THEY WASTED THE half hour and a little more at a bagel shop on Grand Avenue, drinking coffee and trying to figure out the next step. They were still shaky from the shooting: talking too fast, digressing into stories, arguing the Aronson case.

"The woman over at the Catholic school, the museum lady-we gotta talk to her some more," Marshall said. "She comes up four times on our lists, and she takes you right over to that wall in Laura's pictures. That place has gotta be involved, and it's gotta be somebody close to her. Maybe somebody who works at the museum. People come to see her, and he picks them up there."

"Black's running down all the names in the museum and the art department-everybody over twenty-five," Lucas said.

"I'm supposed to go to this task force meeting tomorrow with Marcy," Marshall said. "I'd rather hang with you guys, but if you want, I could go over there and tell them about St. Patrick's and what we've seen so far, and maybe… I don't know, maybe we could get them to do research on everybody in the whole school. Everybody. Maybe there'd be some way to hook up the records from the school computer with the FBI, and run them all off in an hour or something."

"That's a thought," Lucas said. "I just can't figure out what a guy at St. Pat's is doing with a pimp like Randy."

"Just a fence," Del said. "The guy's a sex freak, so maybe they got hooked up that way, and then he started fencing stuff through Randy."

"You know what we should have done?" Marshall said. "When we had that woman over at DDT's place this morning, the one that used to work with Randy, we should have showed her the picture of the guy from the movie."

"Goddamnit," Lucas said irritably. "I should have thought of that."

"I'll get back to her," Del said. "Maybe I can hook up with some of Randy's other girls, too."

Still cranked, they all went back to Randy's. Allport was in the living room with two other cops, and said, "We gotta guy coming down with a recorder and some forms, if you guys could make a preliminary statement before you take off."

They all nodded, and Lucas asked, "Anything new?"

"Can't find his stash."

"Gotta be one," Lucas said. "He was weird about all that English shit-he had a walking stick, and he used to stroll around in riding boots and breeches and hats with feathers. You oughta look behind mirrors and paintings and check for hollowed-out banisters and all that. Look in the clocks."

He was standing at the top of the entry stairs, next to a banister knob, and tried to turn it; it was solid.

"What'd you hear from the hospital?" Del asked.

Allport shook his head. "He's in surgery, and they're giving us about the usual: Nothing, fuck you very much."

"How about the spine thing?"

He shook his head again. "I haven't heard a thing."

The crime-scene people found Randy's stash in a hardbound copy of Bulfinch's Mythology, one of a line of what looked like decorator books in a built-in bookshelf over the television. The pages of the Bulfinch had been haphazardly glued together, and then a hole cut out of the middle. The hole was just big enough to hold a couple of ounces of grass-it didn't, but it did hold a chamois bag.

The cop who found the book shook the bag into the palm of one hand, and out tumbled two rings, one diamond and one emerald. Lucas, Del, and Marshall had seen pictures of them.

"Sonofabitch," Del said.

"Now we know for sure," Lucas said. "He's the link."

They spent another hour at the apartment, giving brief statements to a St. Paul investigator who would be looking into the shooting. When they were done, Marshall asked, "Where can I hook up with this Anderson guy? He's never around when I come through your office."

"He basically works with the computer system," Lucas said. "I'll take you around."

"Got an idea?" Del asked.

"No. I just want to look at all these lists he's making. Have we called these women up, the women in the drawings, to see how many of them have a connection with St. Patrick's?"

"Yeah. Many of them do-I mean, everybody in town is gonna know somebody from the place; it's a big school. But direct connections are pretty thin."

"Four hits with this old lady Qatar is a lot," Del said.

"Gotta be something there," Marshall said.

"Just like there is with Randy," Lucas said. "But how do you connect an elderly museum lady with an asshole like Randy? I looked at her, and I couldn't tell you."

BACK AT CITY Hall, Lucas dropped Marshall with Anderson, the computer guy, and Del headed back to DDT's: "I'll show her the pictures, and maybe Charmin' can give me the name of some of his other girls," he said.

Lucas went back to the office, where Marcy was talking with Lane and Swanson. "Did you hear about Randy?" she asked.

"What?" He stopped in his tracks. "He died?"

"No, but he won't be walking anywhere for a while. Allport just called and said the surgeons are trying to fix his lower vertebrae so he doesn't do any more damage to his spinal cord, but there's already been some damage and they don't think he's gonna have full use of his legs. Not right away, anyway. He'll have to do rehab, and you know how that goes."

"Ah, shit." Lucas shook his head and said, "Nobody knows what happened. He just opened up."

"You don't look too shook," Marcy said.

"I didn't even see anything, until it was all over," Lucas said. "We came in the front, he ran out the back and opened up." He told them the story in detail, and about the rings.

"Allport told me about the rings," Marcy said. "Christ, if Randy hadn't had a gun, we'd have the guy now."

"Did Allport say if he was conscious?"

"Docs have really cut him up-they figure it'll be the day after tomorrow before he makes any sense, and maybe longer than that. They had to go into his gut and he's gonna have a lot of pain, so they're pouring the drugs into him." They all looked at Marcy: What happened to Randy seemed like a replay of what had happened to her. She picked up the vibration and said, "I didn't get the spine. But he's gonna be hurting, I can promise you that."

Swanson had been sitting with his head propped on his hands, and now he looked up at Lucas and said, "Damn good thing you weren't doing the shooting."

"Yeah. The thought's occurred to just about everybody," Lucas said. He looked at the three of them, huddled around Marcy's desk, and asked, "What's going on? You got something?"

"Just trying to figure out this Catholic and St. Patrick's business," Lane said. "To tell you the truth, we've got too many names. We've got connections running all over the place. We've got so many, we don't know what we're doing anymore."

"On the other hand," Marcy said, "I looked at the Minnesota Almanac and guess what? There's a whole bunch of Catholics among the women who got drawings and the dead ones we've identified, BUT…" She dug around in a mess of paper and pulled out a slip with penciled numbers. "We don't have a lot more than the percentage of Catholics in the Minnesota population as a whole. In fact, if the rest of the dead ones turn out not to be Catholics, we'll be a Catholic short."

"In other words, the Catholic thing just went up in smoke," Lucas said.

"There's still St. Patrick's," Lane said.

Lucas pulled up a chair. "Let me look at this stuff, okay? Where're the names of the people on the faculty? Have you run them past the women who got drawings? We're gonna have to do that."

THEY WERE STILL deep into the papers when Marshall came back, with Anderson a few feet behind. They were an odd pair: Harmon Anderson, an aging computer geek, pale as a boiled egg, and Marshall, as weather-beaten and brown as last year's oak leaf. "Might have something to look at," Marshall said gruffly. "Maybe you already thought of it."

"I don't think so," Anderson said. To Lucas: "Terry's smarter than he looks."