Stephaniak, riding in the lead SUV, made the call as they turned into Mack's driveway, and Lucas saw the SWAT guys rush the house, hit the door. A minute later, they were all out, on the snow, behind the trucks, and Franklin came out on the porch and waved.

"Nobody home," Marcy said, disappointed.

"Goddamnit, I hope he's not on his way to Mexico," Lucas said.

"Let's look at the phones, see who's calling him," Marcy said.

"Ike's on his way out," Stephaniak said. "My guy says he didn't seem surprised." THE HOUSE SMELLED like home-canning; like pickles and creamed corn and cigarette smoke. Like an old single guy living out in the woods. Shrake and Jenkins, with the Minneapolis cops, ran the search, moving quickly and efficiently through the house, from attic to basement. Marcy went for the phones: Mack used handsets that listed calling numbers, and she took them down in her notebook. As she wrote, she called to the other cops, "Nobody mention the phones to him. Nobody mention that we looked at them. Ignore them. We want him to use them."

Lucas asked, and she said, "Half-dozen calls from the Cities since the hospital. None of the numbers go to Lyle or Joe."

Lucas wandered through the house with his hands in his pockets, then out on the porch, to the garage. The garage had three overhead doors and was set up to handle two parking spaces and a motorcycle shop. There were pieces of three or four older Harleys around, and one complete frame, but without handlebars or wheels. Nothing of interest.

He checked the woodshed, supposed that something might have been concealed under the three or four face-cords of hardwood, but if so, it hadn't been concealed since the hospital robbery. Snow had been blown in from the sides and had crusted over the lower layers of wood. Not much way to fake that.

Farther back, a cop was looking into what had been a chicken house. He walked away, shook his head at Lucas, and said, "I'm going to walk the perimeter, see if there are any tracks heading back into the woods."

A cinder-block incinerator sat next to the chicken house, and Lucas went that way. There were fresh ashes, signs of burned garbage-orange peels, the odor of burned coffee grounds. Lucas looked around, got a short downed tree branch, and stirred through the debris.

Came up with a partially burned piece of black nylon fabric. Heavy, with a piece of charred strap across it. Like a nylon bag.

The robbers, Dorothy Baker had said, had come in with black bags; had dropped the bags on the floor before they'd taped up Baker and Peterson.

Lucas stirred a bit more, started finding more fragments. Stood up, walked back to the house: "Marcy, Bill…"

Marcy and the sheriff came over, and Lucas showed them the strap. "Looks like it came off a nylon bag. The ashes are fresh."

"Dorothy Baker…" Marcy began.

Lucas nodded, and said to Stephaniak, "The nurse who was in the pharmacy said the robbers brought big black nylon bags, or packs, to carry the drugs. There are more pieces out there in the ash. We need your crime-scene guy to go through it."

"It's suggestive," Stephaniak said. He meant, That doesn't prove much.

"It'll worry them," Lucas said. "If it's the bags, it'll help crank the pressure. And if we find there's more than one bag, then we'll know. The shit came through here. Ike's involved. That's always a help."

The sheriff nodded. "I'll get my boy on it."

A deputy said, "Ike's here." IKE WAS A STOUT MAN, but hard fat, beer-belly fat, with a shiny red bald head and black-plastic-rimmed glasses on a full nose; with little yellow shark teeth under the nose, and water-green shark eyes. He was wearing a sixties army parka over a T-shirt. He was angry but was suppressing it: he'd dealt with the cops before.

Marcy held up her badge and said, "We're picking up evidence that your boys were here with the drugs. We're talking about murder, Ike. You're, what, sixty-five? We'll slam you in Stillwater for thirty years if you're in on it. So: where's Joe?"

"I ain't seen him." He put on a phony wild-eyed look, appealing to the cops. "I ain't seen him. He ain't been here. He knows better'n to draw the shit down on his old man."

Lucas said, "We're gonna get him, Ike. He's killed three or four people now. We're tearing the country up, and he's gonna fall. And when we get the lab results back, on these straps, your ass is grass."

"You find any dope? You won't find dope here, nosir. You'll find some Millers, but there's no dope. I don't allow it."

"Well, shoot, Ike, you made meth for ten years," one of the deputies said. "Everybody in the county knows it. You could smell it all the way down to Barronett."

"I don't know anything about any meth-"

"Ah, bullshit, you're wasting our time, Ike," Stephaniak said. "You could cooperate for fifteen seconds and we'd let you skate on the murder."

"… Maybe…" Marcy said.

"Maybe," Stephaniak agreed. "But if you don't talk to us, and we find out you been hiding that boy, or that you know where he is…"

"You went and burned the bags out in the incinerator, but you didn't burn them well enough," Lucas said. "We'll get them identified by the witness, and you're done."

Ike didn't ask, "What bags?" but said, "I don't know everything that goes in the fire. If Joe was up here, he didn't tell me. I work all day. I don't know everything that happens out here." He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, sniffed, and said, "I'm old. I'm gonna go lay down. If you don't mind."

"Put a cold rag on your head and think about it," Marcy said. "If you talk to us before I leave, we can deal. Once we're gone, you're toast. You get no second chances."

Ike looked around at all the cops, shook his head, muttered "fuckin'…" and stalked through the house to the back bedroom.

When he was out of earshot, Stephaniak said to Lucas, "You were right about the bags. That's them, and he knows it." IKE WAS IN the bedroom for fifteen minutes, then came out, got a beer, and sat in a platform rocker in front of the television and watched the cops take the place apart. No drugs. No anything, but the bag straps from the incinerator.

Marcy got her coat on, said to Ike, "We're leaving. Your last chance is walking out the door."

"Don't let it hit you in the ass," Ike said. WEATHER AND VIRGIL got the names of French-passport employees. Virgil called Jenkins, who'd been down in the cafeteria, and went off to talk to some of the employees. Jenkins showed up, leaned against a wall. Weather put a copy of the list in her briefcase, and then went down and found the Rayneses, Jenkins tagging behind. She'd thought the Rayneses seemed shell-shocked before, and they weren't getting better.

"Those poor little babies," Lucy Raynes said. "They hurt so bad, I can see it in their eyes. Sara knows what's going on, I can see it, she knows her heart isn't working right. She's really scared."

Weather explained about pain control, ground that Maret had already been over, but she wasn't convincing because she really didn't know for sure what the twins were experiencing. They might be, she thought, in some kind of inexpressible pain, though the cardiologist said they were comfortable. But then, he didn't know, either, Weather thought. "God, this is awful," she said aloud. "We'd hoped to get through it in a hurry, but Sara's heart… We should finish tomorrow. I really believe we will. We were ready to go this afternoon, but they started doing better. By this time tomorrow, we'll be done, and then the medical guys can really get in there with individual treatments…"

"Just want to get done," Larry Raynes said. "Just… over." WEATHER FOUND a spot in an empty waiting lounge and took the paper out of her briefcase and looked it over: seventeen names, French nationals working in the hospital. All French nationals, not just doctors, of whom there were four.