"What if we busted in with our guns out, and Clara was sitting at the kitchen table eating oatmeal?" Andreno asked.

"She'd probably shoot us both and throw our bodies in the septic tank," Lucas said.

"So, let's go see the sheriff."

MELLAN COUNTY SHERIFF Errol Lamp was not an impulsive man, and when Lucas and Andreno showed up at the county courthouse in Hopewell, he questioned their credentials and had a deputy check with the feds in St. Louis. Eventually, he got to Mallard, who told him exactly where his bread was buttered, and who buttered it. As they were talking, a woman stuck her head in the office and said, "Errol, you know that Porsche out by the Rinkers'? It's these guys."

The sheriff looked at them with his slow eyes and said, "You went by the Rinkers', huh?"

"Yeah. How'd you know?"

"Neighborhood crime watch," the sheriff said. "They report anything suspicious. Like a Porsche. Lot of drug runners drive Porsches."

Seconds before Lucas would have lost both his patience and his temper, Lamp assigned a deputy to take them around the county and, Lucas thought, to fill him in later.

"BEEN TEN FEDERAL people here to see Rinker's mother, and none of them went in believing what we said, but they all came out believing," said the deputy, whose name was Tony McCoy. McCoy was a heavy, sweating man in khakis, with a straw Stetson, a rodeo belt-buckle, and deep-blue cowboy boots. They were in his Jeep Grand Cherokee.

"What's that?" Andreno asked.

"That's she's crazier'n a goddamn cuckoo clock. She won't have no idea what you're talking about."

"So let's not go there," Lucas said. "Let's go to the school."

"The school?"

"Yeah, you know-brick building full of kids."

McCoy gave him a hard look, and Lucas smiled into it. Lucas had kindly blue eyes, but his smile often came off as a threat, and McCoy flinched away. "Wanna go to the school, the school it is," he muttered.

The Mellan Consolidated School was larger than Lucas expected, with two academic wings built around a gymnasium. The principal was a thin, youngish woman with carefully colored hair, a single eyebrow that extended straight across her brow ridge, and glasses that sat a quarter-inch too far down her narrow nose. She had the habit of pushing them back up with her middle finger, and as Andreno said later, "Every time I looked at her, she was flippin' me off."

"We have cooperated with a number of FBI requests and interviews, and frankly, we just don't have much," she said. "There was an agent here named Josh Franklin. If you were to talk to him…"

"We're looking for different angles," Lucas said. "If you know anybody who knew Clara Rinker, or any of the Rinkers-"

"I'm sorry, but I'm about the same age as Clara, so when she left here, I was in ninth or tenth grade in Weston, Oklahoma," she said. "We only have two teachers here who remember her, and so far, nobody's found them helpful."

"If we could just get a couple of minutes with them…"

"Of course. We're happy to cooperate," she said unhappily.

The two teachers, both women, both in their late fifties or early sixties, remembered only one new thing. The older of the two said, "It might not mean anything at all, but one thing I do remember about Clara, and never told anybody else because it hadn't happened yet-and it's not exactly about Clara-is that Ted Baker got all his guns stolen last month and his guard dogs were shot. This was before Clara showed up in St. Louis. Ted was only two or three years older than Clara. And he used to run with Clara's older brother, Roy."

"Huh," Lucas said. "All his guns?"

He looked at the deputy, who scratched his head and said, "That's right. We handled the break-in. I figured it was one of those gun nuts that Baker hangs out with, if he didn't do it himself, for the insurance. I didn't know that he knew Clara."

"He did," the teacher said. "Don't tell anybody I said so."

McCoy said he knew where they could find Baker. "If he's not at the landfill, shootin' rats, or out pluckin' chickens, he's usually around his house. He's got some new dogs, and he's training them."

MCCOY DROVE THEM from Hopewell back to Tisdale. They stopped at a Dairy Queen and got chocolate-dipped cones, agreeing that they must be low-cal because they were ice milk, not ice cream, and then rode out the west side of town on the county road. Baker's house was a close cousin to the Rinker homestead, a beat-up, seventy-year-old frame house with a tired garage off to the side. The house was surrounded by a waist-high chain-link fence, and two young German shepherds were staked out behind it.

McCoy ran down the driveway as far as the gate, then leaned on his horn. Baker, a rawboned man with shaggy brown hair and a two-week beard, stepped out onto the porch. He had a can of Budweiser in his hand, squinted at them, pointed a finger at the dogs, who dropped back to their stomachs, and walked up the driveway.

They talked over the fence.

"Never occurred to me that it could have been Clara, though it sounds stupid to say it," he told them when Lucas explained why they were there. "I didn't even hear about her coming back to St. Louis until a couple weeks after I was hit. I never put it together."

"You think it was her?" McCoy asked. "You got some crazy friends running around out there."

Baker grinned at them through light-green teeth and said, "Shit, McCoy, there's nothing wrong with those boys."

"Yeah, like Harvey?"

"Well, Harv…" Baker considered the name reluctantly.

"Harv's a couple cans short of a six-pack, is what he is," McCoy said.

"Well, Harvey… tell you the truth, it crossed my mind that it might be one of them, except I can't think who'd shoot the dogs. Takes a cold man to shoot the dogs. Even Harvey wouldn't."

"You think Clara could do it?" Lucas asked.

"I'll tell you what," Baker said. "The last time I seen Clara was five or six years ago-she came through to see her mama, and I bumped into her down to the root-beer stand. She asked me what I was doing, and I said, 'Shootin', and working at Logan's,' and that's about the end of it. We wasn't, like, good friends, not that I wouldn't have liked to fuck her, if you know what I mean."

"Know what you mean," McCoy said, hitching up his khakis.

"She had these nice little hard tits like cupcakes," Baker continued. "And you got the feeling she'd probably fuck back at you."

"The dogs?" Lucas repeated.

"I don't know. If she can shoot all those people she's supposed to, I guess she could shoot the dogs. Somebody did," Baker said. "Right in the head, bam bam."

"Anybody figure out what kind of gun it was?"

"It were a. 22," Baker said. "I couldn't bring myself to dig out the slugs, but I looked at the holes and I'd say it was a standard-velocity. 22. Good tight entry wounds, no sign of bullet breakup, no exit wound. Good shootin', too. They never knew what hit them."

"And you haven't seen her for all that time."

"Nope. Kinda like to, though, if you catch her. I might go see her in jail. She was a nude dancer before she was a killer. I bet she's got some stories to tell."

"Bet she does," McCoy said, nodding. His tongue flickered over his lips. Tasty stories.

"Did she know about your guns?" Lucas asked.

"Oh, sure. Pretty much everybody around here knows I got an interest," Baker said. "I used to hang with her brother, and she was over here a time or two when we were gunnin'. I'm the one who taught her brother how to reload."

"So you were friends," Andreno said.

"Nah. Not with Clara. She was around, because Roy took her around-I personally think Roy may have been knocking a little off her, you know what I mean?-but she was standoffish, even when she was little. She'd just look at you. I didn't have much to do with her."