"Really?" Sloan's eyebrows went up.

"Something he said made me think he might be a priest," Ware said.

"A priest?"

"That's the only reason that it all stuck with me: He was a priest, and his enthusiasm was so clear."

"He was wearing a collar?"

"No, nothing like that. But if you were a priest and you were going to an exhibit of nudes… maybe you wouldn't wear the collar."

Sloan ticked it off on his fingers. "So he was an enthusiast, he had a frenzy about him, he compared the nudes to drawings…"

"One other thing. He was so obviously an enthusiast-and perhaps he saw it in me-that we walked along for a bit, looking at the photographs and talking, and I said something about women being endlessly fascinating. He shook his head and he said, 'Not endlessly. Not endlessly.' He looked at me, and I was a little frightened. Really-frightened."

Lucas said, interested, "Huh. In the middle of the day, in the museum, you were frightened."

"Yeah." Ware nodded. "Years ago, back in the eighties, there were rumors of Mexican snuff flicks. You know, some woman gets hauled into a warehouse, is raped and beaten, and then she's killed on camera. There were even a few flicks offered around, for collectors of that kind of thing. Pretty bad fakes, for the most part. But occasionally, you'd get somebody looking for one. Sometimes they were cops, sometimes they were reporters, sometimes they were curiosity seekers. Sometimes they were people who scared you. People who really wanted a snuff flick. I got a whiff of that from the priest."

"But you don't really know that he was a priest," Sloan said.

"Something he said…"

On another topic: "Have you ever seen anything like these drawings on the Internet?"

"Not really. Porn guys like photographs. They like specifics: You show them a clitoris the size of a chili pepper, they want you to blow it up as big as a zucchini. And they always want better color and better resolution… They're crazy."

"Have you seen photographs that look like the bodies in these drawings?"

"Well, sure, the drawings… those are all pretty standard poses," he said.

"I mean specifically: photos that could have been used for these drawings."

Ware shook his head. "I couldn't tell you that. I'm not out on the Internet that much. You oughta ask Tony Carr."

Carr was the computer tech who'd been at Ware's when the door was kicked. "What about him?" Sloan asked.

"He knows all the sites. What he does is, he loots them, then he burns the images onto CDs and peddles the CDs. He's basically interested in money, not the porn, but he knows about every site out there."

"How about Henrey?" Lucas asked.

"He's just a hired gun. He's not particularly creative, and he's no good with lights-not good enough for product photography or anything hard, anyway. He can do boudoir stuff okay."

"So he's not much."

Ware shook his head. "He's a dummy."

MARCY HAD RETURNED during the interrogation, and was at her desk when Lucas and Sloan finished with Ware. Lucas told Baxter that they might need to talk again; Baxter agreed, and escorted Ware out of the office. Sloan said he'd get back with a transcript for the file; he scrubbed Marcy's head with his knuckles, and left.

"Get anything?" Marcy asked.

"We need to talk to Anthony Carr again. You'll find him in the Ware file. Call him up and tell him to come in."

"All right… Tomorrow?"

"Yeah, it's gonna have to be tomorrow. We're running out of time today. How was your lunch with Kidd?"

Marcy looked up at him, thinking, and then her eyes drifted past to a blank wall. After a couple of seconds, she nodded: "He's a pretty good guy. He's a hardass, though. He's one of those guys who's gonna do what he's gonna do and he doesn't care much about what anybody else thinks about it. He's a lot more of a hardass than you are."

"He's supposed to be a good painter."

"I called up a woman I know. Over at the Institute. She said Kidd paints six or eight paintings a year and gets maybe fifty thousand bucks each. He's in all the big museums. She asked me if I was going out with him and I said we'd been to lunch, and she sounded like she wanted to crawl through the phone and choke me. I think in that world, you know, the guy is eligible."

Lucas said, "Huh. You gonna see him again?"

"I wouldn't be surprised. He kinda liked me."

"Did you let him touch your gun?"

"Not yet."

LUCAS TOOK THE Menomonie files home with him, meaning to look through them during the evening. Weather arrived a few minutes after he did, and they went for a walk along the river, enjoying the cold. Then they walked back to Lucas's house and ate small triangular sandwiches of cheese, onions, and sardines, with tomato-herb soup, at the dining room table. He told her about Jim Wise, the bullet-headed man who was not the killer; about Ware and his priest; and about Kidd.

"You think Marcy and this Kidd guy…?"

"She likes the type," Lucas said. Then he asked, "How can a sandwich that stinks this bad taste so good?"

"It's a great mystery," Weather said. "So is Kidd a good-looking guy?"

"Not as good-looking as me."

"We could hardly expect that," she said.

"But… I don't know. Not bad-looking. Sort of beat-up. Big shoulders: Looks like he could pick you up, put you over his shoulder, and carry you right up to his nest in the tree. I suspect he gets laid a lot."

"Hmm. I'm feeling a little tingle myself," Weather said.

"Marcy did, for sure," Lucas said. He looked over his empty plate at hers. "You gonna eat that triangle?"

WEATHER HELPED HIM with the dishes, and afterward, they hiked a mile to a used-book store and hauled a dozen books back. While Weather paged through a book on human osteology, Lucas went back to the file from Menomonie. At the back, there were Xerox copies of perhaps thirty or forty photographs. Most of them were police photos taken in Laura Winton's apartment or in Nancy Vanderpost's trailer home by crime-scene crews. One set was mostly of a young woman, identified in notes as Winton, Marshall's niece. She was shown walking in the woods, and then standing on a sidewalk somewhere. There was a gap in the trees behind her, and Lucas thought it looked a lot like the Mississippi River Valley between Minneapolis and St. Paul, but there were no identifying landmarks, only a small semicircular stone wall.

He handed the photo to Weather. "Think that's around here?"

She looked at it for a long moment, then said, "Could be. Who is it?"

He explained, and she said, "Then it might be in Menomonie. There's a river and a big lake there, pretty deep valley… Could be there."

"Feels like here."

He had to page back through the file to find the spot where he'd taken the photo out, and there was something about the pictures taken in the woods. Were the woods close by? Maybe they went with the stone wall photo, something that he walked by often enough to ring a bell…

He paged through them again. Then he tumbled: "Holy shit."

Weather looked up, hearing a tone in his voice. "What?"

"These pictures… they look like the place where Aronson's body was found."

"What?"

"These pictures of Winton. They look like they're taken where Aronson was found. I went down there the other day." He went through them again. "Goddamnit, Weather, I think it's the same place."

MARSHALL MIGHT KNOW something.

Lucas looked at his watch: twenty minutes to eleven. Still early enough. He went back through the file and found Marshall's business card, with a home phone number scrawled on the back. Marshall had said to call anytime.

He dialed, and the phone rang four times before a man answered, a harsh rasping cigarette voice, thick with sleep. " 'Lo?"

"Terry Marshall?"

"Yeah… who's this?"

"Terry, I apologize for calling you at this time of night, but this is Lucas Davenport, the deputy chief you talked to."