"See you later," Lucas said. "Thanks." He and Del fell in behind Holme, and as they followed her along a cream-painted concrete-block hallway, Lucas mentioned that they'd just rented cars from her husband.

"I hope you counted your fingers after you shook hands with him," she said cheerfully. "Carl can be a sharp one."

The lounge was the last door on the right, a pale yellow concrete cubicle with Office Max waiting-room chairs, vending machines, and a slender girl in jeans who had her face in an Outdoor Life magazine.

"Letty, dear?" Holme said. "You've got visitors."

LETTY WEST TURNED her head and took them in.

She was blond, her hair pulled back tight in a short ponytail. She had warm blue eyes that Lucas thought, for an instant, he recognized from somewhere else, some other time; and an almost oval face, but with a squared jaw and freckles. She wore jeans and a blue sweatshirt and dirt-colored gym shoes that had once been white nylon. A Coke can sat on an end table at her right hand. She might have been a female Huckleberry Finn, except for a cast of sadness about her eyes-a Pieta-like sadness, strange for a girl so young. Lucas had seen it before, usually in a woman who'd lost a child.

A good-looking kid, Lucas thought, except for the weathering. Her face and hands were rough, and if you hadn't been able to see her preteen figure, you might have thought she was a twenty-year-old farmer's daughter, with too much time hoeing beans.

"These gentlemen are here to see you from St. Paul," Holme said. She was stooping over like older women did when they approached younger children, her voice too kindly.

"Cops?" Letty asked.

"State policemen from St. Paul," Holme said.

"Cops," Letty said.

Lucas looked at the kid and said, "Hi," and then to Holme, "We can take it from here."

"Okay," she said. Holme looked once at Del, as though he might be carrying a flea, and went back out the door. Lucas had the impression that she might have stopped just outside, so he said to Del, "Did I see a water fountain in the hallway?"

"Let me check," Del said, smiling. He stuck his head out, looked both ways, and then said, "Nope. Nothing there." More quietly, "She's going."

THE LOUNGE HAD two candy machines and two soda machines-one Coke, one Pepsi-and smelled like floor wax and spilled coffee, with a hint of flatulence. Lucas asked the girl, "You want another Coke?"

"This one wasn't mine," she said, indicating the Coke with her elbow.

"Well, you want a first one then?"

"If you're buying," she said.

He had to smile-something about her dead-seriousness made him smile-and he got a Diet Coke for himself, tossed a can of sugared Coke to Del, and she said, "I'll take a Pepsi, if that's okay."

"That's fine." He slipped a dollar into the machine and pushed the Pepsi button.

"Where's your mother?" Del asked, as he popped the top on his Coke.

"Probably down at the Duck Inn," Letty said. "We figured I could handle this on my own."

"Yeah?" Del's eyebrows went up.

"She gets a little out of control sometimes," Letty said.

Lucas asked, "She's still your mother. We could call her."

"Not much point," Letty said. "She's probably pretty drunk by now. She's been at it since ten o'clock."

"She drinks a little, huh?" Del asked. Del had dropped onto a couch next to the door.

Letty took a delicate sip of her Pepsi, and then said, "No, she drinks a lot. Almost all the time."

"Where's your father?"

She shrugged. "Who knows? Last anybody heard, he was in Phoenix. That was when I was a little kid."

"Ah," Lucas said. "That's tough… Listen, did you talk to some sheriff's deputies this morning? Make a statement?"

"Yeah."

"So what'd you tell them?"

Her face went dark and her blue eyes skittered away from his. "About the bodies."

"Let's start right from the beginning. Last night you were in your house… "

THE NIGHT BEFORE, Letty said, she had been in bed on the second floor of the house, just across the drainage ditch from West Ditch Road. Although the windows on the north and west sides of the house had been boarded up, and the rooms closed to cut heating bills, she had her own room on the east side of the house, and still had a window.

She was in bed, asleep, when a vehicle went past the house on West Ditch Road. That never happened in the winter. The road was used by a local farmer as back access to a couple of fields, but was used mostly for ditch maintenance, and the strangeness of a passing vehicle was enough to wake her up.

"When I heard the car, I was afraid it was Mom," she said. "She was out last night and it was windy and there was a little snow and if she missed the driveway… sometimes… I don't know. If she was drinking and she tried to turn around on that ditch road, she could roll the car into the ditch or something. So I got up and looked out the window and was watching the car and it stopped up the road a way, and I thought it was starting to turn around, and I was really worried, but then I heard my mom coughing downstairs and I went and called her. She came to the bottom of the stairs and I told her somebody just went by on the ditch road and they might be lost. She came up and looked out the window and we watched it, and it stayed there for a while, and then it drove out."

"This was about midnight?"

"Two minutes after. When I woke up I looked at my clock, and it said twelve-zero-two."

"You didn't see the people?" Lucas asked.

"I didn't even see the truck, except for the lights. The wind was blowing and all I could see was snow and the lights."

"How long did you watch the lights?" Del asked.

"Quite a while. I don't know, exactly. I didn't look at the clock before I went to bed."

"You didn't see it again, after it drove out?"

"Nope. Never saw it again."

In the morning, she told them, she'd gotten up to run her trap line. She ran thirty traps up the ditch, and in the surrounding marshes, for muskrat. She'd get up at five in the morning, collect the day's catch of 'rats, reset the traps, dump the 'rats into a garbage bag, and haul them back to the house by seven. Since it didn't get light until seven-thirty or so, she'd do it all by the light of a rechargeable flash.

This morning, after she'd run the traps, she'd climbed the bank onto the ditch road to walk back to her house. She hadn't been all that curious about the car from the night before, until she saw the tracks in the snow, and the lines in the snow where somebody had dragged something back into the trees.

"What'd you think they were?" Lucas asked.

"What I thought of was bodies," Letty said, holding his eyes. "That's the first thing I thought of. It scared me in the dark-but when people throw their garbage away out here, they don't haul it down the ditch road. They just stop on the side of the highway and heave it into the ditch. They don't hide it. So I couldn't think of anything else but… bodies."

"So then… "

"WELL, IWENT back there, and I didn't see them at first, because it was still dark." Her eyes were wide now, fixed on Lucas, as she remembered and relived it. "I came to this place where there was a big square of messed-up snow with nothing in it. I just, I don't know, I guess I saw a dark thing, hanging, and I lifted up the light, and there they were. The black guy's eyes were open. Scared me really bad. I ran back out to the road and got my 'rats and ran all the way back to the house and woke up my mom. She didn't believe me at first, but then she did, and we called the cops."

"That was it?"

"Yup." She nodded and took a hit of the Pepsi.

"Did your mom go down to the trees to look?"

"No. She was afraid to. She doesn't like dead things. She doesn't even like to drop off my 'rats for me, and they're inside a bag and everything."