"That was him?"

"Yes. That was him. Go to the Internet, it's all there."

"Ah, man. Listen: You gotta get a clean cell phone. Buy one at a Wal-Mart, with cash. Call me at this number… We need that address."

"You don't need that address. They come here in a convoy. She has bodyguards. They must be bringing her from home. You're going to assassinate a half-dozen police officers now? You're going to invade her house and shoot it out with men who have machine guns?"

Another space, then, "No. I guess not."

"I have some advice for you, my fat friend. If something were to happen to your brother, then it would all be done. Would it not?"

"He's my brother," Lyle Mack said.

Barakat sensed equivocation. "If your brother kidnapped somebody, then he is going to prison for a long time. A living death, anyway. Be better, not to be kept in a rat cage for the rest of your life."

"I'm gonna get him to Mexico," Lyle Mack said. Again, Barakat thought he sensed a tentativeness.

"If you just-"

"I'm not going to talk about it. Take down this number…" Barakat took down the number for Mack's clean phone. Mack added, "Get yourself a clean phone. Use a fake name and address. They won't ask for an ID. And if we can't get at Weather what's-her-name at home, then we'll have to do it at the hospital. Watch her."

And he was gone. Two FLOORS DOWN, Weather was working on a cancer patient, a quick job transferring skin from buttocks to arm to cover a wound created by the removal of a lesion from a blood vessel. She was humming along with Shostakovich's Jazz Suite #2, thinking of nothing much more than getting a nice suture line, when Maret pushed backward through the OR door, holding a mask to his face.

"What's up?" Weather asked.

"We've heard from Spacy, and he said that we should probably push through the operation tomorrow. He needs to get Sara isolated so he can work on her heart. They're evaluating her for a possible op within a few days after we finish. A week, maybe."

"Okay." She'd been expecting something like this. Juggling the requirements of both children had become increasingly difficult. "I can be here anytime."

"There's no point in starting this evening-too many people scattered around. But we are tentatively on for seven o'clock tomorrow."

"I'll be here."

He left, and one of the nurses asked if she'd heard any more about the killer who'd kicked the pharmacist to death.

"Nothing more. My husband is out chasing him today. I should get an earful when I get home."

"How can that happen in a hospital?" the nurse asked. She was a young blond woman, three years out of school.

"All kinds of weird and awful things happen in hospitals," Weather said. "Now listen to the nice music, and let me finish this arm." BARAKAT WANDERED onto the surgical floor, nodded at a nurse at the monitoring station. "I've been trying to watch the separation work as much as I can. Is it on for tomorrow?"

The nurse had recognized him as a doc, both from passing him in the hallways and from the ID clipped to his jacket. She'd had other inquiries, and never even thought about the question: "Yup. Seven o'clock. Get there early for a good seat."

"The whole thing is so cool, huh?"

They chatted for a couple of minutes; Barakat was tall, dark, handsome, and convivial. The nurse liked him for all of that. He patted her hand as he left: "Thanks for the info. Maybe I'll see you up there."

Nice guy, she thought. Definitely husband material. LUCAS LEFT MACY'S with a bag of short-sleeved golf shirts-January in Minnesota, how far away could summer really be?-and the information that the menswear department hadn't sold any coats at all that morning. By January, everybody in Minnesota already had one.

9

LUCAS WAS LEANING against Joe Mack's refrigerator with a Diet Coke in his hand, watching with little interest the two men from the BCA crime-scene crew. Joe Mack lived in a nice-enough but bland apartment with all-eggshell walls, in a singles' complex in Woodbury, a suburban town six miles from Cherries.

Joe had decorated the place with framed posters of Harley-Davidsons and Playboy Playmates. He had a stereo/TV system that occupied an entire wall in the front room, and a swinging-singles wet bar with every kind of North American alcohol known to man. No scotch. One of the crime-scene technicians had a Janis Joplin album playing on the stereo, a nice quiet background to nothing much. They'd found two ounces of marijuana in a baggie in the refrigerator. They'd tag it, and if needed, it could be used to hold Joe Mack, but with an outstanding charge of kidnapping, the dope wasn't lighting anybody's fire.

A DNA specialist had already come and gone. It seemed likely that Joe had been sleeping alone, since there was only one pillow on his bed. The pillow provided a harvest of curly, auburn hair, and the sheets a couple of semen stains that should, altogether, provide excellent DNA.

They also found two pistols, a 9mm Beretta and a Colt.45 with full clips, and several boxes of ammo, a twelve-gauge shotgun and three boxes of shells, a scoped.22 rifle, a scoped.30-06 rifle, a broken taser, and a paintball gun with a bag of balls. They took them away, but except for the taser, they were really nothing more than any Wisconsin boy might have in his closet. That included the dope.

"Now here's something really interesting," one of the techs said. He was in the bedroom, across the hall from the kitchen, kneeling next to Mack's bed. The other tech came down the hall from the front room and Lucas asked, "What is it?"

The tech turned and sat down with a magazine in his hands. "The February 1990 Playboy with Pamela Anderson. The gatefold is worn, but intact."

"Whoa." The second tech drifted into the bedroom to look over the first tech's shoulder.

"Think it could be a clue?" Lucas asked.

"It's a clue to something, but I'm so old I can't remember what it is," the first guy said. "Look at this: thirty-six, twenty-two, thirty-four. This woman was in exceptionally good shape."

"I'm not so big on blondes," the second tech said.

The first tech looked at him with pity and said, "Loser."

After a bit, Lucas said, "We're not going to find anything here, are we?" HE WAS GETTING READY to leave when his cell phone rang, and he looked at the screen: Marcy.

"Yeah?"

"The airport police looked at their tag file, and they found out that Jill MacBride's van came into the Blue Ramp about forty minutes after Mack ran. They went looking for it and found it up on top. Door was unlocked. MacBride was inside. Looks like she was strangled."

Janis was singing that "freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose," and Lucas said, "I, uh… Ah, crap."

"I'm going down there. We'll get crime scene on the way. Are you still at Mack's?"

"Yeah. Not much here. Got the DNA going. I'll see you over there." THE SADNESS CAME ON like a wave. He'd never met the woman, but he'd seen the kid, and there was another kid still at school. Weather was talking about having another kid, looking for a daughter, and he wouldn't mind, Lucas thought. Tough to have too many daughters.

What about the girls, Joe? And in a way, he couldn't believe that Mack had killed the woman-he'd seemed like a screwup, but didn't have the hard edge of somebody who could throttle a woman in cold blood. On the other hand, the questioning might have triggered a psychotic state. If that were the case, then he could have strangled MacBride without really understanding what he was doing; from a terrible need just to remove her. That would also explain the irrationality of it. He must've known that they'd put it together, that they'd be after him.

Or maybe he was simply too damn dumb.