The sheriff called back: "Thought you'd want to know. He drives a gray Acura MDX."

"Excellent!" Lucas said.

SLOAN HAD A LAPTOP with him. He called Cale, got O'Donnell's address, plugged it into a Microsoft map program, and took them through St. John's into an exurban neighborhood between St. John's and Mankato. They cleared the top of a hill, where Lucas expected to find the house, but then twisted down a narrow blacktop road into a deep creek-cut valley, and along the creek for a half mile. They spotted a sheriff's car at the bottom of a gravel driveway, slowed, and turned in. A deputy came over and said, "Davenport? The sheriff's up at the house. They haven't gone in yet. They're waiting."

Lucas took the Porsche up the drive, found a modern redwood-and-stone house set to look down the valley; the slope behind the house was heavily wooded, burr oaks with fat dark leaves. A separate building, a workshop or second garage, was visible behind the residence. A blue Buick and a patrol car were parked in front of the attached garage. Nordwall was standing next to the Buick with a deputy, who was swinging a wrecking bar like a baseball bat. Lucas and Sloan got out of the Porsche and walked over.

"Get the warrant?" Lucas asked.

Nordwall nodded: "Yup. Hope he didn't go out for a loaf of bread… you think he's the second man?"

"Uh, we gotta talk about that," Lucas said. "Let's take a look inside."

The deputy said, "The sheriff wanted to wait for you, but I looked in the back window. This guy might be running. There's a whole pile of clothes on one bed, and a suitcase, like he left it behind."

Lucas said, "Let's open it."

The deputy had done it before: "The back door's the best. There's extra space around the jamb-I might be able to pop it without breaking it." He broke it a bit but not badly: the door came open, and Lucas stepped up and pushed it fully open. The thin odor of marijuana was right there. "Doper," Lucas said.

Sloan, a step behind, sniffed. "Smells like Ontario Red, Two Thousand Two." The deputy looked at him oddly, and Sloan said, "Just kidding."

THE HOUSE WAS A bachelor's nest-wood and leather, a sixty-two-inch projection television, a spa on the back deck, a bar off the kitchen. It was neatly kept, but not too neatly kept; idiosyncratic in a way that Lucas recognized as single, everything done to a lone occupant's style.

They cruised the house quickly, looking for a body. There was no body. As the deputy said, there was a suggestion that O'Donnell had gone in a hurry-he'd hauled most of the clothing out of the main closet in the bedroom, had thrown it on the bed, and had apparently picked whatever he needed, not bothering to rehang what he hadn't taken.

An overnighter case sat next to the bed, empty. Not enough room?

Lucas went down to the unfinished basement, found a workshop and sports equipment-two kayaks hanging from the ceiling, a half dozen paddles on the wall, and an ammunition reloading setup on a workbench. When Lucas went down to the basement, the deputy went out back, looked in the outbuilding, returned as Lucas was coming backup the stairs, and said, "Car freak-he's got a five-liter Mustang and a Trans Am in there."

"What color are they? The cars?"

"Red Mustang and white Trans Am."

Huh. The Trans Am was not likely to be mistaken for an Olds, if the witness knew a lot about cars and had time to think about it. But white robbers, standing six feet from their victims, were often described by the victims as black, because the victims expected a robber to be black. Eye-witness testimony generally ranged from suspect to horseshit.

Sloan called from the kitchen: "In here."

They went that way and found him with the freezer door open on the refrigerator: "There's some blood in here. Can't see it. very well. About the size of a dime."

Lucas looked in. A layer of frost covered the blood. "Probably had a steak."

"Probably," Sloan said.

Lucas turned to Nordwall. "Charlie Pope's blood… uh… We need to pull this blood out of here and get it up to our lab just as fast as we can. Could you get your crime-scene guy to take it out, and run it up there?"

"Yup. He's standing by, in case we needed him," Nordwall said. "How fast can you get DNA back? If it's human? I mean, it always takes us a week…"

"A couple-three days if you push," Lucas said. "But they can do a blood-type immediately. That might tell us something."

A ROOM THE SIZE of a large closet had been used as a home office. Lucas pulled file drawers until he found bank statements. "Do you know anybody at River National?" he asked Nordwall, after the sheriff had made the call to the crime-scene guy.

"Yeah, I know everybody."

"Call them. Find out how much he left in his account… looks like he's only got one account, checking. A month ago, he had… six thousand."

Nordwall went to make the call, and Lucas sat down at the desk and brought up the computer, a Dell tower. The computer wanted a password before it would work. Lucas shut it down.

Sloan came in with a handful of paper: "He cut out newspaper stories on the killings."

"All right, all right, that's good," Lucas said. He thumbed through the stories-they'd been cut from a half dozen papers. They were rolling downhill now. "He was collecting them. Better and better."

The deputy came in: "There's a gun safe in the back bedroom, in a closet. It was open. A rifle and two shotguns."

"There's a reloading machine down in the basement," Lucas said. "Run down and see what kinds of dies he has… see if there's any brass lying around."

The deputy disappeared, and Sloan asked, "Anything in the bills?"

"He buys all his gas in Mankato… he bought one tank in the Cities, in Bloomington, right down by the mall. So… that ain't anything."

The deputy came back: "There's brass for a.40 and a.45."

"So he's got two pistols," Sloan said.

AND NORDWALL CAME BACK: "O'Donnell cleaned out his account yesterday afternoon. He took out five thousand, and later in the day, he hit his ATM for another five hundred."

"Do they know…?"

"It was him. Personally. They know him. Told the teller that he was buying a car, and he'd sell one next week and put it all back."

Sloan looked at Lucas and nodded.

"I put out a pickup on the Acura, but just locally," Nordwall said. "You want to go statewide?"

Lucas looked around the house: they had the trophy news stories, and a spot of blood. A missing man, missing money, and some missing clothes. "Yeah. Let's go everywhere," he said.

NORDWALL CALLED INTO his office, staying in touch. Lucas heard him say, "Well, Jesus Christ, just lie about it. Later we can say you hadn't been clued in. Yeah, lie. And if they ask you if I told you to lie, lie about that."

"What the hell was that?"

"A local reporter called and asked if we were looking at a staff mentor at St. John's."

"Ah, Jesus," Lucas said.

"Wasn't us," Nordwall said. "It's the goddamn hospital. That place leaks like a sieve."

Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said to Nordwall. "Let's go take a walk around the yard."

Nordwall said, "What?"

OUTSIDE, LUCAS SAID, "I didn't want your deputy hearing this. I just don't want to leave you hanging in the wind, you got that election coming up… So now you're gonna be one of about seven people in the state who know it. You gotta keep your mouth shut. I mean, don't tell your wife."

Nordwall looked at him with a bit of skepticism. "You know something that important?"

Lucas said, "A few days ago, some fishermen pulled a body out of the Minnesota River up in Le Sueur County, by Kasota. It had been in the water a month or so."