“Carol!” She popped back in the office: “Dan’s on his way."

"We need to get everything on paper that we can about Willett

Run everything you can think of. If we come up with previous addresses, out- of- state, we’re gonna want to get their stuff…”

Jackson, the photographer, came in a moment later, and Carol called, “We’ve only got one Frank Willett locally-it’s Frank, not Francis, on his driver’s license.”

“Where’s that Willett work? We need an address,” Lucas said. “I’ll get into the employment security, hang on…” Jackson, stepping around Carol, asked, “Another rush job?"

"I think we’ve got something this time,” Lucas said. Carol called, “It’s him, he works for A. Austin LLC in Minnetonka

He lives in St. Louis Park.” And she pulled up his driver’ s- license photo: Willett had long black hair, carefully arranged on his shoulders, an oval face, square white teeth. He looked good, and he knew it, even in a license photograph.

“Ooo,” Carol said. Lucas squinted at the picture, trying to make him as the man in the alley. Couldn’t do it; the long hair was distracting. The guy in the alley seemed to have short curly hair, he thought. But if Willett had cut it… or maybe even if he’d been wearing a ponytail on the night of the shooting… it wasn’t impossible, but he couldn’t ID him from the photo.

Lucas had Carol call Minnetonka and ask for Willett. When the receptionist transferred the call, Carol hung up.

“I’m going out there,” Lucas said. “Want to ride along in the van?” Jackson asked. “I’ll meet you over there,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to get stuck if you have to wait awhile; but I’ll come and sit for an hour or two.”

MINNETONKA WAS ON the far western edge of the metro area, and from the BCA office, took a solid forty- five minutes, west on I- 94 and I- 394, winding around in the maze of streets at the end of it. Lucas had Jackson on the cell phone, and they cruised the spa, Waterwood, from opposite directions, then hooked up at a strip mall and Lucas transferred into the back of the van.

The GMC had been taken away from a dope dealer. It had nice captain’s chairs in the back, tinted windows, a dresser with a mirror, and, if the chairs were moved, space for a narrow memory- foam mattress, which had been stripped out.

Jackson took it back to Waterwood, parked across the street, eased into the back of the van and took the other captain’s chair. “Magazines in the chiffonier, diet Coke and raspberry- flavored water in the fridge,” he said. “I got the rest of the subscription to Sirius, long as you don’t play any country and western.”

Lucas settled for a bottle of water and a classic rock channel, checked the magazines: Blind Spot, PhotoPro, PDN, a couple of Shutterbugs, Men’s Journal, a Playboy, and an aging Esquire with a picture of Charlize Theron on the cover, as the world’s sexiest woman.

“You think she’s the sexiest woman?” Jackson asked, about Charlize Theron.

“There is no such thing,” Lucas said. “That’d be like the best baseball game. You can argue about it a long time, but you’ll never agree.”

“I think she’s the sexiest,” Jackson said. “Angelina Jolie?"

"She’s good, she’s good,” Jackson admitted. “Michelle Pfeiffer?"

"Ah, Jesus, now you’ve got me confused,” Jackson said. “I like the blondies…” So they talked about sex and tried not to drink too much water, because they’d have to pee, and Jackson had a sack of black- corn chips and some nacho sauce in a plastic cup, and they ate some of that, but not too much, because then one of them might develop gas, and then they talked about the truck for a while, and whether there was any real difference between a GMC and a Chevrolet, and they watched women coming and going, and Jackson said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing her with her clothes off,” and Lucas asked him if he’d ever shot any nudes. Jackson said he dreamed about it, but his wife would kill him, so he didn’t.

“You got any nude pictures of your wife?” Lucas asked. Jackson bit on the oldest baits in history: “No, uh, you know, I…"

"Want to buy some?” They were still laughing about that when Frank Willett came out the door with an old lady. Willett was six feet tall, Lucas thought, narrow shoulders, no hips at all, probably weighed a hundred and sixty pounds, and all of it was muscle: like a snake. He was wearing sweats with a hood folded back on his shoulders, gym shoes, and a black ball cap; round, steel- rimmed glasses; and he dangled a gear bag from his left hand.

Jackson started whaling on the camera the moment they came out the door. The outside walks were made of flagstone, and Willett and the old lady chattered along as they ambled toward the street, and then took a right toward the parking lot. Lucas said to Jackson, “Short hair,” but when they turned, he spotted a short ponytail sticking out the back of Willett’s ball cap. “Shit. Ponytail.”

“Hair’s black, though, like you wanted,” Jackson grunted. “ Suck- ass license photo, it could have been any color.”

In the parking lot, Willett patted the old lady on the shoulder and walked across to his car, a gray Land Rover LR3. “Get the plates,” Lucas said to Jackson.

Jackson did, but said, “Just as easy to look them up."

"The guy’s a personal trainer,” Lucas said. “Where does he get money for a Land Rover? It might not be his.” Jackson was shooting: “Well, there’s ways…"

"And I know one of them,” Lucas said. “You take fifty thousand dollars off Frances Austin.”

WHEN THEY WERE GONE, Lucas said, “Let’s get these back and get some prints. Need them quick.”

“You can have them in two minutes, if you want,” Jackson said. “Yeah?” Jackson pulled open the bottom drawer of the chiffonier, took out a Canon photo printer about the size of a carton of milk, and plugged in his memory card. Lucas picked out four photos on the small LCD screen, and Jackson printed them as 5x7 glossies.

“Christ, this place is like a photographer’s dream,” Lucas said, as the photos pooped out of the tiny printer.

“And when some asshole tries to take it away from me, I’m counting on you to back me up,” Jackson said.

“Absolutely,” Lucas said.

THE RUN across town was delayed by construction, and Lucas, pissing on his own shoes for choosing the wrong route, took an hour to get to the Riverside State Bank in Maplewood. As he was pulling into the parking lot, he took a call from Carol:

“Not only does our man have a history, there’s an outstanding warrant from San Francisco,” she said. “He never showed up for a court date on a sale- sized pot bust, so he is fair game. We can bag his tight little ass anytime we want.”

“How much did he have?” Lucas asked. “How do you know he has a tight ass?”

“Six ounces. And Dan got back and showed me some of his shots."

"Well, shit, that’s not much of a sale."

"The information out there claims he was providing it to meditation clients to smooth them out,” she said. “He was teaching in a program called Action Zen, where you’d jump out of an airplane or climb a cliff, and then smooth out on dope.”

“Sounds weird,” Lucas said. “Sounds fun,” Carol said. “But the important thing, like I said, is that he’s fair game.”

EMILY WAU, the banker, looked at the photographs for three minutes, shuffled them around on her desk in different configurations, then said, “No.”

“No?"

"I think I would have remembered this one, for sure,” she said. “Is he married?"

"Jeez, Emily, give me a break. I’m not a dating service,” Lucas said. “Maybe you should be- you’re not doing that well as a cop,” she said, but she smiled when she said it.

LUCAS THOUGHT about it for a few minutes, as he drove away from the bank, then put in a call to Alyssa Austin. “I need to talk to you about Frank Willett.”