He was more stunned than panicked. They'd found his special place after all. The discovery of Aronson had made it possible, but when nothing had appeared in the papers, he'd thought they'd missed the others.

With his mind moving like mud, he wandered down a series of narrow blacktop tracks. Lights to the sides marked farmhouses; he passed a lonely Conoco station with two trucks in the parking lot, took a left, and faded into the dark countryside again. He finally crossed a highway with a north arrow, and took that: The Cities were north; he could hardly miss them. Then he passed the Conoco station again, and realized that he'd driven in a circle. He pulled in, went inside, and bought two packages of pink Hostess Snoballs and a Coke, and got directions from the kid behind the counter: "Go right straight up the road here, you'll cut 494…"

He jammed the Snoballs into his face as he drove, chewing mindlessly through the sugar and chocolate-they tasted pink-and threw the packaging out onto the highway. The body in the back seemed to glow in the dark; he had to get rid of her. Had to.

That, it turned out, was as simple as the killing.

He cut I-494 south of St. Paul and took it back west, eventually finding his way to the Ford Bridge over the Mississippi. He parked at the end of the bridge, looked both ways, then carried the garbage sack out over the water and dumped the body into the Mississippi. He started to let the bag go with it, but caught it at the last minute. It was too dark to see the body hit, but it would soon be going over the dam.

And on the way back to Neumann's car, he realized what he'd done. He'd faked a suicide. She was certainly moody enough, dark enough. Lonely. Perhaps he could help the idea along.

He drove Neumann's car back to his own, took the groceries out, along with the spade, put them in the trunk of his car, then drove the car back to the bridge and left it parked illegally on Mississippi Boulevard. Then he started walking. Four miles to his own car. Four miles in the rain.

But he needed the time anyway-the time to think. Life was becoming complicated. He hadn't had any choice with Neumann, but he'd now done something he'd always carefully avoided in the past.

He'd killed somebody close to himself. The cops could stand in her office doorway and see his.

As he walked back, he began to weep again. Life was cruel. Unfair. A man like himself…

James Qatar walked along, snuffling in the dark and the rain.

And he thought about the friends of James Qatar, before tonight snugly buried on the hillside above the creek. Released now. He wondered if they would come to see him.

11

LUCAS GOT UP early, kissed Weather goodbye, and went to the telephone. The police in New Richmond knew the dentist used by Nancy Vanderpost, and the cop who answered the phone volunteered to run across the street to see if he had X rays of her fillings.

Next Lucas called Marcy, who was just out of bed. Del had suggested that there might be something special, or peculiar, about the drawings that were publicly posted, rather than mailed to the victim. Lucas told Marcy to get somebody prying into Beverly Wood's history. The killer, he thought, was back there somewhere.

He called Del and made arrangements to pick him up again, and while he was talking, got a beep of an incoming call. He rang off Del and took the incoming call: The New Richmond cop was calling from the dentist's office. The dentist had X rays, and was offering to scan and e-mail them immediately.

Lucas gave the dentist his e-mail address, got the dentist's phone number, then called Larry Lake at Lake's cell phone number. Lake answered after a single ring: "McGrady decided last night that he wanted one more scan across the bottom of the hill. We think we found another grave. A seventh one. So we're doing another strip."

"Jesus. You sure it's a seventh? Anything come up yet?"

"They're just scraping the leaves off now. These crime guys are pretty fussy about how it's dug."

"Okay. See you in a bit."

He called Del back and told him about the seventh, then called Rose Marie. "We've got a seventh grave."

"Oh, boy. I'll tell you, the governor called first thing this morning. He wants a federal-state-local task force working on it."

"We're already moving slow enough."

"I suggested that he set up a federal-state task force to examine the forensic evidence, which is most of what we've got, and to coordinate between the local agencies."

"Tell me what that means," Lucas said.

"It means that we stay independent, but we send Xeroxes of everything to the task force, if there is a task force. But if there is a task force, it probably won't get started for a few days, so if we really want to look good…"

"We take the guy before that."

"Only a suggestion," she said.

"I'll keep it in mind."

LUCAS MADE A half-gallon of coffee and poured it into a thermos, got his rain suit off the nail in the garage, and tossed it into the back of the Tahoe. With little hope, he cranked up his IBM and looked at his e-mail-and found a message from a DocJohn. He opened it and brought up a page of scanned X-ray images. He sent the images to his laser printer and two minutes later had eight life-size X-ray images.

THE WEATHER WAS better: still overcast, but dry. Del was waiting in front of his house. His wife waited with him, and when she saw the Tahoe coming, handed Del a cooler. Del said something to her, and when Lucas pulled into the drive, he sheepishly got into the truck. "No more meat loaf," Cheryl said to Lucas.

"I'll remember," Lucas said. "Don't let my meat loaf."

"Lucas…" A distinct threat hung in her voice.

"No meat loaf. I swear."

"Have Del tell you about his cholesterol."

Lucas looked at Del, who seemed to shrink down in his seat, then back to his wife. "We'll talk about it," Lucas promised.

On the way out of town, Lucas asked, "What's in the cooler?"

"Bunch of stuff. Mostly cut carrots. Fat-free water crackers."

"I like carrots."

"That's fuckin' great," Del said. "I'm happy for you."

"So are you gonna tell me about your cholesterol?"

Del shrugged. "It's been stuck at two fifty-five. The doc wants it down under two hundred, and if I can't do it by diet, he's gonna put me on Lapovorin."

"Uh-oh. Isn't that what…?"

"Yeah. The guy who comes backwards."

Long pause. Then Lucas said, "Better than a heart bypass. Or dropping dead of a heart attack."

Del said, "Yeah. It kinda scares me, to tell you the truth. The cholesterol does. My mom died of a heart attack when she was fifty-eight."

They rode along for a minute, then Lucas said, "So eat carrots."

Del cracked a grin. "I'm gonna love getting old."

AT THE GRAVEYARD site, there were now a half-dozen TV trucks, along with the line of county sheriff's cars, state cars, a car with federal government tags, Marshall's Jeep, Lake's Subaru, and a few more.

"A simple cop convention yesterday. Now it's a full-scale cluster-fuck," Del said.

"In which nobody knows exactly who's doing what to whom, or with what."

"Or even why."

Lake was waiting on the hillside while his assistant carried the radar along the yellow string. Lucas headed that way first. "Any more?"

"Just the one I told you about this morning, the seventh one. They've got some clothing coming up now."

Lucas looked around the hill. "Where's seven?"

Lake pointed. "Those guys." He pointed farther along the hill. "And those guys, I think, are working on a tree hole, but it's big enough and defined enough that we thought we better dig it out."

"How much longer?"

"This is the last sweep. We'll have some data in a half hour."

Lucas and Del walked up the hill to the command tent. McGrady was still at work, but he looked beat. He peered over his glasses at Lucas. "You're pretty chipper."