"Always worry about a trial," Lucas said. "But we're piling stuff up."

"Need a smoking gun, like your girlfriend says." Marshall said. "With everything else, if we had the gun, I'd be satisfied."

QATAR'S PRELIMINARY HEARING had been set for the following Monday. Nothing more turned up. Lab techs searched the debris tray on the furnace at the St. Pat's museum, found various bits and pieces of metal, but nothing that could be specifically identified as coming from clothing. Lane identified three cab trips from the general area of Qatar's house to the general area of Barstad's, but none of the drivers could identify Qatar as a passenger.

Lo Andrews made his statement, but, as an assistant county attorney pointed out, it was a statement by another heavy doper. Thirty cops were recruited to look inside every trash can and behind every fence within a half-mile of Barstad's. They found all kind of clothing and shoes, but none of it the kind that Qatar might have worn. It was all old and obviously abandoned, or was identified by the people who owned the trash cans.

"What if Qatar didn't do it?" Swanson asked.

"He did," Lucas said.

"I think we're in trouble," Marshall said. Marshall had begun to brood. "I'm not sure we should have taken him when we did," he said. "We could have thrown a net over him, done a full-court press. Sooner or later, he would have fucked up."

"By the time we might've done that, he'd already have spotted us," Lucas said. "And the longer we went with a full team on him, the more innocent he'd look."

MARSHALL STAYED IN town over the weekend. He got permission to enter Qatar's house under the warrant, and spent most of the time taking the house apart. He unscrewed every power outlet, dug through all the loose fiberglass insulation between the ceiling joists, looked up and down the chimney, and took the flue mechanism apart.

He called Lucas late Sunday afternoon. "You know what I got?"

"Something good?"

"I got a face full of glass splinters from the insulation, and I'm covered with soot. I look like I just crawled out of a Three Stooges movie, if somebody'd only hit me with a cream pie. There ain't nothing in the house."

"My fiancй is about to make some meat loaf with gravy and Bisquick biscuits," Lucas said. "Why don't you drag your sorry ass over here-we'll throw your clothes in the washer and give you something to eat."

"I'll do that," Marshall said.

MARSHALL LIKED THE food, and Weather liked Marshall.

"You know what we really wanted for Laura was not revenge," he told her. "All we wanted was justice. I don't think we're gonna get it. I think we're gonna get a lot of bureaucracy and treatment programs, and Qatar's probably gonna sue everybody in sight and get them all running around like chickens, and nobody's gonna want to hear about Laura. Nobody misses her but me and her folks and her family. She hadn't done anything; hell, she might've turned out to be a cook or something, though I think she woulda been better than that. But nobody misses her. If we could just get a little justice for her…"

"HE WAS JUST like all the good old guys back home," Weather told Lucas after Marshall left. Weather had grown up in a small town in northern Wisconsin. "They want to keep everything simple and right. I really like that, even if it's a fairy tale."

"Problem is, it is a fairy tale… at least mostly," Lucas said.

EARLY MONDAY MORNING, Lucas took a phone call at home from the county attorney's secretary: "Mr. Towson would like to talk to you as soon as possible, along with Marcy Sherrill. What would be a good time?"

"I'll come down right away-is he in now?"

"He's on his way. Would nine o'clock be okay?"

"That's fine. You'll call Marcy?"

Randall Towson, his chief deputy, Donald Dunn, and Richard Kirk, head of the criminal division, were waiting in Towson's office when Lucas and Marcy arrived. Towson pointed them at chairs and said, "The Qatar case. You know J. B. Glass is handling it?"

"I heard," Lucas said, and Marcy nodded.

"He's pretty good. We're wondering what the reaction would be if we talked to them about a plea-guilty to one count of second-degree with confinement at the mental hospital instead of Stillwater. He'd have to do his time if he were ever found competent."

"Uh, I think people would be pretty unhappy."

Kirk said, "But the guy's gotta be crazy, and our priority has to be to get him off the street. If we get the judge to do an upward departure, and he gets twenty, by the time he got out he'd probably be past it as a killer."

"Oh, bullshit," Lucas said irritably. "Most of them might stop killing when they get older, but not all of them do. He could come back out and start killing again in a month. If you get him twenty, and if he only had to do two-thirds of it, he'd be out when he's about fifty-one, fifty-two. If we take him on a first-degree, he has to do a minimum of thirty. Then I'd feel pretty safe. He wouldn't get out until he was in his late sixties."

"We'd do that, if we didn't feel a little shaky on the case," Dunn said.

"You gotta take some risks sometimes," Lucas said. Cops hated the conservative prosecution policies: The county attorney's office had a near one-hundred-percent conviction rate-which looked terrific on campaign literature-mostly because they prosecuted only the sure things. Everything else was dealt down or dismissed.

"We're not just risking a loss," Kirk pointed out. "If we lose him, he kills somebody else."

"But I'll tell you what," Marcy said. "If you go to J. B. with that kind of an offer, he's gonna smell blood. He'll turn you down. If you make an offer, it's gotta be tougher than that."

Towson shook his head. "How can we make it tougher? If we go up one notch to first degree, the way the mandatory sentencing works now, he'd go down for the max-same thing he'd get if he fought it. Without a death penalty, we've got nothing to deal with except dropping the degree of guilt."

"Why don't you talk to Wisconsin?" Lucas asked. "They have a couple of counts on the guy, they think. Work out a deal where if he takes one count of first degree over here, he serves his time, and Wisconsin drops out. If he doesn't agree, he goes to trial in both states. One of us'll get him."

Towson was drumming on his calendar pad with a yellow pencil. "That's an option," he said to Dunn. "Weak, though."

"The problem is, I've looked at the Wisconsin cases, and they've got less than we do. About the only thing that connects him to Wisconsin is that he was at Stout."

"And Aronson's pearls and the method of the murders and the fact that they were buried together. There's really a lot there," Lucas said.

"Tell you what," Towson said. "We won't make any move on a deal until we're through looking at everything. If you've got anything else, roll it out. And maybe J. B. will make the first offer."

"Who's handling the preliminary?" Lucas asked.

"I am," Kirk said. "We're just gonna sketch the case, put Whitcomb up and get a statement about the jewelry, and that pretty much ought to do it. You coming?"

"Yeah, I want to look at him again," Lucas said. "He's a strange duck."

MARSHALL WAS BACK for the preliminary hearing, dressed in a brown corduroy suit and fancy brown cowboy boots, his hair slicked down.

"You look like Madonna's boyfriend," Marcy told him.

"Aw, shoot, you get off my case," he said. He didn't quite dig his toe into the tile.

The hearing was routine-Qatar in a dark suit and tie, but his face drawn and white, his eyes ringed as though he'd been weeping-until Randy Whitcomb was rolled in.

Randy, strapped into a wheelchair, looking out at the chamber under a lowered brow, scanning the rows of press people and gawkers, finally found Lucas and fixed his gaze. Marcy, sitting next to Lucas, whispered, "Is he looking at you?"