10

LUCAS SLEPT FOR four hours. Then the alarm buzzer went, and he groaned, and Weather kicked him and said, "The clock, the clock," and he groaned again and swatted the clock hard enough to trigger the snooze feature for the next thirty years. Weather said, "Get up, you'll go back to sleep, get up."

"No, just give me a minute."

"Get up, c'mon, you're keeping me awake."

"Jeez… " He rolled out of bed, stunned by the early hour, staggered to the window, looked at the indoor-outdoor thermometer-it was stuck at -2°F-then parted the wooden slats of the shade and peered out at a surly, pitch-dark morning. The sun wasn't due up for a while, but a streetlight provided enough illumination that he could see the bare branches moving on a lilac bush. Not only bitterly cold, but windy. Good.

He turned back to the bed, but Weather said, "Go in the bathroom."

"Miserable bitch," he muttered, and heard her cruel laugh as he tottered off.

Lucas didn't care for mornings, unless he came on them from behind. He liked the dawn hours, if he could go home and go to bed after the sun came up. But getting up before the sun wasn't natural. Science had proven that early birds weren't as intelligent, sexually vigorous, or good-looking as night owls, although he couldn't tell Weather-she cheerfully got up every workday morning at five-thirty, and was often cutting somebody open by seven o'clock.

THE GOVERNOR WAS an early bird. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled two careful turns-a concession to the fact that it was Saturday-dark gray slacks and black loafers. A pale gray jacket hung from an antique coat tree in a corner of his office. He looked fine, but Lucas could take some thin comfort from Neil Mitford, who looked like a bad car-train accident. He was wearing jeans and a tattered tweed jacket over a black-and-gold Iowa Hawkeyes sweatshirt, and had lost his shoes somewhere-he wore gray-and-red woolen hunting socks. John McCord, the BCA superintendent, huddled in a corner in khakis and a sweater with a red-nosed reindeer on the chest. Rose Marie Roux was still among the missing.

"Coffee?" Henderson asked cheerfully. "Wonder where Rose Marie is?"

"Probably killed by the cold," Lucas grumped. "Or run over by a car in the dark. Gimme about six sugars."

"Good to get up at this time, get going," Henderson said. "You get a four-hour jump on everybody. You're on them before they know what hit them."

"Unless you have a heart attack and die," Lucas said.

McCord had a sixteen-ounce Diet Pepsi in his coat pocket, his own source of caffeine. Mitford drained one cup of coffee in fifteen seconds, and poured another. The governor settled behind his desk and sipped. "What's going on, and what do we do about it?"

Lucas outlined the theory, upon which everyone agreed-that Sorrell had somehow learned who had killed his child, and had killed them in return.

"That'd take some brass balls," McCord said.

"He might be like that," Mitford said. "I did some research… "

Rose Marie slipped into the room, said, "Sorry-it was just so damn cold and dark," and found a chair. Henderson gave her a one-minute update, and then turned back to Mitford. "You were saying?"

"I pulled everything I could find on the guy. After he graduated from Cal Tech, he turned down a bunch of heavy-duty jobs and enlisted in the Army. He spent six years as an infantry and then a Special Forces officer. There are some hints that he had combat decorations, but there wasn't a war going on, so… "

"So he did snoop-and-poops and maybe cut a few throats," Henderson said. He seemed pleased with the snoop-and-poops and the throat cutting.

"That's what I think," Mitford said.

"So." Henderson picked up a ballpoint pen and toyed with it, leaned way back, and asked the ceiling, "When do we take him? We have enough, I think."

"We should get the DNA back tomorrow morning," Lucas said. "We could go tomorrow, but if anything else comes up, it wouldn't hurt to wait until Monday."

Mitford seemed startled. "Monday?" He looked at Henderson. "We can't wait until Monday."

Henderson was shaking his head and said, "Lucas, when I said when… I meant before breakfast, or after? We can't wait until tonight, or tomorrow. Washington is killing us. Fifty states, you know, CBS… "

"Yeah, yeah, I know it."

"They want me to go over to Channel Three and do a segment at eleven o'clock," Henderson said. "Then they're switching out to Fargo for a segment with Washington. I want to be able to say that we've made an arrest, and I want to say something about what we think happened. If I do that, we'll fuck the guy. Washington. I'd love to fuck him. Love it." He turned in his chair, once all the way around, and then again, his pink tongue stuck on his bottom lip as if tasting the word fuck, his glasses glittering from the overhead lights. "Love to fuck him."

"It'd be good," Mitford said. "And it'd be national."

Lucas began, "If we're trying to build a case… "

"It doesn't matter. Look, we've got X amount of information to arrest him with, and to get a DNA sample from him. Then we've got to wait a day or two to process his sample. So… why not grab him now?"

"Just… " Lucas looked at Rose Marie. "Doesn't seem orderly."

"Can I get some of that coffee?" Rose Marie asked. "I talk better when I can see."

"Of course," Henderson said. "Let me… "

"Lucas, everybody else is right and you're wrong," Rose Marie said as Henderson poured her a cup. "We've got two things going: a big crime and a big publicity problem. We can strangle the publicity problem before it gets out of control, and not do much harm to the criminal case."

"If we do hurt the criminal case," Mitford said, "what we've done is, we've fucked up a case against a bright, hard-working guy who employs hundreds of Minnesotans, and who killed a couple of thugs who kidnapped and presumably cold-bloodedly murdered his daughter. So fuckin' what?"

Lucas said to Mitford, "Don't get your shorts in a knot," and then, to the governor, "You say take him, we'll take him. It's seven-thirty now, I can kick Del out of bed, we'll go down and get him. We can have him by, say, ten at the latest, and you can make your announcement. I've got Neil's cell-phone number, if he'll be with you."

"I will," Mitford said. He jumped up and rubbed his hands together like a cold man in front of a fire. "Hot damn. We came, we saw, we kicked ass. And… he's a Republican."

"Poor bastard," said Rose Marie.

"You making the call?" Lucas asked, looking at Henderson.

"Get him," Henderson said.

DEL WAS AS much a night owl as Lucas, and was not happy when Lucas shook him out of bed. Del's wife, Cheryl, was already awake and writing bills in the kitchen when Lucas arrived, and she sent Lucas back to the bedroom to do the dirty work. Lucas stuck his head in the door and cooed, "Get up, sleepyhead. Time to work."

Nothing.

"Sleepyhead, get up… "

"I hope you die of leprosy," Del moaned. He pushed himself up on his elbows. "What do you want?"

"It's not what I want," Lucas said. "It's what the governor and Rose Marie and McCord want. They want Sorrell busted at ten o'clock this morning, and you and I are going down, with a couple of BCA guys in another car, and we're gonna drag him kicking and screaming out of his mansion."

"Can't you do it by yourself?"

"I could, but then I'd feel bad, knowing that you were up here in a nice warm bed sleeping late while I was dragging my ass all the way down to Rochester."

"All right." He dropped back on the pillow. "Just give me one more minute."

Lucas wasn't buying that routine.

JENKINS AND SHRAKE were the BCA's official flatfeet. Most of the other agents had degrees in psychology or social work or accounting or computer science, and worked out for two hours a day in the gym. Jenkins and Shrake had graduated from Hennepin Community College with Law Enforcement Certificates, and, as far as anyone knew, that was the last time either had cracked a book that didn't have Tom Clancy's name on the cover. Both of them smoked and drank too much, both had been divorced a couple of times, and Lucas knew for sure that they both carried saps. They were the pair most often sent to arrest people because, they admitted, they liked the work.