"Stay,"Lucas said.

AS HE GOT out of the car, Lucas spotted Ray Zahn leaning on the fender of his patrol car at the far end of the line. Zahn was watching the body bag being loaded into a Suburban. Lucas walked toward him. Zahn turned his head, nodded, and called, "Bringing them out."

"ME still in there?"

"Yeah, he helped take them down. He had them cut the rope so they could keep it around their necks to make sure that this rope was what killed them."

"You think any of the TV helicopters got pictures?" Lucas asked as he turned into the trees. Zahn trailed behind.

Zahn said, "Yeah. I don't know how much they could see, but if you go over there diagonally, look out over toward the field, there was an open line into the hanging tree. You don't see it right away because of the brush, but if you're up fifteen or twenty feet, looking down at an angle… that's exactly where the choppers were. They kept moving in and out of that hole."

"Shit."

"Maybe couldn't see too much."

"Anything was too much." They could see the hanging tree and a group of men around it. "The ME's the guy in the black coat?"

"Yeah. Henry Ford."

"Really? Henry Ford?"

"Yeah. He's out of Thief River. Good guy. Doesn't know shit about cars."

ANDERSON, THE SHERIFF, Dickerson, the BCA supervisor, and a few other men were huddled to the left of the second black bag, cigarette smoke streaming away from them.

"Cold," Zahn mumbled from behind him. "Radio says it's two below."

"I heard," Lucas said. "But it's gonna warm up tonight. Then maybe snow."

"We could use it," Zahn said.

Anderson had spotted them coming through the trees and turned to the ME, who had what looked like an unfiltered cigarette hanging from one lip, and said something, and Ford looked toward them. He was a white-haired man, hardly old enough to be so white-thirty-five, Lucas thought-with round gold grandpa glasses. Lucas came up, with Zahn a step behind, nodded and said, "Dr. Ford? Lucas Davenport." They shook gloved hands, and Lucas said, "Anything useful?"

"They almost certainly died here, if that's useful," Ford said, talking around the cigarette. "Cash's neck was cut by the rope and he bled down the length of his body and there were a few drips on the ground, in the snow under his right foot, so he was alive when they hung him up. I assume the same was true with Warr, but we'll know for sure later. The blood on Warr's face-I don't believe it's hers. I was worried about jarring anything loose, taking her down, so I took some swabs on the spot. We've got three short blond hairs, not hers, not Cash's."

"Good. Excellent. Any signs of drug use?"

Ford took the cigarette out of his mouth. "Both of them were raw around the nostrils, like they might be if they used cocaine. Cash had some scars on both of his forearms and Warr on her right forearm and both feet, that could be from needles. I couldn't swear to the cocaine because we haven't seen much of that here lately. We'll need a few hours to verify all of this. We'll do the full range of toxicology, of course."

"Okay. Quicker is better, though." He looked out toward the choppers, still hanging south of the crime scene. He could see them clearly, just above the brush. They would have had a straight shot of the bodies hanging from the tree. To Dickerson: "There's no chance that you had the bodies down before the choppers arrived?"

"No." The BCA man shook his head. "If they've got the right cameras, they got the shot. If we'd had another twenty minutes… "

"They tried to come right in and we waved them off," Anderson said. "Not much more we could do."

"Spilled milk," Lucas said.

THE BCACRIME scene crew was already working the site, and Lucas drifted over and spoke for a moment to the supervisor. "Nothing. No good footprints-everything is frozen, and the snow didn't hold anything," the man said. "The length of stride and the size of the foot would make the killer a male, but hell… we didn't think a woman dragged them back there anyway. Looks like just one guy, if that means anything."

"Yeah, it does," Lucas said.

"So it's one guy. Not much else-we're gonna clean the whole place out, though, right down to the dirt."

LUCAS TURNED TO go back to Dickerson, but the phone rang again and he pulled it out and punched it up.

"You're not going to believe it," Del said. "There was a guy staying at the Motel 6 the night before last, driving a '95 Jeep Cherokee, paid with cash. I've got his registration card, he shows Minnesota plates, including the tag number. I'm gonna run it, see what happens. The night clerk says he saw the guy again last night-that he pulled into the parking lot as if he were going to check in again, but he didn't. He just sat in the lot for a few seconds, then pulled away. The clerk says he was a white guy with a short beard, big guy, well-spoken. He was wearing a dark blue parka and a watch cap. If Letty's right on the time, he would have been in the motel parking lot about an hour earlier. Maybe a little less."

"Huh. Anybody else stay in the room since him?"

"One guy last night, who already checked out, and the room's been cleaned. We've got a credit card on the guy who checked out, so we should be able to get him for some prints. I locked up the room and put some duct tape on the doors."

"What else?"

"If I don't get something to eat in the next twelve minutes, my ass is gonna fall off."

"Got a place?"

"There's a cafe called the Red Red Robin. It comes reluctantly recommended."

"See you there in fifteen," Lucas said.

He went back to Dickerson and they stepped away from the crowd to talk. Lucas told him about the dope baggies at the Cash farmhouse. "I was just heading back down there," Dickerson said. "Anything else?"

"We interviewed the kid and she thinks the killer's car was a Jeep Cherokee," Lucas explained and outlined the conversation with Del. "So the guy at the motel saw the Jeep not long before Letty saw the lights out here on the road. It makes me nervous to say it, but it fits."

"Gotta process the room," Dickerson said. He was interested now. "Priority one."

"It's sealed with official duct tape," Lucas said. "Feel free."

"Do any good for us to talk with the kid?"

"I don't think so. She mostly just found them," Lucas said. "You can take a crack at her if you want."

"We got other stuff to do, if you think you got it all."

"I'm taking her back downtown, to see if I can keep her away from the reporters for a while," Lucas said. "We'll talk to her some more."

LETTY WAS SITTING on the hood of the Oldsmobile, apparently impervious to the cold, when Lucas got back to the road. "Couldn't breathe inside the car," she said. "But I stayed right here." She hopped off the passenger side, popped the door, and climbed in. "The bodies in the bags looked stiff, like bags full of boards," she said, as Lucas got in and fumbled out the key.

"Uh. You know a place called the Red Red Robin?"

"The Bird. Downtown. Nice place. My mom and I went there once for Thanksgiving."

"I'm going in to get a bite to eat with Del. I hate to leave you without your mother." He didn't mention that he hated even more to leave her with a pack of reporters outside her door. "Want to come?"

"Sounds good to me," Letty said. "If you're buying."

"I'm buying."

On the way, Letty asked, "They were stiff in the bags. Is that like, rigor mortis?"

Lucas shook his head. "No. They were frozen. Like Popsicles."

THE RED RED Robin was a storefront cafe with a robin painted on a swinging wooden sign outside the door, like the sign on an English pub. Inside, a dozen red-topped stools ran straight down a coffee bar, and behind those, and behind a sign that read, PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF, were sixteen booths covered with the same red leatherette as the stools. The place smelled of fried eggs, fried onions, fried potatoes, and fried beef. Eight other customers sat in three groups down the booths. They seemed to be arranged to keep an eye on Del, who sat halfway down the right-hand wall.