"That's good," Lucas said. "You know, if he'd faked a suicide with O'Donnell…I don't know that we ever would have broken it out. He got too complicated for himself."

THE CRIME-SCENE PEOPLE believed that Angela Larson was killed in O'Donnell's workshop; they found traces of blood, with indications that somebody had tried to clean it up with commercial liquid cleanser; the cleanser had actually ruined the blood for DNA analysis, but chemical analysis of the concrete dust on Larson's feet matched the concrete of O'Donnell's garage floor. O'Donnell, according to the security hospital records, was working the night that Larson was killed but was not working the night that Peterson was kidnapped. Was he involved? Lucas didn't think so. He thought O'Donnell was probably Grant's-or Rogers's-last line of defense, and had been carefully set up.

THE BIGGEST, MOST complicated lie-if it was a lie, and many people would have denied that it was-appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune four days after the shootings, under the byline of Ruffe Ignace.

LIKE THIS:

The Twin Cities were saturated with media. Reporters were looking for explanations, going to funerals, interviewing people who didn't know anything.

Rose Marie called Lucas and outlined the problem: "The media want a public execution. The legislature is behaving with its usual courage, so there'll probably be one. The only candidates are the Department of Human Services, and us. Some of the DHS guys are semipublicly wondering why you were driving down there to pick up Grant? Why didn't you call the sheriff and have him grabbed earlier in the day?"

They talked about it for an hour, and then Lucas called Ignace. Ignace came into the hospital on the evening of the day after the shooting, armed with six steno pads and half a dozen pens.

"We want to tell the truth before too many innocent people get hurt," Lucas said piously.

"Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm here for," Ignace said.

"You gotta cover me," Lucas said. "I'm not supposed to be talking. So… you've got multiple sources, okay?"

Ignace said, "That's fine with me. I've already talked to a couple of people. I haven't gotten much, but I can use them. So, saying I had multiple sources wouldn't exactly be a lie."

Not exactly.

LUCAS LED HIM THROUGH the chain of events, from the discovery of Pope's body, to O'Donnell's disappearance, to the call to the Cancun clinic, to the attack on Millie Lincoln and Mihovil, through the fight and the evacuations of the wounded to the various hospitals.

IGNACE TOOK a full day to write the story. It said, in part:

"… spent days looking for O'Donnell but couldn't find him," according to one investigator. "We decided we had to look at other staff members. We had the feeling that O'Donnell was another red herring, like Charlie Pope. We also decided that we couldn't really trust the hospital personnel records, so we began researching the records on our own, vetting the staff members."

A BCA researcher eventually contacted a clinic in Cancun, where, he was surprised to learn, Dr. Leopold Grant still worked. "That was the key," said a source close to the investigation."That's when we knew we had identified the killer."

Asked why they didn't simply call the sheriff's office and have "Roy Rogers" arrested at the hospital, the source said that "when O'Donnell disappeared, everybody thought he must be the killer. The Sheriff's Department was involved in the search of O'Donnell's house, and within a couple of hours, it seemed that everybody in Mankato knew we were looking for him. We didn't know whether the Sheriff's Department was leaking, or the hospital-but there was a big leak somewhere. When it came to Rogers, we didn't want to take any chances. We knew he had at least two guns, taken from O'Donnell's house, and we knew he was a complete madman. We wanted to take him down quickly, and secretly, without any warning. That's why we did it the way we did, why we sent Davenport down with his team. These were all very experienced men as we saw in the way they handled the firefight. And remember, we were only talking about an hour, not a long period of time. There was no long delay."

Fatefully, when one of the researchers was looking into the "Leo Grant" personnel file, a direct call was made to the hospital. The research request was leaked inside the hospital, and apparently reached "Roy Rogers's " ears, who concluded correctly that he had been identified. He rushed from the hospital, back to his apartment where the confrontation with Millie Lincoln and Mihovil took place, and the race to the hospital began.

ONE QUESTION POSED by Ignace and left out of the story when Lucas couldn't answer it was "Why did O'Donnell take all of his money out of the bank the day he disappeared?"

Lucas shook his head. "We don't know. We may never know."

IGNACE IDENTIFIED LUCAS variously as a BCA official, an investigator, a state law-enforcement officer, a researcher, a source close to the investigation, a source who asked not to be identified, and a highly placed state official.

Because he actually named Rose Marie Roux, Carlton Aspen, the commissioner of the Department of Human Services, and Jerald Wald, the Senate majority leader, Ignace felt safe in saying that his sources included "police officers, state officials, legislators, and people directly involved in the firefight at St. John's."

ON THE EVENING THAT he finished the story, Ignace spent several hours on the Internet, checking apartment prices in Manhattan.

ROSE MARIE, ON READING the story the next morning, was pleased. "It might not be the truth, but it's one truth, and best of all, its ours," she said. She added, with some satisfaction, "The goddamn DHS is fucked."

THE MORNING AFTER he talked to Ignace, Lucas woke up, expecting to get out of the hospital, to find an exhausted and angry Weather sitting next to his bed.

"Wait'll I get you home," she said. Her eyes drifted toward a nurse.

"Where's everybody else?" Lucas said.

"They're still back in London. I didn't have time to get everybody here. Lucas, we gotta talk. I'm your wife. You don't get shot and don't tell me about it…" Tears started down her face.

The nurse said, "Maybe I better take off for a while…"

LUCAS WENT HOME that day. His eye was blacker than it had ever been, but his nose was more or less straight. His arm was immobilized from shoulder to wrist. Two quarter-inch metal rods went straight through his skin from an outer brace: they would be there for a few days, and then another minor operation would take them out.

An orthopedic surgeon was checking out the brace when Weather came back from the bathroom. The doc recognized her and they chatted for a few seconds, and then Weather, with a certain tone in her voice, said to Lucas, "You see these rods going into your arm?"

Lucas looked down and said, "Yeah?"

"That's what orthopods call 'sutures.'"

THE MORNING AFTER THAT, he and Weather were sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, reading Ignace's story. Now that Lucas was ambulatory and she could see that his life wasn't in danger, she was talking about getting back to the kids.

"Go ahead," Lucas kept saying, "I'm really okay."

His arm felt like a truck was sitting on it, and his face felt like somebody had driven a nail through his eye. He smiled and suppresed a wince.