"Goddamnit…"

Lucas hung up, looked at the slip for the Dunn County cop, and poked in the number. A woman answered on the first ring. "I'm returning a call from Terry Marshall," Lucas said.

"I'm afraid he's gone for the day," the woman said. "Who's calling?"

"Lucas Davenport. I'm a deputy chief over in Minneapolis."

"Oh. Okay. Terry's on his way there now. I think he's looking for you."

"You know what it's about?"

"Nope. I just got a note. Says if I need to get him, call your office, he expects to be there by noon unless there's a problem with the snow. He's driving."

"There's snow?"

"Around here there is; it looks like a blizzard. You can see it on the radar all the way to Hudson… Must be past you guys."

"Yeah, it's past here… I'll keep an eye out for your guy." He dropped the phone on the hook and went to get Del. As they were leaving, Marcy got off the phone and said, "I just talked to Mallard in Washington. He says the shrinks are looking at the drawings and pulling on their beards, but don't expect anything before tomorrow."

COOL SPRING DAY, the air damp, walking across town, looking at all the muddy cars, eighty-thousand-dollar Mercedes-Benzes that resembled melting mudbergs, and at the women with their red noses and cheeks and plastic boots. "Kind of interesting, having Marcy as a coordinator," Del said, as he hopped over an icy puddle at a corner curb.

"Could be chief someday, if she works things right," Lucas said, hopping after him. "If she's willing to put up with some bullshit."

"Hate to see her go for lieutenant," Del said. "She'd wind up stuck away somewhere, property crime or something. They'd start pushing her through the rounds."

"Got to do it, if you want to go up," Lucas said.

"You didn't do it," Del said.

"Maybe you didn't notice, but I never went up until I pulled a political job out of my ass," Lucas said.

THE SIX AD agencies took the rest of the morning; hip, smart people in sharp clothes, all with a touch of color, the people looking curiously at the cops. Lucas, in his straight charcoal suit, felt like a Politburo member walking in a flower garden. They showed pictures of Willis in Pulp Fiction, and got shaking heads at four of the agencies, raised eyebrows at two others. They looked at the possibilities presented by these two agencies, without any personal contact, and agreed that they were possible but unlikely.

One was a kid, the right size and shape, but probably too young-his personnel jacket said he was twenty-two, a summer graduate of the University of Minnesota… Morris. His winter coat was a dark blue hip-length parka, and his boss had never seen him in anything else. "Never in a topcoat," she said. "He's pretty country for a topcoat."

Lucas nodded. "So thanks," he said.

"What should I do?" she asked. "If he's being investigated…"

"Don't do anything," Lucas said. "Wouldn't be right; the chances of his being involved in anything are pretty slim."

Outside, Del said, "Didn't Aronson come from out there somewhere? Like Morris?"

"No, she was from Thief River," Lucas said.

"That's out there."

"Del, Thief River is about as close to fuckin' Morris as we are to fuckin' Des Moines, for Christ's sakes."

"Excuse my abysmal fuckin' ignorance," Del said.

The second possibility was the right age, and he had a dark topcoat, but the hair and body shape were wrong. The agency chief said the man never had a buzzcut, always the ponytail. They thanked him and left.

"This sucks," Lucas said.

"Be nicer if we were walking around in the summer," Del said. "I'll run them both, but they don't feel so good." He looked up at the gray sky and said, "I wish the sun would come out."

"Maybe in April."

THEY WALKED BACK to City Hall through the Skyways, shouldering through the lunchtime rush and the human traffic jams around the food courts. Lucas got an apple at the courthouse cafeteria, and Del got a tuna-fish sandwich and a Coke. At the office, Marcy, who was talking to a severe-looking young woman, looked up and said, "The Dunn County guy is here. I put him in your office. And we got those pictures made. You say yes, and we send them out."

Lucas took a picture from her. The artist had deftly generalized Willis's features, emphasized the buzzcut and added the long coat. "Good," Lucas said. "Send it."

Terry Marshall was ten or fifteen years older than Lucas, in the indeterminate mid-fifties to early sixties, with a lean, weathered face, brown hair showing swatches of gray, and a short brush-cut mustache. He wore round steel-rimmed glasses that might have made someone else look like John Lennon. Marshall didn't look anything like Lennon; he looked like something that might have eaten Lennon. He was sitting in Lucas's guest chair reading the paper. When Lucas pushed through the door, he stood up and said, "Your girl out there told me to wait here."

For all his wolfish appearance, he seemed a little embarrassed, and Lucas said, "As long as you didn't go through my drawers."

Marshall grinned and said, "Let it never be said that I spent any time in your drawers. Is that girl a secretary, or what? She pushes people around."

"She's a cop," Lucas said. "She does push."

"Ah." Marshall sat down again as Lucas settled behind his desk. "I thought she seemed, I guess…" He stopped, looking confused.

"What?"

"She seemed like she might be… I don't know. Handicapped, or something."

"We had a guy up here running around shooting people last fall. We caught him in a gas station-it was on TV."

"I remember that," Marshall said.

"Before we caught him, the guy shot Marcy with a hunting rifle. Right through the rib cage from about fifty feet. She got off a couple of rounds as she was down-helped us pin down the car and break the whole thing. But she was pretty messed up."

"Jeez." Marshall leaned forward to look at Marcy through the office window. "She gonna be all right?" There was concern in his voice, and Lucas liked him for it.

"In a while. She's getting pretty antsy already, that's why we've got her in here."

"Never been shot myself."

Marshall seemed to think about that for a minute, and Lucas, just a little impatient, said, "So, what can I do for you?"

"Ah, yeah." Marshall had a beat-up leather briefcase by his foot, and he picked it up, dug through it, and pulled out a legal portfolio. "This file is for you. Nine years ago, we had a young girl-nineteen-disappear. Name was Laura Winton. We never found out what happened to her, but we think she was strangled or smothered and dumped out in the country somewhere. We never did find the guy who did it."

"You think…"

"The thing is, he was pretty clever," Marshall said. "He apparently hung around this girl for a week before he killed her. He killed her on Christmas day, during Christmas break at the university. She lived on a street full of older houses that are all cut up into apartments as off-campus student housing… You know what they're like."

"I know. I lived in the same kind of place myself when I was a kid."

Marshall nodded. "Anyway, he hung around her for about a week, and not a single one of her housemates ever saw him. When he killed her, he did it when they were all gone-she had three housemates, and all three were gone for Christmas."

"Why wasn't she gone?"

"Because she was a hometown girl," Marshall said. "She was the older of two daughters and she had two younger brothers, and when she moved out of her house to go to the university, the other daughter got the bedroom to herself. It was just too much trouble to stay overnight when her own place was only a couple of miles away. So she went over to her parents' for Christmas morning, to open gifts and eat lunch, and then she went back to her apartment. As far as we know, nobody ever saw her again, except the killer."