Lucas dialed, identified himself, and asked for the medical examiner who'd done the postmortem on Coombs. Got her and asked, “What you take out of her stomach. Uh-huh? Uh-huh? Very much? Okay… okay.”

He hung up and Coombs again asked, “What?”

“Her stomach was empty. If she fell when she was by herself, I wonder who ate nine oatmeal cookies?” Lucas asked.

Back at BCA headquarters, he briefed Shrake, put Coombs in a room with him, and told them both that he needed every detail. Five minutes later he was on the line with an investigator with the Chippewa County Sheriff's Office, named Carl Frazier, who'd worked the Donaldson murder.

“I saw the story in the paper and was going to call somebody, but I needed to talk to the sheriff about it. He's out of town, back this afternoon,” Frazier said. “Donaldson's a very touchy subject around here. But since you called me…”

“It feels the same,” Lucas said. “Donaldson and Bucher.”

“Yeah, it does,” Frazier said. “What seems most alike is that there was never a single lead. Nothing. We tore up the town, and Eau Claire, we beat on every asshole we knew about, and there never was a thing. I've gotten the impression that the St. Paul cops are beating their heads against the same wall.”

“You nail down anything as stolen?”

“Nope. That was another mystery,”Frazier said. “As far as we could tell, nothing was touched. I guess the prevailing theory among the big thinkers here was that it was somebody she knew, they got in an argument…”

“And the guy pulled out a gun and shot her? Why'd he have a gun?”

“That's a weak point,” Frazier admitted. “Would have worked better if she'd been killed like Bucher-you know, somebody picked up a frying pan and swatted her. That would have looked a little more spontaneous.”

“This looked planned?”

“Like D-Day. She was shot three times in the back of the head. But what for? A few hundred dollars? Nobody who inherited the money needed it. There hadn't been any family fights or neighborhood feuds or anything else. The second big-thinker theory was that it was some psycho. Came in the back door, maybe for food or booze, killed her.”

“Man…”

“I know,” Frazier said. “But that's what we couldn't figure out: What for? If you can't figure out what for, it's harder than hell to figure out who.”

“She's got these relatives, a sister and brother-in-law, the Booths,” Lucas said.

“They still around?”

“Oh, yeah. The sheriff hears from them regularly.”

“Okay. Then, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna go talk to them,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could stop by and look at your files?”

“Absolutely,” Frazier said. “If you don't mind, I'd like to ride along when you do the interview. Or, I'll tell you what. Why don't we meet at the Donaldson house? The Booths still own it, and it's empty. You could take a look at it.”

“How soon can you do it?”

“Tomorrow? I'll call the Booths to make sure they'll be around,” Frazier said.

Weather and LUCAS spent some time that night fooling around, and when the first round was done, Lucas rolled over on his back, his chest slick with sweat, and Weather said, “That wasn't so terrible.”

“Yeah. I was fantasizing about Jesse Barth,” he joked. She swatted him on the stomach, not too hard, but he bounced and complained, “Ouch! You almost exploded one of my balls.”

“You have an extra,”she said. “All we need is one.” She was trying for a second kid, worried that she might be too old, at forty-one.

“Yeah, well, I'd like to keep both of them,” Lucas said, rubbing his stomach. “I think you left a mark.”

She made a rude noise. “Crybaby.” Then, “Did you hear what Sam said today…?”

And later, she asked, “What happened with Jesse Barth, anyway?”

“It's going to the grand jury. Virgil's handling most of it.”

“Mmm. Virgil,” Weather said, with a tone in her voice.

“What about him?”

“If I was going to fantasize during sex, which I'm not saying I'd do, Virgil would be a candidate,” she said.

“Virgil? Flowers?”

“He has a way about him,” Weather said. “And that little tiny butt.”

Lucas was shocked. “He never… I mean, made a move or anything…”

“On me?” she asked. “No, of course not. But… mmm.”

“What?”

“I wonder why? He never made a move? He doesn't even flirt with me,” she said.

“Probably because I carry a gun,” Lucas said.

“Probably because I'm too old,” Weather said.

“You're not too old, believe me,” Lucas said. “I get the strange feeling that Virgil would fuck a snake, if he could get somebody to hold its head.”

“Sort of reminds me of you, when you were his age,” she said.

“You didn't know me when I was his age.”

“You can always pick out the guys who'd fuck a snake, whatever age they are,” Weather said.

“That's unfair.”

“Mmm.”

A minute later, Lucas said, “Virgil thinks that going to Dakota County was a little… iffy.”

“Politically corrupt, you mean,” Weather said.

“Maybe,” Lucas admitted.

“It is,” Weather said.

“I mentioned to Virgil that I occasionally talked to Ruffe over at the Star Tribune.”

She propped herself up on one arm. “You suggested that he call Ruffe?”

“Not at all. That'd be improper,” Lucas said.

“So what are the chances he'll call?”

“Knowing that fuckin' Flowers, about ninety-six percent.”

She dropped onto her back. “So you manipulated him into making the call, so the guy in Dakota County can't bury the case.”

“Can you manipulate somebody into something, if he knows that you're manipulating him, and wants to be?” Lucas asked, rolling up on his side.

“That's a very feminine thought, Lucas. I'm proud of you,” Weather said.

“Hey,” Lucas said, catching her hand and guiding it. “Feminine this.”

Another great day, blue sky almost no wind, dew sparkling on the lawn, the neighbor's sprinkler system cutting in. Sam loved the sprinkler system and could mimic its chi-chi-chi-chiiiii sound almost perfectly.

Lucas got the paper off the porch, pulled it out of the plastic sack, and unrolled it. Nothing in the Star Tribune about Kline. Nothing at all by Ruffe. Had he misfired? Lucas never liked to get up early-though he had no problem staying up until dawn, or longer-but was out of the house at 6:30, nudging out of the driveway just behind Weather. Weather was doing a series of scar revisions on a burn case. The patient was in the hospital overnight to get some sodium numbers fixed, and was being waked as she left the driveway. The patient would be on the table by 7:30, the first of three operations she'd do before noon.

Lucas, on the other hand, was going fishing. He took the truck north on Cretin to I-94, and turned into the rising sun; and watched it rise higher for a bit more than an hour as he drove past incoming rush-hour traffic, across the St. Croix, past cows and buffalo and small towns getting up. He left the interstate at Wisconsin Exit 52, continuing toward Chippewa, veering around the town and up the Chippewa River into Jim Falls.

A retired Minneapolis homicide cop had a summer home just below the dam. He was traveling in Wyoming with his wife, but told Lucas where he'd hidden the keys for the boat.

Lucas was on the river a little after eight, in the cop's eighteen-foot Lund, working the trolling motor with his foot, casting the shoreline with a Billy Bait on a Thorne Brothers custom rod.

Lucas had always been interested in newspapers-thought he might have been a reporter if he hadn't become a cop-and had gotten to the point where he could sense something wrong with a newspaper story. If a story seemed reticent, somehow; deliberately oblique; if the writer did a little tap dance; then, Lucas could say, “Ah, there's something going on.” The writer knew something he couldn't report, at least, not yet.

Lucas, and a lot of other cops, developed the same sense about crimes. A solution was obvious, but wasn't right. The story was hinky Of course, cops sometimes had that feeling and it turned out that they were wrong. The obvious was the truth. But usually, when it seemed like something was wrong, something was.