"I don't know what that means. Burst?"

"That means that they could have been frozen. That means that the guy killed Pope, took blood from him, and planted it on the body."

LUCAS LOOKED AT Hopping Crow for a long three seconds: "You gotta be shitting me."

"I shit you not."

"Charlie Pope was never out there to find," Lucas said.

"That's right. The medical examiner says he's been dead for at least a month," Hopping Crow said. "How long ago did he disappear?"

"Little more than a month, now."

"There you are."

LUCAS CONSIDERED THE PROBLEM for another long minute, then he leaned forward and tapped Hopping Crow's desk with his index finger: "If this gets out, there's going to be hell to pay. The media will look for somebody to drop a brick on. Me, or, maybe, you. Or both of us, or all of us."

"I know that."

"So you tell Anita that her job's on the line," Lucas said. "Sooner or later, somebody will find out that we didn't look at the blood cells under a microscope."

"We never look at them. Nobody does. DNA's a whole different thing."

"Think that'll make any difference to the TV stations?" Lucas asked.

Hopping Crow thought about it for a moment, then said, "If it was presented exactly right…"

"Bullshit. There's no way to present it. There's a kind of Occam's razor that applies to TV: the simplest answer is the best," Lucas said. "The simplest answer is we fucked up. People can understand that. All this science shit, they don't understand. It might as well be magic."

"So what are we gonna do?" Hopping Crow sounded a little desperate.

"Gotta find this cocksucker."

"Yeah, right. I can see us holding off on mentioning this for a day or two, but what if he grabs somebody else like this Peterson woman?" Hopping Crow asked. "What do we do then, tell a million cops to look for Charlie Pope? And what do I tell the medical examiner?"

"Tell him you came up negative. That's what he expects, anyway."

"Ah, man." Then: "What are you going to do?"

"I gotta talk to Rose Marie and maybe the governor. Figure something out. In the meantime, you get Anita and you tell her that I personally will run her out of the state if she says a fuckin' thing to any-fuckin'-body."

LUCAS STOPPED AT his office and made a call to Del Capslock, his lead investigator. Del was working dope with a task force from the suburban town of Woodbury trying to figure out who was putting metham-phetamine into the high school. Lucas called him: "What are you doing?"

"Reading a magazine and watching a house."

"Could you break off?"

"If I had to."

"Get in here, quick as you can. I've gotta go talk to Rose Marie, just wait in my office. Get Jenkins and Shrake, too."

ON THE WAY TO Rose Marie's office, Lucas thought: What about Mrs. Bird, the old lady from Rochester? She'd identified Pope as making the call to Ruffe Ignace. She'd seen him, on the phone, she said. She'd picked him out of a photo lineup…

ROSE MARIE ROUX had once been a state senator from Minneapolis and knew how the legislature worked, which didn't always help. The financial crisis had escalated to the point that a special session had to be called if the state wanted to keep the parks open and continue to pay for cops, snow removal, and highway repair.

Rose Marie was in charge of cops, and she was pulling her hair out: when Lucas showed up at her door, she looked like somebody had tried to electrocute her, her parlor-blond hair standing out from her ears like fighter-jet wings.

"Tell me you got good news," she said.

Lucas groped for words for a minute, then said, "We found Charlie Pope."

Her eyes lit up.

A FEW MINUTES LATER, she said, "I'll get even with you, some-day, for that 'We found Charlie Pope' line."

"Yeah, yeah," Lucas said. "The question is, What do we do?"

"I'll talk to the governor," she said. "Usually, it's a bad idea to keep this sort of thing from the media. They'll eventually find out, then they'll start screaming 'cover-up'…"

"Which it is…"

"… and nobody in public office wants to hear that," she said. "The media's their own judge and jury on cover-ups, and we've got no say."

"So you think we should make an announcement?" Lucas asked. He was skeptical, and showed it.

She turned in her chair so she could look out her window, rocked back and forth a couple of times; her face took on the blank expression she assumed when she was plotting. After a moment, she said, "No…We start talking secretly to a few sheriffs about the white car and the silver car and about a probable second man. You've been kicking that idea around for a few days anyway. Sloan will back us up on that. The media already has the white car, and sooner or later they'll hear about the second man and the silver car. They'll know that something is going on, and they'll write about it…"

"And?"

"And then we tell them that we knew that Charlie Pope wasn't the guy, and that we were trying to outwit the real killer by not letting him know that we were on to the frozen-blood thing," she said. "That they-the media-ruined it all by releasing the second-man theory. It's their fault."

"Jesus." Lucas was impressed.

"I have to run this by the governor." She poked a finger at Lucas: "In the meantime, you gotta find this guy. Start filtering out the word on the second man, for the media. Then find this motherfucker. If you find him soon enough, all this becomes moot."

SLOAN AND ELLE had to know.

Lucas didn't want to tell them on the phone. Sloan hadn't been of-ficially working that day and had come down to the Blue Earth mur-der scene on his own hook. Lucas called his office, was told that he was probably at home. Called Sloan's home and got his wife.

"He's out walking, Lucas. He's pretty shook up about Peterson."

"I need to talk to him about the case. We've got a thing going on… Could you ask him to call me?"

"I will, but listen, Lucas: don't try to talk him out of quitting," she said. "Don't do that."

"Ah, jeez…"

"Lucas, he needs to do something else. I remember when you had your little problem, and Sloan's working on something like that. I don't know if he'll go into a full-blown clinical depression, but he's walking around the edges of it. Work's making it worse."

"Is he sleeping at night?"

"No. That's why this cold got on top of him," she said. "He's completely exhausted. He hasn't slept since he found Angela Larson, and then couldn't find who'd killed her."

"All right. I'll keep my mouth shut."

"I'll have him call you, as soon as he gets back."