"Atta boy," Andreno said.

"Who the fuck are you?" the partner asked.

"BCA undercover," Lucas said. "Pretend you never saw him."

"What about my shirt?" the waitress asked. "It's new, it's probably ruined."

Lucas asked, "What's the biggest tip you ever got for coffee and waffles?"

"Maybe five dollars."

"Brace yourself; your ship just came in."

She nodded, looked down at her blouse, and up at Lucas: "All right. Hope it's like one of them supertankers."

The Duluth cops took Reasons out, and Andreno said, "You got a cut on your nose. You need another napkin."

"That woman was like a hurricane of fingernails," Lucas said. He touched his nose, and it stung. "I hope she didn't give me something."

"You mean, like the clap?" Andreno said. He was having a pretty good time, now.

"What is this clap?" Nadya asked. She had tears running down through her makeup, and Lucas shook his head at Andreno, said, "Let's get her to her room."

Andreno proved to be expert at gently cleaning and bandaging wounds, and he did both Nadya and Lucas, using Band-Aids from Lucas's Dopp kit. "Leave them on until the blood dries-tomorrow would be good-and then wash them off. You'll still have grooves, both of you."

"I'm not leaving it on my fuckin' nose," Lucas said. "I'd rather bleed."

"What is this groove?" Nadya asked. She'd become quiet, somber after the fight.

"Fingernail cuts," Andreno said. "Nasty. I always hated to break up fights between women. When women fight, civilization goes right out the window. They don't know how to play-fight, like guys. They go right for the eyes."

"I hit her hard, with those napkins," Nadya said, with just a sliver of satisfaction.

"Yes, you did," Lucas said. "She wasn't exactly a lightweight, either. I think I fucked up my back, getting her off you."

"Two Aleves," Andreno said. "Get a couple for Nadya."

Nadya was reluctant, but they went back to the restaurant when Andreno complained that he hadn't had breakfast. The manager looked at them with trepidation, but the waitress was right there: Lucas had given her a hundred-dollar bill. After they ordered, Andreno said, "Tell me everything. I don't know shit."

Lucas told him. Andreno was bright, and a longtime street cop. When he finished, Andreno said, "What you need is to finish those genealogies. If there are four families, somebody in the families is gonna know who the killer is."

"Spivak might know," Lucas said. "That's not doing us any good."

"I know, but the more you nail down the families, the more you bring up the possibility that they're all going to jail on spy charges. Somebody, somewhere along the line, is gonna crack."

"We haven't even talked with the Svobodas yet," Lucas said. "Put some bullshit on a woman in their shop…"

"The thing I keep thinking about is those birth certificates from the ancestors. The fake ones. Maybe there's some way to go through the vital records and pull everybody who makes that claim."

"I don't think they'd be computerized that far back," Lucas said. "Maybe they would. I can check."

They thought about that for a minute, then Nadya said, "Remember when we talk to this horse-woman, the one who is a barmaid at Spivak's?"

"Yeah?"

"If I remember, she said that one of the men at the table was very old. We do not have any very old people in our families. Is there a way you can look at driver's papers?"

Lucas snapped his fingers: "Good. Good thought. That's all been on the computer for a long time. Say we go back ten years, so he's likely to have a driver's license. Everything we've seen has been on the Range, so we look only at the Range cities-Virginia, Eveleth, Hibbing, Chisholm, whatever, there can't be too many people. We pull those names, and then we start pulling birth certificates."

"Another possibility," Andreno said. "How about some kind of analysis of the telephone records of the two families you already have? Who'd they call? If they're spies, and they're all hooked together, I bet there's been a long history of calling each other."

"Mmm. I don't know how far that stuff goes back," Lucas said. "The FBI could figure it out."

"How do we get all this stuff going?"

"Make some phone calls," Lucas said. He added, "Micky, I think you should hang around with Nadya, at least when I'm not. Maybe, when we're driving around, you oughta follow, about six cars back. See if you can spot somebody looking at us."

"How did they find us here?" Nadya asked.

"When the woman called from St. Paul, the woman from the shack, she said she figured this is the hotel we'd stay at. Maybe everybody figures that. They just call up and asked for you. If the front desk put the call through, they'd just hang up. Then they'd know where you were… Not that many big hotels in Duluth."

"Maybe we should move," Andreno said.

"I think so," Lucas said. "You guys, anyway. Get adjoining rooms somewhere, go in under a different name. Ask the desk to notify you if anybody asks under your real name."

"We can do that," Andreno said, looking at Nadya. "What do you think, honey?"

"What is this 'honey'?" Nadya asked.

Before Andreno and Nadya left to find a new place, Lucas took Nadya aside and said, "Before the fight, you were wondering about telling your bosses about this… liaison."

"Yes."

He shook his head: "I wouldn't. If you tell them, you're in trouble. If you don't tell them, you're in a little more trouble, but what are they gonna do, shoot you? So the spread in penalty isn't that much if they find out one way or the other. But if we crack the case, and they never find out-you're gold."

She looked at him for a long time, and then asked, "Have you been in trouble much, with your agency?"

"Not with this one. I once got fired from another one, but they hired me back."

"Why did they fire you?"

"I beat up a guy. A pimp. Maybe I was too enthusiastic."

"Why'd they hire you back?"

"Couldn't live without me," Lucas said.

She looked at him for another long moment, then smiled just a little, and said, "I think maybe you were… this is a phrase Jerry used for some people… a big pain in the ass."

Lucas hadn't known Reasons very well-they had spent a few hours together over a couple of days, enough that Lucas knew that they would never have been good friends. But the murder hung over his head; he didn't have any trouble functioning, didn't feel any great sorrow or terrible regret for things left undone or unsaid… but the death hung there. For one thing, he thought he should feel worse than he did. When his friend Del had been shot in the leg the previous winter, Lucas had spent a couple of hours a day at the hospital, then more time at Del's home, had worked out with him in rehab. With Reasons, he could hardly remember what his voice sounded like. And when he stopped to think about it, that made him feel bad. Reasons was a mote in the eye…

After Nadya and Andreno left, Lucas spent the rest of the morning and afternoon harassing people in St. Paul, trying to pull people into work on a Saturday. He called up Neil Mitford, the governor's top aide, and had him wade in, asked Rose Marie Roux to call downtown and kick butt. Generating the list of licenses was not a problem, but pulling the vital records essentially had to be done by hand. He tried to get twenty people working at it.

He'd worked this out: there were more or less forty thousand people in the Range cities. According to an almanac he carried in his laptop, only about 1 percent of the American population was male and eighty years old or older. The Range might have an older population than the country as a whole, because young people had been fleeing the area for decades-still, even if there were twice as many eighty-plus males, that'd only be eight hundred. With twenty people working on it, they would have to check only forty records each.