didn't do much in the way of sales Then he just disappeared. They never tried to find out where he went, they were just happy he was gone. They did some assessments on him when he was in juvenile care. They say he's smart, but as far as they can tell, he never went to school after the fifth grade."

"All right," Lucas said. He handed the glasses back to Lane and said, "You go home, relax, have a couple beers, visit your girlfriend, whatever. But I want you back on this guy tomorrow morning at nine o'clock, wherever he is, and you can plan to stay on him every day, all day, until we take him down."

"Good." Lane nodded. "Where're you guys going?"

Lucas looked at Del. "We better go talk to Rose Marie."

Rose Marie had just broken free of a press conference when Lucas and Del arrived. They could see her through the glass door of her outer office, waving her arms around, as the receptionist shook her head in sympathy. Lucas pushed through the door. Rose Marie nodded at them, turned back toward the receptionist to finish what she was saying, saw Del's "Lick Dick" T-shirt, did a worried double-take, lost her thought, and asked, '"What?"

"We gotta talk."

Inside her office, with the door closed, Lucas said, "I think we got the Alie'e killer. I'd say maybe eighty-five percent."

Rose Marie looked from Lucas to Del and back to Lucas and asked, "Who?"

"A guy named Rodriguez." They laid it out for her. At the end, she said, "So we know who it is, but we can't convict him."

"That's pretty much it," Lucas admitted. "When you make the leaps, you can convince yourself that he's the guy but a jury, I don't think so. One thing, he doesn't look like a dope dealer. He looks like a washing-machine salesman."

"What if he isn't the guy?"

"We put together a case. If we can put together a solid enough case to convince ourselves maybe we'll have a chance. Or maybe we'll stumble over something," Lucas said. "I mean, we convicted Rashid Al-Balah and he didn't even do it."

"So we brace the loan officer from the bank."

"As soon as we do it, he's gonna go out the back door, make a phone call, and Rodriguez will know we're on his ass," Del said.

"Good thought. We ought to have Rodriguez tapped," Lucas said. "If we can get him talking about it"

"Do we have enough for a tap?" Rose Marie asked.

"Probably," Lucas said. "We can get that going this afternoon. The best thing that could happen to the county attorneys office is to have something to distract from the Al-Balah story, when it breaks. If we can hang Rodriguez for Alie'e, Al-Balah moves to page nine."