Despite his weaseling, Lucas was pleased. Flowers had done the job, and Ignace would nail Kline to a wall. Further, Ignace wouldn't give up the source, and if the game was played just right, everybody would assume the source was Dakota County.

He called Rose Marie Roux. He didn't like to lie to her, but sometimes did, if only to protect her; necessity is a mother. “I just talked to Ruffe Ignace. He knows about Kline. He's got Jesse Barth's name, he's going to talk to Kathy Barth. I neither confirmed nor denied and I am not his source. But his source is a good one and it comes one day after we briefed Dakota County. We need to start leaking around that Dakota County was talking to Ignace.”

“We can do that,” she said, also pleased. “This is working out.” “Tell the governor. Maybe he could do an off-the-record joke with some of the reporters at the Capitol, about Dakota County leaks,” Lucas said. “Maybe get Mitford to put something together.

A quip. The governor likes quips. And metaphors.”

“A quip,” she said. “A quip would be good.”

Lucas called John Smith. Smith was at the Bucher mansion, and would be there for a while. “I'll stop by,” Lucas said.

The Widdlers were there, finishing the inventory. “There's a lot of good stuff here,” Leslie told Lucas. He was wearing a pink bow tie that looked like an exotic lepidopteran.

“There's two million, conservatively. I really want to be here when they have the auction.”

“Nothing missing?”

He shrugged and his wife picked up the question. “There didn't seem to be any obvious holes in the decor, when you started putting things back together-they trashed the place, but they didn't move things very far.”

“Did you know a woman named Claire Donaldson, over in Eau Claire?”

The Widdlers looked at each other, and then Jane said, “Oh my God. Do you think?”

Lucas said, “There's a possibility, but I'm having trouble figuring out a motive.

There doesn't seem to be anything missing from the Donaldson place, either.”

“We were at some of the Donaldson sales,” Leslie Widdler said. “She had some magnificent things, although I will say, her taste wasn't as extraordinary as everybody made out.” To his wife: “Do you remember that awful Italian neoclassical commode?”

Jane poked a finger at Lucas's chest. “It looked like somebody had been working on it with a wood rasp. And it obviously had been refinished. They sold it as the original finish, but there was no way…”

The Widdlers went back to work, and Lucas and John Smith stepped aside and watched them scribbling, and Lucas said, “John, I've got some serious shit coming down the road. I'll try to stick with you as much as I can, but this other thing is political, and it could be a distraction.”

“Big secret?”

“Not anymore. The goddamn Star Tribune got a sniff of it. I'll try to stay with you…”

Smith flapped his hands in frustration: “I got jack-shit, Lucas. You think this Donaldson woman might be tied in?”

“It feels that way. It feels like this one,” Lucas said. “We might want to talk to the FBI, see if they'd take a look.”

“I hate to do that, as long as we have a chance,” Smith said.

“So do I.”

Smith looked glumly at Leslie Widdler, who was peering at the bottom of a silver plant-watering pot. “It'd spread the blame, if we fall on our asses,” he said. “But I want to catch these motherfuckers. Me.”

On the way out the door, Lucas asked Leslie Widdler, “If we found that there were things missing, how easy would it be to locate them? I mean, in the antiques market?”

“If you had a good professional photograph and good documentation of any idiosyncrasies-you know, dents, or flaws, or repairs- then it's possible,” Widdler said. “Not likely, but possible. If you don't have that, then you're out of luck.”

Jane picked it up: “There are literally hundreds of thousands of antiques sold every year, mostly for cash, and a lot of those sales are to dealers who turn them over and over and over. A chair sold here might wind up in a shop in Santa Monica or Palm Beach after going through five different dealers. They may disappear into somebody's house and not come out for another twenty or thirty years.”

And Leslie: '“Another thing, of course, is that if somebody spends fifty thousand dollars for an armoire, and then finds out it's stolen, are they going to turn it over to the police and lose their money? That's really not how they got rich in the first place… So I wouldn't be too optimistic.”

“There's always hope,” Jane said. She looked as though she were trying to make a perplexed wrinkle in her forehead. “But to tell you the truth, I'm beginning to think there's nothing missing. We haven't been able to identify a single thing.”

“The Reckless painting,” Lucas said.

“If there was one,” she said. “There are a number of Reckless sales every year. If we find no documentation that suggests that Connie owned one, if all we have is the testimony of this one young African-American person… well, Lucas… it's gone.”

Ruffe Ignace's story wasn't huge, but even with a one-column head, and thirty inches of carefully worded text, it was big enough to do all the political damage that Kline had feared.

Best of all, it featured an ambush photograph of Dakota County attorney Jim Cole, whose startled eyes made him look like a raccoon caught at night on the highway.

Kline was now a Dakota County story.

Ignace had gotten to Kathy Barth. Although she was identified only as a “source close to the investigation,” she spoke from the point of view of a victim, and Ignace was skilled enough to let that bleed through. “… the victim was described as devastated by the experience, and experts have told the family that she may need years of treatment if the allegations are true.

” Neil Mitford led Lucas and Rose Marie Roux into the governor's office and closed the door. The governor said, “We're all clear, right? Nobody can get us on leaking the story?” He knew that Lucas had ties with the local media; that Lucas did, in fact, share a daughter with the leading Channel Three editorialist.

“Ruffe called me yesterday and asked for a comment and I told him I couldn't give him one,” Lucas said, doing his tap dance. “It's pretty obvious that he got a lot of his information from the victim's mother.”

“Is Kathy Barth still trying to cut a deal with Burt?” Mitford asked Lucas.

“They want money. That was the whole point of the exercise,” Lucas said. “But now, she's stuck. She can't cut a deal with the grand jury.”

“And Burt's guilty,” the governor said. “I mean, he did it, right? We're not simply fucking him over?”

“Yeah, he did it,” Lucas said. “I think he might've been doing the mother, too, but he definitely was doing the kid.”

Rose Marie: “Screw their negotiations. They can file a civil suit later.”

“Might be more money for the attorney,” Mitford said. “If he's taking it on contingency.”

“Lawyers got to eat, too,” the governor said with satisfaction. To Rose Marie and Lucas: “You two will be managing the BCA's testimony before the grand jury? Is that all set?”

“I talked to Jim Cole, he'll be calling with a schedule,” Rose Marie said. “There's a limited amount of testimony available-the Barths, Agent Flowers, Lucas, the technical people from the lab. Cole wants to move fast. If there's enough evidence to indict, he wants to give Kline a chance to drop out of the election so another Republican can run.”

“Burt might get stubborn…” the governor suggested.

“I don't think so,” Rose Marie said, shaking her head. “Cole won't indict unless he can convict. He wants to nail down the mother, the girl, the physical evidence, and then make a decision. With this newspaper story, he's got even more reason to push. If he tells Burt's lawyer that Burt's going down, and shows him the evidence, I think Burt'll quit.”