"It is. Let me see… four, five miles?”

THE DAKOTA COUNTY crime-scene guys arrived a couple of minutes later, and Lucas and Del and Odd walked them out to Two. “You know what you’re looking for?” Lucas asked.

“Yes.” The older of the two guys looked into the truck bed. “We’re gonna find it, too-whether or not it’s exactly right, we’ll have to see.”

“I understand there were some oak leaf bits stuck in the plastic sheet,” Lucas said.

“That’s right,” the older one said. “We’ll look for them. What we’ll do, we’ll seal up the bed as best we can, then take it back to the garage and sample everything.”

“How long before you know?"

"Lot to sample,” he said. “Let’s say… a preliminary read by tomorrow, something definitive in a week or so?"

"I’ll give a preliminary read right now,” the shorter guy said. “Given what we found in the sheet, you couldn’t even think of a better possibility than this truck. We had a mix of engine oil and transmission fluid and brake fluid and… shit, we should have thought of wreckers.”

“Good enough for me,” Lucas said. To Del: “Wanna go talk to Ricky?”

“What’d that boy do, anyway?” Odd asked.

THEY WERE only fifteen minutes from Lucas’s place, so they went back into town, and Lucas dropped the Porsche and Del left his state Chevy in the street, and they took Lucas’s truck. They got lost cutting across country, and didn’t make the Davis farm until late afternoon.

The farm was not on what Lucas would have identified as farmland: it was a forty- acre hump of scraggly, sapling- infested meadow with a big wire cage in the middle of it, backed on one side by the foundation of an old barn. The barn foundation was tented with plastic; the pen itself was full of five- or six- foot- tall birds that Lucas would have called ostriches. A trailer, missing its wheels, sat on blocks to the right of the driveway, opposite the barn and bird pen, and a Dodge pickup was nosed in to the trailer.

They pulled into the driveway and parked fifty feet down the hump from the trailer; as they did, Ricky Davis stepped out of the trailer and peered at them. Lucas slipped his gun out of its waist holder and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Watch yourself-that’s the motherfucker who shot me.”

“You sure?"

" Ninety- four- point- six percent.”

DAVIS WAS watching them, a frown on his face. When Lucas stepped out, with Del on the other side, his face dropped, and then he looked both ways, up and down the hill, and Lucas yelled, “Ricky…” but Davis had thrown himself into his truck.

“Shit,” Lucas said, and pulled the.45. Davis fired up the truck and hit the gas, backing straight toward them, and Lucas yelled, “Ricky,” and pointed the pistol, and Del, who was exposed, ran around behind Lucas’s truck, and Davis accelerated, backward, past them, down the hill, all the way to the gravel road, across the gravel road, into the ditch on the other side.

Neither Lucas nor Del had fired a shot; they both climbed back into Lucas’s truck and Lucas whipped it around in a circle. Davis was moving forward, but couldn’t climb the steep bank of the ditch for a hundred yards or so, and bounced and ricocheted over the rough turf on the edge of the ditch, and finally coaxed the truck up the side and hit the gravel road. Lucas was a hundred feet behind him when they cleared the top of a hill, past a farmhouse where there was a woman standing on the lawn with a golden retriever. They were going way too fast.

Gravel dust made it impossible to see for more than forty or fifty yards. Every time Lucas moved to the side, to get out of the dust, Davis moved over in front of him.

“Gotta hard right coming up,” Del yelled. “Coming up… Coming up close!”

Lucas hit the brakes and dropped back, the stability- control lights flashing on his dashboard, but Davis plowed into the intersection, too fast to hold. The back end of the pickup started to slide, the rear wheels frantically throwing rocks and dirt, and the truck almost went into the ditch again, but Davis at least got it straight, with two wheels down in the ditch and two on the shoulder. Then the ditch wall got steeper and he tried to stop; did stop. Sat for a moment, and then the truck slowly rolled sideways. Davis tried to steer into it, but failed, and the truck rolled, and stopped upside down.

“Hard right,” Del said, climbing out behind the muzzle of his Beretta 9mm.

Lucas said, “Might be a gun in the truck. Watch it.” They boxed the truck, easing up behind it. There was no visible piece of sheet metal on the vehicle that hadn’t been dented in the roll. All the windows were cracked, and when Lucas came up on the driver’s side, he could hear Davis weeping.

He risked a peek: Davis was hanging upside down in his safety belt, his face contorted, tears running down his forehead into his hair. Lucas asked, “Are you hurt?”

Davis, out of control, asked “ Wha- wha- what’s gonna happen to the birds?”

“Are you hurt?” Del asked.

“No, I’m just upside down."

"Gotta gun?” Lucas asked. “No."

"Let’s get you out of there.”

THEY’D GOTTEN him out, and Del had cuffed him, when a sheriff’s car cut around a corner a half- mile away, out from behind the shelter of a stand of trees, and Del looked back at the farmhouse where the woman had been and said, “She must have called it in.”

Lucas said, “Hang on,” and climbed in the truck and hit the switch that activated the two red- LED flashers on his grill. The cop car slowed a bit, but came on, stopped thirty yards away and the cop got out with a shotgun, pointed to the sky, and Lucas shouted, “BCA-BCA,” and he and Del held up their IDs.

“I’m so fucked,” Davis said.

WITH THE Goodhue deputy standing there, they read Davis his rights, and Lucas asked if he understood them, and then Del said, “You scared the shit out of us, back there, man. What the hell was that all about?”

“I knew you were coming, someday,” Davis said. “I knew you’d find out.” He began to weep again, and the deputy seemed about to say something, but Lucas gave him a quick head shake.

“You almost shot me in the balls, Ricky,” Lucas said. “Two inches over, and I’d be Nutless Davenport, wonder cop.”

That made Davis smile, momentarily, shakily, and he said, “I didn’t want to do it. That crazy bitch made me do it. We weren’t trying to kill you.”Lucas was a little pissed: “Man, you shoot a gun at somebody."

"I was trying to wound you or something. Get you off the case

Didn’t try to hit you in the nuts, though,” he said, miserably. Then. “Look at my truck. Jesus, look at my truck. What’s gonna happen to my birds? What’s gonna happen to the farm?”

“Did you buy the farm with the fifty thousand?"

"Yeah… paid it off, anyway,” he said. “We couldn’t afford the mortgage when it rolled over. It was some kind of A- T- M or A- R- M or something. Couldn’t make payments. We just got the birds, we were desperate.”

“Who killed Frances?"

"She did,” he said bitterly. “Helen,” Lucas said. “Called me up at work and said there’d been a terrible accident and I had to get down there. Accident, my ass, she stabbed her about a hundred times. Big puddle of blood all over the place. I never knew she hated the Austins that much.”

Del: “Hated them?"

"Hated them. They treated her like dirt. Paid her shit, and she was like, invisible. If I’d known all that shit… I don’t know."

"So you didn’t plan it out?"

"Hell no. I wouldn’t have done anything to Frances Austin,” Davis said. “I mean, we stole the money. She had so much, we didn’t think she’d notice right away, or that she could figure out what happened. But she figured it out: came right out and told Helen that she was gonna be locked up for a hundred years, because that’s what happened when somebody stole from the Austins. They started screaming at each other, and finally, Helen… stabbed her.”