Singleton got into his car and headed for the fire. Halfway there, a new thought occurred to him: Mom was gonna be pissed.

16

THE FIRE WAS out, and a couple of the firemen were gingerly working through the blackened jumble of burnt wood and plaster in the now-open basement; it looked like a bomb crater. Lucas and Del took turns watching the work, and getting warm in the car. Ray Zahn showed up in his Highway Patrol cruiser, and they chatted for a while. "The comm center called the sheriff. He told them to handle it, and to coordinate with you guys, and then he went back to bed. I guess this isn't important enough."

"We're not being fair to him," Del observed.

"No, we're not," Zahn said. "I'm sure we don't know all the problems and contingencies he has to deal with. The miserable twat."

Zahn left on a drag-racing call, and Lucas and Del lingered, watching. More sheriff's deputies came in, apparently working on their own time. Zahn came back, and wanted to talk about how Rose Marie Roux might change the Highway Patrol.

They'd been back at the fire site for an hour, when a gray Toyota Land Cruiser pulled off to the side of the highway and two women got out. Lucas recognized one of them as the woman he'd talked to at the church. He dug around in the back of his mind for a moment, then came up with her name-Ruth Lewis.

Ruth walked down to a cluster of the firemen, as the other woman popped open the back of the Land Cruiser. Lewis talked to the firemen for a moment, then two of them broke away and followed her back to the truck. The second woman was doing something in the back, then produced a carton of white paper cups, and the firemen who came back with Lewis took the cups and stepped out of sight, behind the truck.

"Coffee," Del said.

"Like to talk to that woman," Lucas said. "Want some coffee?"

"Take a cup," Del said. They got out of the Acura and walked over to the Toyota. More firemen and cops were clustering around the back of it, taking cups, and Lucas and Del edged into the line. When they got their coffee, Lucas took a sip and stepped over next to Lewis.

"You heard what happened? You heard about Letty?"

"Some of it. I heard she was at the hospital, that you took her in," Lewis said.

"She's hurt," Lucas said. "She was shot, not too bad, but when she was getting away, she had to jump out her window. She slashed her hand open, really bad-we're flying her down to the Cities so a hand guy can look at her. Her ankle is either busted or twisted so bad that she can't walk."

"That's terrible. I heard her mom… " Lewis's eyes went to the house, "… might still be in there."

"We're waiting, but Letty thinks she was shot to death. Right at the beginning of it. She apparently fought the guy long enough for Letty to get away."

"This doesn't happen in Custer County," Lewis said. "Somebody told me that the last murder here was fifteen years ago."

"Our operating theory is that Deon Cash, Jane Warr, and probably Joe Kelly kidnapped the Sorrell girl and killed her, and probably another girl named Burke."

"Twoof them?"

"Yes. We think that Hale Sorrell somehow grabbed Joe Kelly and tortured him and got the names of Cash and Warr. We think he found out that his daughter was already dead. We think he then waited until their guard might be down a little, then he came up here, took them and hanged them for the murder of his daughter. But we think there was at least one more person involved, and that person is afraid that somebody will give him away. It's a him, by the way, not a her- he spoke to Letty."

She smiled quickly, a flitting smile that was gone as quickly as it came. "Thanks for the briefing."

"I'm not just chatting," Lucas said. "Something complicated is going on around Broderick, and I don't know what it is. But it's the cause of all these deaths. And people in Broderick are evading us, they're not telling us what they know. I don't know why they're doing that, but they are."

"I more or less know everybody in Broderick. Some of the men from the body shop keep to themselves, but nobody I know well would have done this. Kidnapped those girls or… " She gestured at the burned-out hole in the ground.

Three firemen were standing in the ruins of the basement, and as Lewis gestured and they looked that way, one of them called up to another man, who was standing outside the hole, and he turned and trotted toward one of the fire trucks. Two more firemen dropped into the basement.

"Aw, shit," Lucas said. "I think they found her."

THEY HAD. LUCAS and Del hung around for another hour, watching as the medical examiner crawled down into the basement. Ten minutes later, he climbed back out.

"Martha West?" Lucas asked.

"I assume so, from what I've been told. No way to tell by looking at the body. We'll have to do DNA on the body and on her daughter, and make some comparisons. But-it's her."

"All right." They lingered a few more minutes, then headed back to Armstrong. There was actually traffic on the highway, cop cars and fire department vehicles, and maybe rubberneckers running up to see what had happened.

On the way back, Del asked, "What'd you tell Ruth Lewis?"

"I gave her something to be guilty about. Those kind of women, they guilt-trip pretty easily."

"Just gonna let it percolate?"

"Yeah, overnight. Then I'm gonna go up there tomorrow and ask Lewis if she'll go down to the Cities and tell Letty that her mother is dead."

"Mmm," Del said. Then after a minute, "Hitting her with a hammer."

"Maybe she'll break," Lucas said.

They stopped at the hospital, found it quiet. The duty nurse told them that the resident had gone back to bed, and that Letty was in the air. "They got here really quickly," she said. She glanced at a wall clock. "She should be at Hennepin in a half-hour."

After leaving the hospital, they drove over to the Law Enforcement Center, where two people were sitting in the comm center eating microwave pizza. Lucas borrowed a computer and wrote a memo to the sheriff, outlining what had happened, and what had been done about it. He made two copies, put one in the sheriff's mailbox, and kept one himself.

AT THE MOTEL, they went to their separate rooms, and though he was tired, Lucas turned on the television, found a movie channel, and watched James Woods, Bruce Dern, and Lou Gossett get wry with each other in Diggstown. Forty-five minutes later, Weather called.

"We've got her on the ground," she said. "The hand is not good, but it's fixable. Gonna take a while to heal. Do you know if she has insurance? She doesn't seem to think so."

"She doesn't," Lucas said. "I'm buying."

"Is this a Roman Catholic guilt thing that I've got to be psychologically careful about?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Call me tomorrow. I want all the details. She seems like an interesting child. She's scared."

"She jumped out a window, got shot, got stalked in the dark, shot a guy, saw her house burned down, and her mother's dead. She doesn't know about her mother for sure, yet. I'm going to try to get somebody up here to fly down and tell her. Somebody she knows."

"Aw, jeez… All right. I'll stay with her. Call me."

SLEEP WOULD BE tough-coming up to five o'clock in the morning, but he was still too cranked. He clicked around the TV channels, found nothing that he wanted to watch. Eventually, he put on his shoes and walked down to the motel office.

"That black guy from Chicago still here?" he asked the clerk.

"Yup. Said he's checking out tomorrow morning."

"What's the room?"

"Two-oh-eight. Is he gonna be a problem?"

"Naw. I called Chicago, and they say he's gonna win the Nobel Prize for reporting. I just wanted to shake his hand."

WAY TOO EARLY for this, he thought, but what the hell, reporters fucked with him often enough. He knocked on 208, waited, knocked again, and then a man croaked, "What time is it?"