"Check the Oelwein address?" Lucas asked.

"No, but I will. Bet you a buck it's fake."

THE MEHAD arrived, and after fussing around, checked the blood puddles and body temps. Sorrell and his wife had certainly been killed sometime after midnight, he said, and after he got some weights and checked the accuracy of the house thermostat and the floor-level temperatures, he said he could probably do better than that.

"Off the top of my head, I'd say they were killed this morning," he said. "They're a little too warm to have lain on the floor all night, and the blood is a little too liquid. But we'll have to do the numbers before we know for sure."

Sheriff Wilson was standing by the door and said, "Here come the feds. Just what we needed."

"Who?"

"Lanny Cole and Jim Green. Pretty good guys, actually."

"Mmm. I know Cole, I don't know Green."

Del came back and said, "There's no such address in Oelwein. It's fake. There is a Curtis Frank, and he says he sold the truck for cash. I talked to Des Moines homicide cops and they'll take a picture of Sorrell down to his house for an ID." He saw the men in suits coming up to the door and said, "Feebs."

COLE, THE FBI agent, shook hands with the sheriff and said, "How ya doing, Brad?" and nodded at Lucas and asked, "They got any more jobs over there at the BCA?"

"I got a slot for a female investigator," Lucas said.

"I can investigate females," Cole said. "So what happened here?"

Wilson and Lucas took him through it, Lucas connecting Sorrell with the hangings in Custer County. "I gotta call in on that," Cole said, squatting next to Sorrell. "We got civil rights guys on the way to take a look at it. You say Hale did it?"

"Most likely."

Cole nodded, and looked at his partner who said, "We knew something was seriously screwed up."

"Didn't know it was that screwed up," Cole said. He looked down at the body again and said, "Goddamnit, Hale. What'd you do?"

"You guys want in on this act?" Lucas asked.

Cole shook his head. "We're gonna want to know all about it, if you could forward your findings… but we're not going to get directly involved. We just don't have the manpower, what with discovering Arab terror plots at the Washington County courthouse."

Sheriff Wilson looked at Lucas and said, "Doesn't make any sense for us to do it-it doesn't sound like the killer's from around here. So you got it. I'll call John McCord right now, and ask you in."

"Good enough," Lucas said. "If your guys come up with anything, they can pass it up to me, and I'll coordinate with Lanny and Jim." To the feds: "Any problem getting your files on the kidnapping?"

"I'll talk to the SAC from here. We should be able to give you the file this afternoon."

Back to Wilson: "Can you handle the press down here?"

"I can do that."

"So we're set."

THE FBIAGENTS visited, nothing more, and at noon they left. A BCA crime scene crew arrived from the Twin Cities, and Lucas eventually joined Del in turning over the house, looking at pieces of paper. They found nothing of interest, but couldn't get into three of the Sorrells' four computers.

The two desk-top machines, one in a library and another in a home office, and a laptop in Sorrell's briefcase, were password-protected, and would have to be cracked by computer people. A fourth laptop, apparently belonging to Mary Sorrell, was not protected, but contained nothing but letters, a personal calendar, and a few documents relating to a heart disease research foundation.

Lucas was returning Sorrell's machine to the briefcase when he found an envelope with a bank letterhead. Inside were twenty separate receipts for bank drafts, each for $50,000, with each check made to a different, major Las Vegas hotel.

"A million dollars," Del said. "High roller. Maybe that had something to do with the kidnapping? Gambling debts or something?"

"These can't be all for him," Lucas said, looking at the receipts. "Every one of the hotels is different."

"Maybe it's a business thing, a convention."

"It's weird. We oughta look at it."

AT ONE O'CLOCK, with Del getting restless, Lucas was ready to leave. He turned control of the house over to Carl Driscoll, the head of the BCA crime scene crew, who said he'd get the computers to St. Paul. "If anything comes up, call me," Lucas told him. "All the routine stuff, get it in your own computer-I think Del and I are probably headed back to Custer County, and you can e-mail it to me."

The sheriff had just come back up the hill, after talking with reporters, shook his head and said, "This is gonna get goofy. The governor's statement… it's gonna get goofy."

"Never was gonna be any other way," Lucas said. "Not after those two people went up in that tree."

Lucas got his coat, collected Del, and as they headed for the door, saw a fortyish man in a gray overcoat walking around the line of cop cars in the driveway, closely trailed by a deputy. He was carrying a wallet-sized box, and when he saw the sheriff step out on the porch with Lucas, he called, "Hey, Brad."

"George… you heard about Hale, I guess." Wilson said to Lucas, "Hale's lawyer."

"My God. I was at a wedding, Ken Hendrick's kid," the lawyer said, as he came up to them. He looked back down the hill-"I got here as fast as I could, but I had a heck of a time getting through your boys down there."

"Not much for you to do, here, George."

"Yes, there is. A week ago, Hale gave me a box… " He handed the box to the sheriff. It was about four inches by five, an inch thick. A tough-looking lock was set flush to the polished steel surface at one edge. "He said, I swear to God, that if he should die, I should give this to the authorities. I asked him if it was anything illegal, and he said no, it's just some information that he felt should come to official attention. I thought maybe it was business, but now… "

"What's in it?"

"I don't know," the lawyer said. "He gave it to me, told me to file it and forget it. He said it couldn't be opened without destroying the contents, unless you used a key. He said the key was on his key ring with his car keys."

Wilson looked at the box, then handed it to Lucas. "Ever see anything like that?"

"Yeah. It looks like a magnetic-media safe, for carrying around computer Smart Cards and so on. It's bigger than most of them, and I've never seen a lock before."

"His key ring is on the bedside table," Del said. "I checked to see if there was a Jeep key on it."

"Let's go look," Lucas said.

"Maybe we ought to do it in a lab," Wilson said doubtfully.

"It's not a bomb. It's something he wanted us to get," Lucas said.

DEL RETRIEVED THE key ring, which contained one key with a circular blade. Lucas popped the top on the safe, and inside was an old-fashioned 3.5-inch computer floppy disk.

"Laptop," Del said.

They took Mary Sorrell's IBM laptop out of her briefcase, put it on the floor of the home office. The base unit had no floppy drive, but they found the drive in a separate pouch and plugged it in. Lucas brought the laptop up, slipped the floppy into the drive, and found one file. He clicked on the file. Microsoft Word began opening on the screen, and then the file itself.

A note-a brief note.

Tammy Sorrell was kidnapped by Joe Kelly, Deon Cash, and Jane Warr. Cash is a driver for the Gene Calb truck rehabilitation service in the town of Broderick, near Armstrong, Minnesota. Jane Warr is a card dealer at the Moose Bay casino near Armstrong. Warr and Cash live together in a farmhouse in Broderick. They killed Tammy on Dec. 22 and buried her somewhere nearby. The exact location is unknown. This information has been confirmed.

"Jeez. There it is," Wilson said, looking up at Lucas. "Where did he get the information? The FBI says that the kidnappers never called. The feds even started looking at Hale's background to see if he might have had something to do with Tammy… you know."