"Different situation," Del suggested. "No pressure then."

"Maybe. Anyway, I talked to him. I told him that we would all be committing crimes together, so nobody could talk about anyone else. He really needed people to drive the cars across, since he was starting to do some… some volume. We were perfect. Older women, forties and fifties and sixties. Who would suspect? And Gene built some special… things… for us, that fit in the Toyotas, and let us bring the drugs across. It was all very smooth."

"Did you bring a Toyota through last night?" Lucas asked.

"No. The last one was the one we had at the fire at the Wests' house. You saw it. Gene took it. It was a wreck, though. I don't think it would make another two hundred miles."

"You know what the license plates were?"

"I have no idea."

"Okay… You got some people killed," Lucas said. He said it in a soft voice, but a mean one, taunting, like a bully trying to pull another kid into a fight. Pushing her.

"But there was no connection between the kidnappings, between Deon and Jane, and the car deal," she said. She said, "Listen to me: no connection. I knew Gene pretty well, and he didn't even like Deon or Jane. He didn't trust them. Deon wasn't a big shot in this thing, he was a driver. He was a gofer. "

"But if we'd had a piece of it… "

"It wouldn't have made any difference," she shouted, tears running down her face. "You're not listening to me. The kidnappings and all the rest of it weren't connected. They weren't."

ALITTLE LATER, Lucas spoke to Neil Mitford. "I don't think the governor necessarily would want to know about this conversation," Lucas said, as an opener.

"That's why I work here," Mitford said. "Talk to me."

Lucas outlined the situation, including the murder of Lewis, and the cover-up of the stolen-car ring. "The women covered up material information. We could bust them six different ways. The thing is, I'm not sure that if they had told us, it would have made any difference to the killer. He's operating on some other schedule-I can't figure out why Calb would kill Lewis and then run for it. As far as we can tell, she didn't know anything that all the other women didn't know. If he was going to kill Lewis, he should have been up here, trying to wipe out the church."

"And if we bust the women, that's the end of their little drug-running enterprise," Mitford said.

"That's right. I don't feel too good about that-and to tell the truth, I think we could smell a little stinky afterward. We bust them, and four or five thousand women don't get their cancer pills."

"Let me rephrase that for you," Mitford said. "Four or five thousand registered voters won't get their cancer pills and they'll complain to one of the biggest interest groups in the country, the breast-cancer coalition."

"You think we should let it slide?"

"I don't think anything. I'm not a law enforcement officer. I don't even recall having this conversation. The governor certainly never knew about it."

"So I'm working on my own book."

"Welcome to state government," Mitford said.

LUCAS AND DEL left the church, so Letty and the other women could get ready for the funeral, and walked across the highway to Calb's. The two BCA investigators were in the shop, working through the office. A deputy was sitting in the work bay, with a half-dozen employees scattered around the bay on folding chairs.

Lucas briefed the BCA guys on the theft ring, then went out to talk to the employees. "You all may be in some sort of trouble, so maybe you want to get a lawyer or public defender out here… but none of you will be charged with anything right away. The guys in the office will want to talk to you individually. I would like somebody to tell me one thing, which won't have any effect on you at all… Okay?"

The men glanced around at each other, a couple shrugged, and a stocky man in a grimy Vikings sweatshirt said, "What do you want to know?"

"You know that one of the women from the church-one of the nuns-was found dead at Gene Calb's house. Shot in the head."

"Gene didn't do it," one of the men interrupted.

"That's not what I need," Lucas said. "We're not sure what happened, but we know that both of Gene Calb's cars are still in his garage. What I want to know is… did one of those Toyotas come in last night, or the night before? One of the good ones?"

The men all looked around at each other again, there was more shrugging, eyes drifted away, and finally the spokesman said, "I don't know."

"Is there an old one around here? At somebody's house, or around back? I haven't looked around back."

"Not around here," the spokesman said. No more eye contact.

On the way out, Del said to Lucas, "So the Calbs are running in a wrecked Toyota. Why is that? Why not take one of their cars?"

"Because if they can get it as far as the airport at Thief River, or Fargo, and if we hadn't found out about it… we'd never know where they went."

"I'll get some calls out," Del said.

MARTHA WEST'S FUNERAL service was held in a nondescript chapel at the funeral home, so nondescript that it could hardly even be called nondenominational-it looked like a grade-school cafeteria without the charm, and was cold, as if the funeral home didn't want to waste energy on heating it. Seventeen people showed up, including cops. The coffin was sealed. Letty sat at the front and cried, her cast propped on the chair in front of her, her single crutch between her legs. A Lutheran minister called on Martha's friends to talk about her, and a few did, without much to say.

Couldn't say that she drank a lot, and spent most of her time at the Duck Inn.

Most talked about her songs, and how hard she worked on them, and what a good voice she had, for Custer County anyway, and let it go at that. A women's group served Ritz crackers with cheese, and sliced celery and carrots with pimento spread, in a side room, for people who weren't going to the cemetery. That was almost everybody.

Lucas and Del drove out to the cemetery behind the hearse, with Letty crying in the back seat, and Ruth trying to comfort her when she wasn't crying herself. The snow was blowing hard, and the grave looked like a big fishing hole in an ice-covered lake. The coffin went in the ground and they all left, with Letty peering back for as long as she could see the cemetery. And when she couldn't see it anymore, she rolled facedown on the back seat and sobbed.

The sheriff had made tentative arrangements for a foster home, but in the end, they didn't take her there. They left her with Ruth, at the church, with the older woman. The arrangement, they agreed, was temporary, until they figured something out. "Don't tell me you're gonna try to find my dad," Letty said. "There's no way I'd live with that sonofabitch."

AS THEY DROVE away from the church, Del said, "What a wonderful fuckin' day. If there was a four-story building in town, I'd jump off it."

"There's the smokestack. There's the grain elevators."

"Fuck you."

Lucas: "Got to think of something, man."

"I have thought of something," Del said. He suddenly seemed comfortable, Lucas thought, which was odd, given the circumstances.

"What?"

"I'll tell you in a while. I gotta make sure I can pull it off, first."

"What?"

"Drop me off at the drugstore. I got things to buy."

"What're you doing?"

"Figured out how we're going to end this thing."

"Tell me."

"I will-in about an hour."