LUCAS DIDN’T GET back to the office until four-thirty. Carol, his secretary, looked at him and said, “You’ve been taking some exercise.”

“Yeah.” He felt pretty good, in fact, except that his right hand hurt.

The Tomses were both at Regions hospital in guarded condition, with a few broken bones and blunt trauma between them, and Antsy also had about a million tiny thorns sticking in him. “Don’t know what we can do about that,” a doc said. “Let them work their way out, I guess. Gonna itch like fire, though.”

“We’ll have to find a way to live with it,” Shrake said.

“I GOT THAT stuff from Dan Hall,” Carol said. “He faxed a subpoena to Fidelity and they sent back a fax of the canceled check. Frances Austin had a checking account at Riverside State Bank.”

“Huh.” The Antsy episode had temporarily kicked the Austin case out of Lucas’s frontal lobes. He wanted to go around and punch walls, and talk about the bust, and maybe have a couple of beers and kick cans down the street and laugh out loud.

“I got you a subpoena for her Riverside records,” she said, and handed him a piece of paper with his own signature at the bottom. “They close at five. The records will be ready when you serve the subpoena.”

Lucas looked at the paper, felt the high leaking out. “I think I should have been there… you know, to sign it?”

“You were, in spirit,” she said. The Riverside State Bank was not on the side of the river, but in one of St. Paul’s downtown skyways, an obscure bank, one that you didn’t think about. Lucas left his car on the street, got a bag of popcorn, and wound his way through the skyways, replaying the Antsy Toms fight in his head.

How did some people grow up to be pieces of shit? They didn’t have to be-they just were. They liked it. What was the Kid Rock song? “Low Life”? Like that.

The bank was painted in tints and shades of brown; if you didn’t look at it carefully, it might not have been there-in a fantasy novel, it would have been the gate to an alternate reality.

The vice president in charge of the branch, a tall, balding man with weasel- like teeth, took the subpoena and produced a piece of paper, an account file.

“This is it?” Lucas asked, turning it over. “One side of a piece of paper?”

“An unusual account,” the vice president said. “What do you think she’s up to?”

Lucas shook his head. “She’s dead.” The vice president’s hand went to his lips. “Not… She wasn’t withdrawing… Somebody wasn’t taking out…?"

"No, no. She was killed after the last withdrawal. A month or so afterwards. And this is still open, right?” He held the paper up. “Nobody’s gotten in touch about an estate?”

“No. There’s nothing in her file at all. No notations. We did issue a check- cashing card.”

“And it’s open."

"It’s still open, but only has a hundred dollars in it. The fifty-thousand-dollar deposit was withdrawn in cash, starting two weeks after it was deposited. Then nothing more.”

“Hmm."

"That’s what I thought, when I saw it,” the vice president said. “Of course, this is all automated, and it’s not big enough to draw any particular attention. But, look here…”

He reached out for the file, and Lucas let it go, and the vice president put it on the desktop, upside down from himself, so Lucas could read it, and used a pen to point out the individual lines of the withdrawal records.

“We have five branches: this one, plus one at Maplewood, one at Signal Hills, one in Woodbury, and one down at Midway. The money was taken out twenty- five hundred dollars at a time, in cash. Twenty withdrawals, one a day. Look at this code-this tells you the branch where the withdrawal was made. The first was taken out here, the next in Maplewood, the next at Midway, the next at Signal Hills. And so on. Every week for four weeks.”

“Why would they do that?"

"My thought was, she didn’t want to be seen taking out too much money at once,” the vice president said. “I looked in my computer records, and I can tell you that she never saw any teller twice. Since we only have two or three working at a time, that doesn’t work out statistically.”

“So she was avoiding the tellers she’d seen before,” Lucas said. “That’s my idea,” the vice president said. “Thank you,” Lucas said. He started away, then turned back. “The fifty thousand wasn’t the first deposit?"

"That’s on the paper,” the vice president said. “The account was opened with five hundred dollars. There were two one- hundred- dollar withdrawals on the check card, then nothing for two months, then the big check, then nothing for two weeks, then four weeks of daily withdrawals.”

Fifty grand. What had she been buying? Maybe nothing. Maybe she was putting together some case money, a stash. Shit, maybe she was a terrorist. A rich Caucasian Goth terrorist, buying RPGs. Maybe she was going to war against the Republicans. Lucas smiled to himself: maybe not.

So what had she been buying? Or why would she need case money? He couldn’t remember the names, looked in his notebook: Denise Robinson, Mark McGuire. Hung out with her, might have wanted to start a business. Wanted her for the money? Something to push.

HE WENT HOME for dinner, the kitchen warm and smelling good, like potatoes and salmon, Sam making a hash of his hash, Letty working on algebra while she ate (“If a train is going sixty- five miles an hour to the east, and another train is going forty- five miles an hour to the west…”), and took time out to grouse about not getting a cell phone, because everybody else had one, and Weather, quiet, amused, and at the same time, tired from a seven- hour- long operation, talking about going to bed early. A happy moment: if he’d ever thought of commissioning a painting of his family, that would be the moment.

“I’ve got to run out,” Lucas said, when things had settled down to coffee. “Down to the A1, see if I can catch a few of Frances’s friends, people we haven’t touched yet. There’s some weird stuff coming out.”

“You could have another piece of pie,” Weather said. “A small piece.”

Felt so good, in a quiet way. He left at eight, feeling a tug back toward the brightly lit windows, but going on into the dark, in the Porsche, around the corner, and then up Cretin to I- 94.

HE FOUND A place in the street to park the car, under a streetlight. The A1 had changed, just as the bartender had said it would. The lights had been turned down, and the crowd was younger and quieter and dressed in black. The bartender was the same guy: Jerry. Lucas nodded at him and asked, “Can you point me at anybody who knew Frances Austin?”

The bartender asked, “What kind of beer do you drink?"

"Leinie’s?” The bartender nodded and pulled a bottle of Honey Weiss out of a cooler and said, quietly, “Take a drink and then turn and look around, but not like I told you. There’s a guy over there with a black cowboy like hat. He knew her. But don’t go right over.”

Lucas took a sip of the beer and nodded, and the bartender went down the bar, to the only other customer sitting on a stool. Lucas took another sip, then turned and looked at the rooms, clusters of black garbed Goths on their night out, mostly wine with a little beer here and there, quiet enough. The guy picked out by Jerry wasn’t wearing anything like a cowboy hat, Lucas thought; it was the kind of hat you’d wear with a cape, or with a pencil- thin mustache. Lucas turned back around, took another sip, and the bartender laughed with the other guy down the bar. Good time to move…

Lucas stepped over to the booth where the hat guy was, with two other Goths, one male and one female, and took out his ID and said, “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” He held out the ID, and the three of them looked at it doubtfully, and he said, “Some of you knew Frances Austin, and I’m trying to figure out what happened there. I’ve got a photo kit… Could you tell me if this is Frances?”