Hart shook his head. "That's not quite right. Two weeks if you've shown recognition and contrition. Every day that you don't is a new offense. You won't be out of here until your boy is caught."

"Or until you get transferred to the federal pen," Lucas said. He pushed the button to close the glass panel, waited for an objection from Taylor, and got nothing but ten seconds of silence. Then, in a teasing baby voice, Taylor said, "I know you're still standing there."

O'Donnell sighed and pushed the microphone button, turning it off. "Next?"

THEY DID BIGGIE NEXT. Biggie was naked and masturbating. "Go away. I need my privacy to jerk off." He twiddled his fingers at the surveillance camera.

"I need to tell you about the special offer," Lucas said. Biggie never stopped while Lucas recited the death-penalty threat.

Biggie said, "Hey, you know what? Having you watch is gettin' me harder. This is really good."

"I'll come and watch you take the needle," Lucas said, turning away. To Hart: "Shut the window."

"I'm gonna come. Don't you wanna watch?" Biggie shouted as the window slid shut, "Maybe you can get our boy for not having a hunting license…"

O'Donnell punched the microphone button and said, "Hard to threaten a guy when he's in isolation. Maybe we should have moved them back to their regular cells. Might as well be dead as down here."

"Almost pointless to talk to Chase," Hart said. "He's going downhill fast. The catatonic and manic periods are getting longer, the transitions are getting shorter. He was down for almost thirty-six hours, ending last night, then he went through transition and now he's going manic. When he's manic, there's nothing left but the instinct to kill."

"Let's try him," Lucas said. "Might as well, since we're here."

THE GLASS SLID BACK, and Chase hurled himself at it, his fingers like claws, his mouth open, his eyes sparking with hate. Like Biggie, he was naked: he hit the glass like a bug hitting a windshield, bounced off, came back at it, scratching at the glass, prying at its corners, his fingernails breaking, blood slipping across the glass. He was wailing, like an injured big cat, like a jaguar. Hart was shouting, "Easy, easy, easy… You wanna get out, wanna get out…"

Chase seemed not to hear him. He hurled himself at the glass again, hitting it with his face, beating it with his fists; behind him, the cell was torn up as much as it could be, as most of it was concrete. He hadn't simply taken off his clothing, he'd taken it off and shredded it; he'd done the same thing to the blanket, and the mattress, which was covered with nylon and bolted to the bed, was streaked with blood, where Chase had been tearing at it.

"Close it, close it," Lucas shouted at O'Donnell, and the window slipped shut. The microphone was still on, and they could hear the continuing animal wail until Hart reached out and cut it off.

"Goddamnit," Sloan said. "Maybe you ought to do something. Like sedate him."

Hart nodded: "We try, but chemicals don't have much effect on him anymore. If we give him enough to really calm him down, we might kill him."

"Well, that'd calm him down," Lucas said. "He's like a fuckin' werewolf, or something." Then, to Sloan: "We're wasting our time."

"Listen, we can work on Taylor and Biggie for you, keep talking up the death-penalty thing," O'Donnell said. "Is that for real?"

"It will be," Lucas said.

"We sorta… oppose the death penalty around here," O'Donnell said. "By and large."

"So do we," Sloan said. "By and large."

THEY STOPPED FOR LUNCH on the way back, cheeseburgers at a McDonald's.

"I don't care what anybody says about the shit McDonald's feeds you," Sloan said. "They do know how to make a French fry. You gonna eat those?"

They were finishing the French fries when Del called: he was even more wired than he'd been in the morning.

"Man, you gotta find a place to lie down," Lucas said. "You're yelling at me."

"We're getting a little frazzled," Del shouted. "Listen, where are you? How fast can you get up here?"

"Forty- five minutes, depending on where you are. You find West?"

"We know where he is. We talked to a chick who just saw him. He's walking around with his bag along the riverbank. We've got some Minneapolis cops coming over to help. He might be in one of the caves."

"All right. We're coming. Be careful in those fuckin' caves, man."

17

A MINNEAPOLIS PATROLMAN Spotted Mike West walking along the riverbank more than a mile downstream from where the woman had seen him-"When she said she saw him five minutes ago, what she meant was, she saw him half an hour ago," Del told Lucas and Sloan.

Del was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and for some reason-odd on a hot day in the middle of the summer, though nobody mentioned it-a navy-blue watch cap. With his weathered face, he looked like the Ancient Mariner, except in a Metallica T-shirt. "We spent another half hour crawling all over the riverbank by the university, and he was already down by St. Thomas."

"So where is he?" Lucas asked. They were parked with a half dozen cop cars on Mississippi River Boulevard, looking down into the river gorge that separated St. Paul from Minneapolis. The sides of the gorge were steep, but not sheer, and covered with trees and brush. Outcrops of sandstone were showing through the greenery; the Mississippi snaked through the bottom of it, in its usual summer dress, mud and beached carp.

Del shrugged: "He must've seen us coming, because he fuckin' vanished. Dick Douglas spotted him, called it in, then went down after him. Never saw him again." "Caves," Sloan said.

"Douglas was sure it was him?" Lucas asked.

"It's the guy we were told about. We found Gary, the panhandler. He said this was our guy, this Mike West. Calls him Mikey. He pointed us at Sandy, this woman, who knows West pretty good. She's a graduate student up at the U, she works in a cafeteria and gives him leftover food."

"We ought to get Sandy down here," Sloan said.

Del nodded: "She's on the way. Jenkins and Shrake went to get her."

"Jesus, I hope you told them to go easy," Lucas said. Shrake bragged that when it came to pickups, they had a.740 slugging percentage. He wasn't sure Shrake was joking.

"Ah, they're all right," Del said. "They get a little antsy sometimes."

They found West before the woman arrived. A couple of cops halfway down the hill, and two hundred yards south, started yelling and humping around one spot on the hill. A group of college students, who had gathered on the sidewalk, cheered, then booed. Lucas could see the cops bending into the hillside and then yelling some more. "What the hell's going on down there?" Del wondered. They all started down the hillside, holding on to tree limbs and brush, skidding along in their slick-soled city-cop shoes.

"What?" Lucas asked when they got to the cops. More cops were crossing the hillside to where they were standing.

"There he is," said one of the cops. He was hot and pissed off. He pointed at the hillside, and Lucas took a moment to see what he was pointing at-the worn white soles of two gym shoes, six or eight inches into a hole so small that it seemed impossible that a man could be on the other side of them. The hole, worn by water out of the rotten rock, apparently extended straight back into the hillside.

Lucas stooped to look, and Sloan and Del scrambled around behind him "Come out of there," Lucas said. He heard what might have been a muffled reply.

"He's holding on to something, inside there," one of the cops said. "We tried to pull him out, but we couldn't budge him."

"How about some shovels?" Del asked.