The generally upset state didn't have the look of deliberation, of a search-it simply looked like bad housekeeping.

"Hey… " The BCA guy came up behind him. "Look at this." He led the way to the kitchen. On the way he said, "I'm Joe Barin, by the way, we were introduced… "

"This morning," Lucas said.

"Here," Barin said. "Be careful where you put your feet. We've got some blood spatter."

He was pointing into a wastebasket on the floor by the kitchen door. When Lucas looked inside, he saw two tiny Ziploc-type bags, the kind used by hardware stores to hold small collections of screws, washers, cotter pins, and the like, and by dope dealers to parcel out measured amounts of cocaine, heroin, and crystal methadrine. There were no cotter pins in sight.

"You pull one out?"

"Not yet. You can see there's some residue. I wouldn't stake my child's life on it, but it's coke."

"They were dealing?"

"We looked around, can't find any more baggies. So maybe just using. Or maybe we'll find more stuff later… and then, we've got these clothes." He pointed to another corner, at a heap of clothing. "It's all cut to shreds. This is where the killer cut the clothes off them."

"So he comes in with a gun, cuffs them up, tapes them up, then cuts the clothes off them."

"Beats the shit out of the guy, of Cash."

"Beats the shit out of Cash, and then drags them both out the door, and throws them into his truck, and takes them down the road, and hangs them."

"Yeah."

"Tough guy."

"Fruitcake."

LUCAS LOOKED AROUND the kitchen for a few more seconds: nothing for him here, that he could see. The crew might get something. "What's upstairs?"

"Three bedrooms and two bathrooms," Barin said. "One of the bedrooms doesn't look too used. One of the other ones has a double bed, and there's some clothes hanging in a closet, a man's clothes, and some stuff in the bathroom, but it doesn't look like it's been used lately. The clothes are not Cash's, they're for a bigger guy. The third bedroom, the big one, was their regular bedroom. Clothes for both Warr and Cash. Lots of clothes. Lots of cashmere."

"Let's get the crime scene crew over quick as we can," Lucas said. "Tear this place apart. If they were dealing, that would explain a lot. Could be punishment killings."

"Okay." Barin hesitated. "I don't exactly understand the chain-of-command here… "

"Where's Dickerson?"

"Still out at the scene, I guess."

"He's in charge on your side, I'm running my own thing. What I just suggested was… a suggestion." Lucas grinned at him. "Of course, I do talk to the commissioner five or six times a day."

Barin shrugged. "I'm not big on bureaucracy. Tearing the place up is the right thing to do."

"The guy with me, Del, knows every drug hideout invented by modern man. I'll bring him by later on."

"Good enough."

The deputy came to the door. "This young lady… " Lucas and Barin turned. Letty was standing behind the deputy, looking around with interest. "… says she has to use the bathroom."

"Uh… not here. I'll run you home," Lucas said. To Barin: "So you know what you're doing. I'll get Del up here."

"Okay." Barin was looking curiously at Letty. "Is this the young lady who found… " He tipped his head to the north.

"Yeah," Lucas said.

Barin said, "For a second, I thought she might be your daughter. She's got exactly your eyes."

"ICAN WALK back to the cafe," Letty said to Lucas. "It's only two blocks."

"I'll take you," Lucas said. "C'mon."

On the way out, Letty pointed at the wide-screen Panasonic television in the corner. "That used to be in the window at Lute's. You know how much that cost?"

"Thousand, fifteen-hundred?"

Letty snorted. "It was on sale for nine-thousand, nine-ninety-nine. Ten thousand bucks. High-definition TV. Sat there for six weeks, and then one day, it was outa there. Didn't know it came here, though."

Lucas looked at Barin, raised his eyebrows. Barin nodded-he'd check. A ten-thousand-dollar television would give weight to the drug-dealing proposition.

"So let's go," Lucas said to Letty.

But outside, Letty said, "I don't really have to pee. I just wanted to get a look around."

"Well, Jesus Christ," Lucas said, irritated.

"I'm trying to help. You need all you can get," she said. Then, "Why couldn't I pee here?"

"They have to process the whole place. Crime scene process. Like the shows on television. Bathrooms are good places to process, because they have good surfaces for fingerprints and so on. You can sometimes get DNA out of them."

"Okay." She nodded. "Good reason."

"Let's get you home," Lucas said.

6

LETTY'S HOUSE WAS visible from Cash's: a gray spot on the bowl-rim of the horizon.

"What the heck are they doing?" Letty asked, peering out the passenger window, as they drove out of town.

"What?" Lucas ducked his head to look through her window. Out over one of the farm fields, directly south of the line of cop cars at the crime scene, two helicopters were hovering thirty feet above the ground, kicking up a small storm of ice crystals and dirt as they moved slowly sideways, in line, toward the ditch and the police cars.

"Television," Lucas said. He looked at his watch: not yet two o'clock. The newsies had been quick. "Taking pictures." He glanced over at her. "You really don't have to use the bathroom?"

"Not really."

"Okay. You better stick with me for a while."

ASHERIFF'S CAR was parked across the side road, and Lucas held his ID out the window as he turned in. The deputy stopped to look through the windshield-it was one of the guys who Lucas had released from the hanging site-and waved them through. They continued down the track toward the cop cars.

There were fewer cars now, but as they pulled up, they saw three men carrying a black body bag through the trees.

"Are those the dead people?" Letty asked, peering out over the dashboard.

"One of them," Lucas said. He popped the door and was about to get out of the car when his cell phone rang. He swiveled back into the car and punched the phone: "Yeah?"

"Lucas. Neil Mitford." The governor's aide. There was electronic noise in his voice. Again, Lucas remembered, they were on the edge of nowhere. "Anything yet?"

"One of the victims, the black guy, was in jail down in Missouri until he moved up here. That was probably a year and a half ago. The guys from Bemidji are running that down. And at the house where they lived, there're a couple of baggies in the wastebasket, small ones like the kind used for street drugs, that show some white residue-probably cocaine."

"Excellent," Mitford said. "Is it too early to start spinning out a dope story?"

"Don't let the governor do it. You want to be able to deny it if you have to," Lucas said. "But I think it'll hold up. They're just bringing the bodies out of the woods now."

"Any film?"

Lucas told him about the helicopters: "I don't know what they could see from out there. They'll be able to get pictures of the bodies coming out in the body bags."

"But nothing of the trees?"

"I don't know. I'll ask and get back to you."

"We're pretty anxious," Mitford said.

"I'll get back," Lucas said. He rang off and turned to Letty: "This time, you stay in the car."

"It's a free country," she said.

"You step out on the crime scene, which this is, and I'll put you in a sheriff's car and send you back to Armstrong to sit in the sheriff's office and think about it for a few more hours," he said.

"Not fair," she said.

"So take a couple aspirins and lie down," Lucas said.

As he started climbing out again, Letty said, "Ex-con with bags of cocaine, huh? That's a pretty picture."