He kept his mouth shut.

She said, "So we talked about it, and not one of us could figure out how we could be involved in anything that had to do with the girls. We couldn't see any possible connection."

"Good," Lucas said. "The parents of the other girl are coming up here today. You could meet them, if you like."

Her hand went to her throat. "That's cruel."

"Keep going with the story," Lucas said. "What're you doing? I'll figure out for myself if there's a connection."

"We're smuggling drugs," she said abruptly. "We bring them down from Canada. We put on nun's habits so that the border people don't check too closely, and bring them across."

"Marijuana?"

"Some. But that's more complicated. Usually, it's tamoxifen and ondansetron. They're cancer drugs and we get people in Canada to buy them for us at Canadian government prices. We bring them across the border and distribute them to people who can't afford them. Because of the way the drugs are sold in Canada, they only cost about ten or fifteen percent of what they cost in the U.S. Tamoxifen in the states costs a hundred a month, or more, and you might take it for years. The poor tend to skip days or skip whole months and hope they can get away with it. Ondansetron is a really expensive antinausea drug. It costs two hundred dollars to cover the nausea from one chemo treatment-so a lot of people go with a cheap drug that doesn't work as well, and just put up with the nausea. Ever been nauseous for a week straight?"

"No."

"Neither have I, but it looks pretty unpleasant. We can buy the stuff in Canada for thirty bucks."

"Cancer drugs," Lucas said.

"And some marijuana. The marijuana is the cheapest way to fight nausea-sometimes, it's the only way-and the best marijuana for our purposes comes from British Columbia. We don't bring it across too often because of the dogs. The dogs don't care whether we're wearing habits or not. And if we have to, we can get it in California."

"Huh," Lucas said. Then: "Just, uh, for the sake of my own, uh, technical knowledge, how do you get it past the dogs?"

"We have a number of religious young men and women from Winnipeg who have grown out their hair. We provide them with what you might call "doper clothing," and they drive vans across the border ahead of us. If the dogs are working, they'll do the van every time, and as soon as the people see the dogs, they let us know with a walkie talkie. If there are no dogs, we'll come across."

"Okay. Cancer drugs."

"Yes."

"That's all a little hard to believe."

"Sister Mary Joseph said that if you don't believe, you should ask your wife. I don't know exactly what that means… is she a cancer survivor?"

"No. She's a doctor."

"Then she'll know. I promise you this, Lucas, and Sister Mary Joseph would tell you the same thing-this is only for people who might die if they don't get the drugs. People can get the standard chemotherapy, one way or another, even if they don't have money, but the ancillary drugs and the follow-up drugs… lots of times, it comes down to a choice between eating and taking the drugs. I'm absolutely serious about that-that's what it comes to. Our drug shipments involve about four thousand patients at the receiving end."

"Four thousand-"

"And we're growing."

"And you weren't involved with Deon Cash or Jane Warr or Joe Kelly."

"No. Except that we drive for Gene Calb, and they did."

"They never tried to cut in on your drug deal."

"There is no money in the drugs.We don't get any money. We don't buy or sell anything-the whole point is that our clients can't afford to buy it. You have to understand, except for marijuana, all these drugs are legal down here. We're not so much smuggling the drugs, as smuggling the prices paid for them."

They sat looking at each other for a minute, then Lucas said, "That's crazy."

"Want to know something even crazier? There probably isn't any way to make it work better. Ask your wife."

Lucas took a few seconds to think about it, then said, "My partner claims that a tiny town like this can't have two big crime deals going on at the same time without some relationship between them. I tend to agree, but if you're telling me the truth, I don't see what it could be."

"There isn't one," she said.

"So tell me one more thing," he said. "Where'd you get that Land Cruiser you were driving last night?"

She blinked. "Up in Canada."

"In Canada?"

"Yes. At an auction. We need a four-wheel drive for some of the roads here, when we're doing our regular charity work. It's a terrible truck, it has two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers on it, we're always afraid it's going to blow up. The transmission feels like… you're shifting through a pound of liver. It squishes," she said. Then, "Um, why did you want to know?"

He was a little embarrassed, and shrugged. "I don't know. You told me that story about raising pin money by driving for Calb."

"That's true."

"But I've looked at trucks like that and they cost sixty thousand bucks or so. So… "

"What? We have the receipt." She was getting a little warm. "We paid one thousand five hundred dollars for it."

"Okay, okay." Lucas stood up to go. "You're going to go down and talk to Letty?"

"I'd be gone already, if Sister Mary Joseph hadn't called. I'll be going in one of our Corollas. Our expensive Land Cruiser might not make it that far."

"All right, all right. I had reason to ask."

"So what're you going to do?"

"Try to find whoever is doing the killing. I don't care about your drugs, but if you think of anything -anything-that might hook it all together, you've got to call me. This guy won't stop as long as he thinks he's in danger." He took a couple of steps toward the TV room, then looked back and said, "When you're taking weed across the border, you've got to be careful. My partner could smell it on you the other day. He's worked with dopers a lot, and he's pretty sensitive. The guys at the border probably are, too."

"We were repacking that day," Lewis said. "We're very careful before we go across. We have no drug abusers here-zero. That's one of our rules. The only people we allow to use drugs are survivors. Some of them are still on tamoxifen."

LUCAS LEFT THE room, looking for Del, then turned around and went back to her. "Why isn't there a better way to price the drugs?"

"Because the drug companies say, and they may be right-although they lie about everything else-that they won't be able to create new drugs that everybody wants, or specialized low-profit drugs, if they don't make a substantial profit from the ones they're selling now. So they're allowed to charge what they want in the United States.

"Canada's a small part of their market, and it's got one central bulk buyer-the government, and they make the best deal they can. So the drug companies sell to Canada for a little bit more than cost, because the market's small enough that it doesn't have much effect on their overall profit."

"Why don't we just make it legal to reimport the drugs?"

"Because then Canada would essentially become a drug-wholesaling middleman for the U.S. The drug companies won't allow that. They'd start charging Canada the American price, to get the profit they say they need. The end effect would be that Canadians would pay more, or go without, and Americans wouldn't pay less."

"You know that bumper sticker about the Arabs? 'Nuke Their Ass and Take the Gas'? Why doesn't the U.S. just nuke the drug companies' ass and take the drugs?"

"Then who's going to develop the new drugs we need? The government? The people who brought you the CIA and airport security and the Bush-Gore election?"

LUCAS FOUND DEL watching Night of the Living Dead with the older woman who'd met them at the door. "You at a good part?" he asked.