11

THE MORNING WAS BRILLIANT, a bluebird sky with a breath of breeze from the south, and a lick of humid gulf air that meant there'd thunderstorms in the afternoon.

Lucas woke at six, cleaned up, and went to the phones. Nordwall said he was moving people into the bean field even as they spoke; the Rochester chief of police said his guys had come up empty the night before. "You sure he was here?" the Rochester cop asked.

"Unless Ma Bell is lying to us," Lucas said. "You got a place for us to get together?"

"Yup. We're getting quite a few calls, too. The sheriff did some kind of District Six hot-line thing. You know where the government center is, downtown, right on the river? We're gonna use the boardroom."

"I know it. See you at ten. Get some coffee and doughnuts-the state will spring for it."

"Jeez- no wonder the legislature is back in session."

SLOAN SHOWED UP a few minutes after seven o'clock, dragging. He looked better than he had the night before, but only because he was standing in daylight. Lucas told him about Grant's visit the night before and their talk about the possibility of a second man. "A second man?" Sloan wondered.

"Or a woman."

"Could be a woman, I guess. Another nut. They had a problem at St. John's with male and female patients getting together…"

"We had a report on that: they keep the sexual predators away from the mixed-gender units," Lucas said. "Charlie wouldn't have met a Woman there."

"But what if he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a woman…"

They talked about inmates at St. John's, about the phone call from Charlie Pope, and about Mike West, the missing schizophrenic, as they finished the coffee. Lucas had decided during the night that he wanted to talk to Pope's mother, who lived in the town of Austin, south of Rochester.

"You're better at talking to old ladies than I am," Lucas said. "I thought as long as we were down there…"

"Yeah, sure."

When they finished the coffee, Lucas stood at the kitchen sink and rinsed the cups and said, "You don't look so good."

"Ah, I took about four orange Nyquils. I oughta be okay," Sloan said. He didn't look okay: his eyes were rimmed in red, and he occasionally gurgled. He'd brought a box of Kleenex with him.

"Your call," Lucas said.

"HOW ABOUT 'BEAST OF BURDEN'?" Sloan asked, on the way out of town.

"That's one too many Stone's songs," Lucas said. "Besides, what's-her-name covered it, and I never liked the cover."

"How about Def Leppard, 'Rock of Ages'?

"On the possible list, but down a way."

"You know what you oughta do? You oughta make a worst song list from the rock era. That's something nobody's seen before."

Lucas considered the possibilities for a second, then said, "Wouldn't work. You'd play 'American Pie' followed by 'Vincent,' and then any normal human being would throw the iPod out the window."

THEY TOOK THE TRUCK, because the Porsche's paint job didn't like gravel, heading south again, down the four-lane to Mankato, through town, out to the Rice farm. They'd just gone through town when Weather called from London.

"You sound like you're up," she said.

"I just went through Mankato. I've been up since dawn."

"Something broke!"

Lucas told her about it, and about Sloan figuring out a murder, and the press conference. She told him about revising the burns on the face of a little girl who was messing around with the white gas in her brother's camp-stove set.

"At least we're both staying busy," Lucas said.

"What about the music list?"

"We were just talking about it. I've got about a million songs," he said.

"You know, for a few more bucks…"

"That's not the point. The point is the discipline. The best one hundred songs…"

"Have you considered 'Waltz Two' from the Jazz Suite by Shostakovich?" she asked.

He wasn't sure whether she was joking; sometimes it was hard to tell. "Uh, no."

"Well, I know you liked the music."

Lucas smiled into the phone. "Weather, I don't have any idea what you're talking about. I never heard of the thing."

"You know, it was the theme music in Eyes Wide Shut, when what's-her-face took her clothes off."

He remembered. Clearly. "Ah… that was a nice piece."

"I thought you'd remember…"

She said she missed him; he said that he missed her; Letty, their ward; and Sam, the kid; and even the housekeeper.

"Three more weeks," she said. "This is great, but I gotta get back."

WHEN THEY ARRIVED at the farm, they found two cop cars in the driveway, one of them just leaving. Lucas pulled onto the lawn and got out of the truck. Nordwall got out of the passenger side of the cop car that had been rolling down toward them.

"What happened?" Lucas asked, as they crunched toward each other on the gravel drive.

"Took about twenty minutes to find it," the sheriff said, hitching up his uniform pants, looking back over his shoulder at the bean field. "You see the tape over there? Right in there… Right where Pope said it would be. And exactly what he said it would be-an aluminum baseball bat."

"You already pick it up?"

"Yeah. We had our crime-scene guy photograph it, and he's driving it up to your lab right now. He said there's some hair stuck to the end of it, gotta be the kid's, but we, want to nail it down. We don't want some smart-ass saying it was a practical joke."

"It never felt like a joke," Lucas said. They both looked out at the field with the tape strung over the bean plants, the cops tromping up and down the rows. Then, "You coming over to Rochester?"

"Yeah- but that's not for a couple hours. I gotta stop back at the house. I haven't had breakfast yet." A man who didn't miss many meals.

"You see the paper?"

"Yes. Pope scares the shit out of me," Nordwall said "I told my guys to shoot first, ask questions later."

"See you in Rochester."

THEY CUT CROSS-COUNTRY; the trip took an hour. They rolled down a long hill, the towers of the Mayo Clinic in the distance. Sloan sniffed and said, "Look at the fuckin' golf courses; just like a town full of doctors."

"Bigot."

"Ruin a perfectly good cornfield," he said. "What do you want to do? We got some time."

"Let's look at that pay phone. Maybe we can shake something loose."

"Like what?"

"Security camera?"

"Yeah, right," Sloan said. "Fuckin' waste of time."

"Hey, something could happen."

"And Snow White might come over to my house and sit on my face," Sloan said. His voice was nasal, stuffed.

"Okay. So let's sit around with some cops and drink coffee and talk about pensions."

Sloan sighed, pulled out a sheet of Kleenex, and blew into it. Lucas winced. "Okay," Sloan said. "We look at the phone. And don't look like you're trying to crawl out the side window."

ROCHESTER WAS DOMINATED economically and socially by the Mayo Clinic; but there was still a piece of the old downtown stuck to the south side of the hospital district-exfoliating brick and patched concrete block, halfhearted attempts at rehab, streets emptier than they should be in a town jammed with cars; streets from an Edward Hopper painting.

The phone was on a wall of an out-of-business gas station, the only outside phone they'd seen in the city. "Must've known where the phone was," Lucas said. He pulled into the parking area and killed the engine.

"Probably a doc at the Mayo," Sloan said. "Most docs are a little whacko." The words were just out of his mouth when he remembered that he was talking to the husband of a surgeon. "I hope you took offense at that."