"We could be," Lucas said.

"What about the DNA?"

"Oh, Pope was there, all right," Lucas said "He did it, some of it. But he's not setting it up. Maybe he does the act; but somebody else does the directing. Somebody else has a car, somebody else has the money, somebody else does his shopping for him-Christ, the guy can barely feed himself. There's gotta be somebody else."

"We need to find this Mike West guy."

"We need to find everybody who might ever have talked to Charlie Pope," Lucas said. "We need to get back to St. John's, talk to people."

"Not me," Sloan said. "I'm out of it for a while. I can barely fuckin' walk. I walk across the house, I get so dizzy I wanna puke."

"Hey- I'm not saying you gotta do it yourself, but that's what's gotta be done. I've got to talk to Elle some more. She was right from the beginning-it's not Charlie Pope."

WHEN HE GOT OFF THE PHONE, Lucas went into the bathroom to look in the mirror again. His face hadn't changed: it was still the color of an eggplant. The pain had changed: though it was duller than it had been, it had spread all through his skull, and he felt as though his front teeth might come out.

He couldn't use the pain pills. They kicked his ass. Instead, he took two Aleves, got a drawing pad from the study, along with the all the paper and reports generated so far, and headed back to the chair.

He was trying to get comfortable when the phone rang again.

Sloan said, "Me again. You got me thinking."

"Okay…"

"You say there's gotta be another guy."

"Yup."

"Then where do the Big Three come in? We know they're involved. Somehow. Who did they influence, Charlie Pope or this other guy?"

Lucas thought about it for a moment. A puzzle. "I dunno. We come back to Mike West again."

"Or somebody like Mike West," Sloan said. "I can't believe that they made a robot out of Charlie Pope, and then he just went out and found some brains for himself. You know, a smart crazy guy to manage him."

"Maybe… maybe it was somebody one of the Big Three knew before he went inside. Did any of those guys have accomplices? Did they work with anyone?"

"I don't know. I can get Anderson to pull all those old records, if you think it's worth doing."

"It is. We don't want to miss anything."

"I'll call him. Like, in ten minutes. Right now, I gotta get back to my toilet."

LUCAS PUT HIS KNEES up and propped the drawing pad against it, stared at the blank page. Got on the phone again, called Shrake, the BCA muscle who'd gone after Mike West. Shrake picked up on the first ring.

"You get even a sniff of him?" Lucas asked.

"Not even a sniff."

"What's his history? Does he wander all over the country, or does he stay close?"

"He's got family here, and they say he's generally around somewhere," Shrake said. "They do know he goes out west from time to time. Washington, Oregon, California."

"Look, call Minneapolis and St. Paul, and all the burbs. Tell them we need to drag the streets-this is a big priority now. This is right there with finding Charlie Pope."

IN THE SKETCH BOOK he wrote,

4. Positive visual ID in Rochester, positive phone ID

5. Mother in Austin, worked in area, seen in July

8. Pope told Ignace that he'll kill somebody in the Boundary Waters…

How in the hell would somebody like Charlie Pope know anything about the Boundary Waters? Pope was a pickup guy, not a canoe guy. The second man again? He had to force himself to think or woman.

THE ALEVE WERE TAKING HOLD. He pushed himself out of the chair, found a Minnesota road map, and unfolded it. If you drew a cross made up of major highways south of the Twin Cities, he realized, you would encompass Charlie Pope's world.

Pope had killed Angela Larson at the northern point of the cross, a couple of miles from I-35 in Minneapolis. He'd been living in Owatonna, which was right on I-35, halfway between Minneapolis and the Iowa border. That was the center point. And he'd grown up in Austin, Minnesota, just a few miles from the Iowa border and not far east of I-35. That was the southern point.

The east-west arm of the cross ran through Owatonna, with Rochester on the east, where he was seen making a phone call, and Mankato to the west, where he'd killed the Rices. All three town were linked by Highway 14.

As a matter of fact, it was almost perfect. He drew a circle connecting the four outlying cities, with Owatonna in the middle. The circle together with the highways looked like the crosshairs on a rifle scope.

Lucas thought about (10) for a moment, then added,…who knows the Big Three.

HE WENT INTO the bathroom and shaved; the warm water felt good, but his nose was still clogged with blood, and he could only breathe through one side. That fuckin' Clanton…

In the shower, he decided that Pope was in his circle. Not for sure, but 80 percent. Somewhere, in a rough circle maybe a hundred miles across. He tried to do the math with the water pounding on his back. Something like 7,800 square miles, he thought. Lots of rabbit holes in 7,800 square miles of corn and beans.

With the water pouring on his head, he thought, forlorn hope? And then he thought, beans?

HE GOT OUT OF the shower, toweled off, went back to the bed-room, and sorted through the case reports. When they'd talked to Ruffe Ignace after the call from Pope, Ignace said a couple of times that he'd taken down everything Pope said "verbatim." He'd emphasized his own precision.

Lucas found the Ignace/Pope transcript in the report, and thumbed through it. According to the transcript, Pope had used the words forlorn hope. The words rattled around in Lucas's brain because he'd seen them in a Richard Sharpe novel by Bernard Cornwell. In the novel, the words had referred to a group of men who volunteered to be the first to attack a breach in a city wall during a siege. The survivors got otherwise impossible promotions… but they were also unlikely to survive.

Lucas put on shorts and a T-shirt and went down to the study, opened his Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary. Forlorn hope meant, exactly, a "faint remaining hope" or a "desperate enterprise."

He snapped the dictionary closed: Charlie Pope, the retard, had used the phrase precisely. And something else… He ran back up the stairs, still carrying the dictionary, and picked up Ignace's transcript. Didn't Pope say he'd thrown the baseball bat into a field of "whatever-it-is?"

Lucas found the line. Yes, he had. The whatever-it-is was beans.

Charlie Pope spent his entire life in a sea of soybeans, and he didn't know what a soybean field looked like when he was standing next to it? Now that was stupid, something you might expect from Charlie Pope.