"Good night's sleep, pancakes for breakfast, nice conversation with a pretty woman," Lucas said.

"Better'n this, huh?"

Lucas nodded. "You've got seven."

"Yeah." McGrady stumbled backward a step and sank into a canvas field chair. "You know what? The first six didn't bother me that much. The seventh, finding the seventh… that kicked my ass."

"I got some X-ray printouts for you. We can get the actual films if we need them. This is for the woman from New Richmond. Nancy Vanderpost."

Lucas handed McGrady the printouts, and McGrady looked at them for a long moment, then said, "Four."

"What?"

"They could be number four."

He walked across the tent to six long cardboard boxes. Inside each box was a stack of clear plastic bags, with the contents of each bag carefully tagged. He rummaged around in the box numbered four and came up with a bag. Inside, Lucas saw several separate bones, including a lower jaw. McGrady looked at the jawbones for a minute, then at Lucas's printouts, then at the jawbone, then at the printout. After a minute, he looked up at Lucas and said softly, "Hello, Nancy."

"You're sure?" Del asked.

"Ninety-nine percent." He dropped the bag back into the box, pulled off his glasses, and said, "Goddamnit. I'm so fuckin' tired."

"You oughta crash for a couple hours," Lucas said.

"Maybe tonight."

LUCAS CALLED MARCY and told her about Vanderpost, then told her to start building a file with the cops from New Richmond. She said she would, and added, "Black was over at the archdiocese, and they're looking for a priest who studied art at UW… Stout in Menomonie, but this monsignor over there said they won't find one. He says he generally knows the background of all the priests in the area, and none of them went to Stout."

"That was thin, anyway," Lucas said.

"Yeah, but listen to this. After Black talked to the guy, he noticed that a bunch of these women listed 'going to Mass' as one of their social activities, and he started to add them up. Of the seventeen people who've gotten drawings so far, eleven are Catholic. That's way too many. Of the three dead women we know about, two were Catholic."

"Yeah?"

"Interesting, huh?"

"Push it."

"We are."

When he got off the phone, Lucas asked McGrady if he'd seen Marshall.

"He wanders around the hill," McGrady said. "He was right up on top the last time I saw him. Sitting on a log."

He was still sitting on the log when Lucas climbed to the top of the hill. He crossed the lip of the crest, and Marshall said, "More bad news." Not a question.

"McGrady says four is Nancy Vanderpost, from New Richmond."

"Ah, jeez."

"You did a hell of a job, man," Lucas said.

"I was nuts for all those years. That's the answer. I kept hoping she'd show up-you'd see those TV shows on amnesia. I knew it was all bullshit, that she was dead."

"You had the guy figured, and that's-"

"What the heck is this?" Marshall was looking past Lucas, down the hill. Del was climbing toward them at a dead run.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"Eight wasn't a tree hole," Del said, gasping for breath.

THEY WERE STANDING around hole eight, looking at a shoe with a dirty bone in it-with the combination of heavy soil and oak litter, the bones showed an irregular coffee color, with lines and pits of bone white. "We need to find a girl who wore red high-top Keds," said the cop in the hole.

"That fad faded a few years ago," Lucas said.

"Yeah, well, she's been here a few years."

Below, another federal car crept slowly past the cluster of cop cars on the road, parked, and three men climbed out. "Baily," Del said.

Lucas looked down the hill. Baily was the FBI's agent in charge at the Minneapolis office, a heavyset man who played a mean game of handball. "Better go get him, take him up to the command tent," Lucas told Del. "I'll round up Marshall and McGrady."

McGrady was at hole six. Lucas said, "The feds are here. Del's bringing Baily up to the command tent."

"Okay… You think they'll come in?"

"Does a chicken have lips?"

Marshall had left his spot at the top of the hill and was wandering past hole three, where the diggers were getting into virgin earth. Lucas caught him by the arm. "Come on and talk to the FBI," Lucas said.

McGrady and Baily were shaking hands when Lucas and Marshall got to the command tent. Baily shook hands with Lucas and said, "Eight."

"Coming out of the ground now," Lucas said. "This is Terry Marshall, a deputy sheriff from Dunn County over in Wisconsin. He broke it."

Lucas explained, and when he finished, Baily nodded at Marshall and said, "Nice piece of work. I'm sorry about your niece."

"I just hope we get the guy," Marshall said. "If he reads the newspapers, he might've taken off like a big-assed bird."

"Got nowhere to run," Baily said. "We've got enough bodies now that we should be able to pinpoint him with victim histories."

"Could be tougher than that," Lucas said. "We've been doing histories on all the women who got the drawings, and so far we've pretty much come up with zip. We got matches, of course, but nothing that looks likely."

"We're setting up a task force, Wisconsin… Minnesota, FBI. We'll run down every single possibility. We'll have all the manpower we need," Baily said. "I talked to the director this morning, and he made this the number-one priority nationwide. Nothing else comes first."

"Terrific," Del said. There was a tone in his voice, and when everybody looked at him, he said, "No, I mean it. I really… mean it."

LUCAS AND DEL left the site twenty minutes later: nothing to do that the professionals couldn't do better. McGrady promised updates by telephone, and Lucas told Baily that he would talk to Rose Marie about setting up a liaison to the task force. "Probably gonna be a sergeant named Marcy Sherrill," Lucas told him.

When they were on the road, Lucas looked at Del and said, "That was pretty swift of you, that 'terrific' you laid on Baily."

"Ah, the FBI's a bite in the shorts."

"Baily ain't bad," Lucas said.

"No, he's not. But I can see that he's building a machine, and I've never been much of a cog."

"You're more like a flywheel," Lucas suggested. "Or an air brake."

"You know what I think? I think we better get back and start cross-matching what we've got. I'm not saying this is a competition, but I'd like to be the ones to catch this asshole."

"I hope there's not a nine."

BACK AT CITY Hall, Lucas spoke briefly with Rose Marie, filling her in on developments, then suggested that Marcy be made liaison with the joint task force. "Give her a little exposure," Lucas said.

"She could wind up getting her ass kicked," Rose Marie said.

"You don't know her well enough to know how unlikely that is," Lucas said. "But I'll tell you what-I really don't want to do it. If I've only got six months left in the job, I want to spend my time running around town, chasing this guy's ass."

Rose Marie got Marcy on the phone, told her to stop down. When she did, Rose Marie said, "You've been unanimously elected as our representative to the joint federal-state task force that's being set up. You've also got to coordinate for us, but I don't see how that could be much of a problem, since you'll mostly be doing the same stuff."

Marcy nodded. "Thanks. I'll do it. Anything else?"

"Go with God," Rose Marie said.

Out in the hall, Marcy said, "If you fixed this, I appreciate it." Lucas opened his mouth to reply, but she held up a finger. "You're gonna crack wise, but you don't have to. I appreciate it. Period."

Lucas shrugged. "So all right."

"If you're gonna spend all your time running around town, why don't you figure out why we're up to our ass in Catholics?"

"Maybe I'll do that," Lucas said.