"Oh, yeah," Lucas said. "She would know about drugs."

"How come you guys drive for Calb?" Del asked Ruth.

Ruth shrugged. "Extra money. Pizza money. Easy money. We follow the delivery car in my Corolla. Fifty cents a mile, so we get fifty dollars for a hundred-mile round trip, and we can do that on three gallons of gas. We don't have a lot of money here."

"You did it a lot?"

"A couple of times a week," she said.

"Is Calb straight?" Lucas asked.

"Yes. He's a very nice man, in a… car-mechanic way," Ruth said, meeting his eyes. She had pale eyes, like the moons you could see in daylight. "His wife sometimes helps us out, when we're checking on older people, shut-ins."

"You don't think… if Cash and Warr were involved in a kidnapping, you don't think that Calb would have been involved?"

"Good gosh, no. I mean, the girl… is dead, I guess."

Lucas and Del both nodded.

Ruth continued. "Gene always wanted children, but he and his wife couldn't have any. They've been foster parents, even, for like a half a dozen kids. There's no way he'd ever hurt a child."

Lucas said, "All right. But Deon Cash could."

"Deon… Deon was crazy. I didn't know him very well, but you didn't have to. I once saw him kick a door for two minutes because it didn't open right. He was really crazy-angry with it. With the door." She looked away from them for a minute, thinking about it, then back, and nodded positively. "He could kill children."

"How about his pal, Joe?"

"I hardly knew him, but he always seemed to be walking behind Deon. I think Deon impressed him. Deon impressed Jane, too-she liked him being crazy. Like it gave her status." Again, she looked away, thinking, and then turned back. "We see that quite a bit, actually. Women taking status from the violence of their men."

"A sense of protection, if you live in a slum," Lucas said.

But she shook her head. "Not just in the slums. All kinds of women. Even nuns."

She showed a little smile and Del grinned at Lucas and said, "Ouch."

Lucas said, "Tell me one good fact. One thing that will point me somewhere. Something you know, way down in your head, about Deon."

"I've thought about this, ever since they found Jane and Deon," she said. "I keep thinking, Deon was from the big city, Kansas City. So was Jane. They hated it here. I don't think they even knew anybody, besides a couple of people at Calb's. But they stayed, so there had to be a reason. Something they couldn't do in Kansas City. Maybe they were selling the dope, maybe it was the kidnapping. Whatever it was, came from up here."

"Good," said Lucas.

OUTSIDE, DEL SAID, "Sister Ruth does a little dope herself."

"Yeah?"

"I could smell it on her. Faintly. Raw, not smoke."

"Brownies."

"Maybe." Del looked around at the white-on-white landscape, at their lonely car sitting in the empty, snow-swept parking lot outside the empty yellow building across the highway. "I can't blame her. It's like, it's dope or network TV. There ain't nothin' else."

"I'll ask Elle about her," Lucas said. "I'm not sure the sister was entirely straight with us."

"What'd I miss?"

Lucas shook his head. "Maybe nothing. I counted eight cots in there and most of the rooms seemed to be lived in. That's a sizable operation. What would a hundred dollars a week mean to them? I mean, if they each worked one night in a Holiday store, they'd make three or four times as much. If they need the money that bad… "

"Maybe it's just easy, casual. Pin money. Take it if they have somebody around, skip it if they don't. Wouldn't be tied to a schedule."

"Could be," Lucas agreed. "She seemed pretty rehearsed… but then she might have expected us." He looked at his watch, and found a patch of white skin where the watch face should have been. Not having a watch was going to drive him crazy, he realized. "The bar's closed. Let's go try the cafe, and then the grocery."

"It feels hopeless," Del said. "Knocking on doors in nowhere."

ON THE WAY to the cafe, Lucas's cell phone rang, and when he answered it, a voice said, "This is Deke Harrison. Is this Davenport?"

"Yeah, it is. How are you, Deke?"

"Interrupted. I was halfway through an anchovy, pepper-cheese, onion sandwich and you know what it's like to be interrupted halfway through one of those."

"So are-"

"Halfway through, when somebody called for somebody else who got a call from Mark Johnson that said you wanted him vouched for."

"You vouching for him?"

"Yeah. He's a good guy, knows what he's doing. Takes care of his sources."

"I might chat with him, then."

"Excellent. If you ever run for governor of whatever hick state you're in-Minnesota?-you'll know that the Tribune stands behind you."

"Far behind."

"You stepped on my line," Harrison said.

"Yeah, I know," Lucas said. "It was such an original. Go back to the sandwich."

SANDY WOLF, WHO ran the cafe, told them that Deon Cash liked coconut cream pie and that Jane Warr was allergic to sulfites used as a preservative. She said that she'd never seen them argue. Every time they left the cafe together, she said, Warr would go through the door first and that Cash would reach out and squeeze her ass. Wolf also knew that Cash liked basketball and was a Los Angeles Lakers fan, and that he didn't care for football and especially hated the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings. She once had a Vikings game on the television, and Cash asked her to turn it off. "He had a mean look in him, so I turned it off," she said.

THE CONVENIENCE STORE/GAS station was run by John McGuire and McGuire's sister, Shelly. McGuire was a lean man who might have been taken for a farmer; his sister, equally lean, reminded Lucas of a pool shark he'd known in Minneapolis, who eventually became a successful rug-cleaning franchisee. Both of them knew Cash, who, in addition to whatever dope habits he might have had, also was attracted to the orange Halloween Hostess cupcakes, and had bought four dozen of them last Halloween, all that the store had in stock.

They had also known Joe Kelly and said that he seemed like a shy man. Every night when they saw his car parked at Cash's place, Kelly came in and bought a twelve-pack of Budweiser. "We think he had alcohol issues," Shelly McGuire said.

"I should have offered to take him to my AA meeting," McGuire said, "but I wasn't sure he was drinking it by himself, and I couldn't get him talking. And I thought, you know, him being colored, maybe colored people can drink more than white people."

The bar was closed.

THE DOG HOUSE on the side street was a manufactured home, built in a factory and trucked to the homesite, where it was hammered together on a prepoured slab. The siding felt like tin. Del knocked, and a man in a sleeveless undershirt came to the door while the dogs went crazy in a back room. Lucas, without looking, could feel Del loosening up his Glock.

The man said, "Yep?" He propped himself in the door, and Lucas could smell tomato sauce and dog shit in the overheated air streaming out. The man had an American flag tattooed on one shoulder, and on the other, a skull with a dagger through its eye, and the legend, Death From Above.

"We're with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We're investigating a series of crimes… "

"Got an ID?"

A woman in the house yelled, "Who is it, Dick?"

Lucas held out his ID and Dick glanced at it and yelled, "Cops, asking about Cash," and stepped out on the porch. "What can I do for you?"

"Don't want you to freeze," Lucas said. He would have liked a look inside.

"I'm fine," the man said. His arms were turning red. "Don't feel the cold."

"We understand you work at Calb's, and we're looking for any information… "

The man's name was Richard Block, and the woman inside was his girlfriend, Eurice. He was a prep specialist who set the trucks up for painting.