Lucas mulled it all over: there was information to work with, which wasn't always the case. He began to put together a list of questions.

Saturday evening, they barbecued: Sloan and his wife came over, and Del and his wife-Del worked in Lucas's office and was investigating the McDonald's thefts. Sister Mary Joseph, wearing street clothes, showed up with a post-doc student in psychology, who'd wanted to meet Weather and talk about cranial-facial surgery.

Earlier in the summer, Lucas had met a white-haired Georgia man on a flight between Chicago and Atlanta. The man was wearing a burgundy-colored baseball cap that said Big Pig Jig on the front, and it turned out that he was a barbecue judge.

In the ensuing conversation, James Lever of Tifton, Georgia, recommended that Lucas try his special competition Pig Jig spareribs. Getting the ingredients together had been a pain in the ass, cutting the membrane off the bone with a dull knife had been a pain in the ass, marinating the ribs for two hours had been in a pain in the ass, and Weather had insisted that they go the whole route and grind their own spices, which had been interesting in its own way, leaving the kitchen redolent with garlic, fennel, ginger, oregano, basil, and marjoram. And though she'd insisted on going the whole way, Weather quailed at the idea of mixing the two cans of Coca-Cola with a bottle of Chianti, but Lucas, in his turn, had insisted.

Just before getting off the plane, Lever had said that the ribs should be accompanied by Miller Genuine Draft beer, "because if you drink some fruity Mexican beer with these ribs, you'll be fart'n' up a storm."

Lucas refused to drink Miller Genuine Draft on moral grounds, and so they made do with a case of Leinie's.

While Lucas was barbecuing, Weather roasted sweet corn, still in the husk, in the oven; at the end of it, the kitchen looked like Anzio Beach, but everybody agreed the food was wonderful.

Sunday was even slower than Saturday, but still a great day: blue skies, cool enough to make your face and skin feel good. On Sunday afternoon, Lucas and Weather took a long walk down to a bookstore off Ford Parkway and along the way talked about what he should do.

"I like working for Rose Marie, but the governor… the governor. After a while, it feels a little like prostitution," Lucas said. "This is the first time I've felt sleazy. Chasing people down for political reasons."

"You're putting the same old assholes into jail," Weather pointed out.

"Yeah, but not because anybody gives a shit-it's because the politicians don't want the TV people talking about crime waves, or because some out-state sheriff fucked it up and we go bail them out so he'll owe us."

"If you go back to school…"

"Jesus, Weather."

"Listen, you've got a B.A."

"Yeah. Not worth the paper it's printed on."

"Sure it is, because it means you don't have to go through a lot of other shit to study something you're interested in. I was thinking: you really liked building the Big New House. That's the happiest I've ever seen you, when you were doing that. You drove everybody a little crazy, but look at the house. What a great house."

"Not that great. If I find the guy that sold me the front door, I'll cut his nuts off. And how in the hell…?"

"Shut up for a minute. You loved doing it. Building the house. Have you ever thought about doing something in construction? Building custom houses or something?"

They walked along for a few seconds, and then Lucas said, "No, I never thought about it."

"You'd be good at it. And I think you'd be interested in it. You'd be… building something. Think about driving around town in your old age, looking at the neat houses you'd built."

They walked along a bit more and Lucas finally sighed and said, "Something to think about."

Weather said, "That's encouraging."

"What?"

"Ever since you've gotten into this mood, you've pushed away everything I've suggested. This is the first time you said anything remotely positive."

"Houses."

"Think about it."

By Sunday evening, Lucas was ready to go. As the evening news ended, the FBI's special agent in charge called. "Got back from Kenora an hour ago, I just picked up my messages," he said. "You're heading up to Duluth?"

"Yeah. Whattaya got going up there?"

"That's what I want to talk to you about. Could you come by in an hour or so?"

"I'm leaving tonight…"

"Just need a few minutes. We've got a guy in from Washington who wants to hook up with you."

"It can't wait?"

"Not really."

"See you in an hour," Lucas said.

Lucas had always had an ambiguous relationship with the FBI. They were supposed to be the elite-and they did do some good work-and they acted that way. Even their offices reminded Lucas of their superior status. The offices were like spaceship interiors seen in the movies; sealed airlocks with only the initiated allowed inside.

The FBI's attitudes, their separateness, their secrecy, their military ethic, had filtered down to state and local cops, and eventually were taken for granted. Police stations, once relatively open, had become fortresses, places that people feared and that they hurried past.

But local cops weren't the FBI, and they didn't do what the FBI did. FBI agents worked in offices and did intricate investigations; they weren't on the street. But as cops began to develop FBI-like attitudes, and to build FBI-like fortresses, as they sealed themselves away in patrol cars, as they fended off contact with the public, they began to resemble a paramilitary force, rather than peace officers.

When Lucas was a kid, cops were part of his neighborhood, with jobs just like the mailman and the teacher. By the time Lucas had joined the Minneapolis cops, that old workaday attitude was disappearing-cops were creating their own bars, holding their own cop parties, picking up privileges that weren't available to outsiders.

That all began, Lucas thought, with the spreading influence of the feds, and he didn't like it. It was bad for the country and bad for cops, he thought. And he thought it again as he checked through the airlock and was buzzed into the FBI offices in Minneapolis.

Charles Peyton was a small man, thin, blue eyed, wind-burned with chapped lips. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved outdoorsy blue shirt, with the sleeves rolled up over the elbows, the rolls held in place by a little buttoned tab on each sleeve; nobody ever called him Charley.

His feet, in expensive-looking leather ankle boots, were up on one corner of his desk. He stood up when Lucas was ushered into the office, said, "Lucas, how're you doing?" and reached across his desk to shake hands. Another man, heavier, lazy eyed, red faced, and blond, sat off to the right on a leather chair, and said, "Barney Howard," and lifted a hand.

Peyton pointed at a visitor's chair and asked, "Can I get you a coffee or a Coke?"

Lucas settled down in the chair and said, "No, thanks… What's going on?"

"Have you read the file? We sent a Xerox over to Rose Marie."

"Yeah," Lucas said. "Mostly forensics."

"We did what we could, on the technical end, but there wasn't much," Peyton said. "Nothing moving."

"How many investigators are working it?"

Peyton leaned back, as if chewing over what he was going to say, then leaned forward again. "Look, you're a smart guy. That's not moonshine, that's the fact of the matter, and you've worked with some of our big guys…"

"Louis Mallard," Howard chipped in. "He says you're a friend."

Lucas tipped his head: Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

"We've got some people up there. Some counterintelligence people," Peyton said. "They're working the case, but not as criminal investigators. They're not homicide cops."

"They work with you?" Lucas asked Howard.