He dropped it on her desk and she leaned over and looked at it, then took a pencil out of a cup and pushed it around. "Straw. Yeah. Like that. Exactly. See this cut? Cut like that. Same color and texture."

"Is there any way to tell if it's the same straw? Or hay? Like genetically the same?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe the FBI could. Maybe one of the big ag schools could tell you what variety of straw it is, if that would help."

"I'm not exactly following-I'm a city kid. Hay, straw…"

Hay, she said, was essentially different from straw. Hay was a dried food crop, like alfalfa or clover, heavily fed to cattle, horses, goats, sheep, and sometimes other animals. Straw was the support stalk for cereal grains, like wheat, oats, and rye, didn't have much nutritive value, but was used for animal bedding.

"And what we had on Haines's back was several pieces of straw, not hay. It looked exactly like what you've brought in, and I suspect a lab could tell you that they were both, say, oat straw, or not. Or wheat straw, or not. About the genetics, I bet they could figure it out, but I'm not sure."

"Bedding material. For what kind of animals?" Lucas asked.

"Horses. You know, horses in a barn," she said.

"Huh."

"If you want to leave this, I can check around, see if we can find a place to compare it. If you have a scene where you think they might've been killed, well, just me eyeballing it, your samples look identical to what we took off Haines," she said. "And Haines and Chapman were living in the city, too-they wouldn't have just picked it up anywhere. So… I bet you found it. Uh, where was it?" LUCAS CALLED JENKINS from the road: "You still got her there?"

"Yes. Having a nice chat."

"Hold her there." GABRIEL MARET pulled the surgical team together outside the operating theater. "One more day. The cardiologists say there could be some benefit by holding off for another twelve to twenty-four hours, but not after that. So tomorrow morning, at seven o'clock, we're going, and we have to go the whole way, regardless of what happens."

Virgil had been leaning against the wall down the hall, and when Weather broke free of the group, asked, "Back home?"

She said, "I was thinking. About these latest killings. Lucas thinks that the hospital guy has to be involved somehow. He's one guy they don't have any ideas about, except for the accent."

Virgil nodded. "So?"

"So they killed this one man last night, and another one probably this morning. Who do we know who has a French accent, who didn't show up for work today?"

Virgil's eyebrows went up. "Not a bad thought. Who'd we ask about that?"

"Let's go down to admin." LUCAS GOT BACK to the BCA office and found Jenkins and Honey Bee in a conference room finishing a pepperoni pizza. Lucas took a chair, pulled it close to her, and said, "Ms. Brown. Harriet. Honey Bee. When the bodies of Haines and Chapman were found, some pieces of straw were taken off their backs. I collected some straw from your driveway this morning. I've just been down to the Dakota County sheriff's office and we've done a comparison. We think we can prove that Haines and Chapman were killed at your farm."

Her mouth dropped open. "What?"

"We can use genetics techniques to prove the connection," Lucas said. "Very sophisticated, but they're better than fingerprints."

"I don't-"

Lucas beat her down with an angry snap: "Goddamnit, don't bullshit us. This is way out of control. Do you realize how many people are dead? Somebody's killed six people."

"Not me…"

"But you were involved, one way or another," Lucas said, leaning toward her, looming, tapping on the table with his index finger. "We've already got enough to convince a jury: you were intimate with Lyle Mack, you were friends with Joe and Ike, you were friends with the victims, Haines and Chapman, we've got the evidence of the straw, taken from your house. Have you helped us? No. You've stonewalled. You've given us exactly zip."

She looked at Jenkins. "I've been cooperating…"

"You've been talking to me," Jenkins said. "You've been nice, I gotta admit. But Honey Bee, you've given me exactly no useful information. Not even the simple stuff, like, who's the 'doc' guy?"

"I don't know who the doc guy is," she said. "I think he's a doper. Joe told me once that the worst doper he knew was a doctor, and I think it's the same guy. I think that's how they knew him. The guy was trying to buy dope."

"Did Joe sell dope?"

She looked away, and then said, "He might have, at one time. I don't know exactly."

"Oh, horseshit," Lucas said. "Did he sell dope?"

Long pause, then, "Yes. Not so much sell it, as trade it. You know, for stuff."

"What kind of stuff?" Jenkins asked.

"Office equipment."

"Office equipment." The two cops looked at each other.

"They used to sell a lot of office equipment on the Internet," she said. "And cameras and stuff," she said.

"In other words, hot stuff," Lucas said. "Stuff from burglaries, stolen stuff from offices."

"I guess," she said.

"Where'd they keep it?" Lucas asked. "There wasn't any at the bar, or their houses."

She started to cry, and the cops sat and watched. After a minute, she stopped, checking for effects, saw nothing but stone faces. "What?"

"Where'd they keep it?" Lucas asked again.

Another long wait, and then, "They have a storage place out in Lake Elmo."

"Do you know where it is?"

"Yes."

"Did they put the dope from the hospital robbery out there?"

"I don't know about the hospital robbery. "

They pushed her around for a while, then Lucas said to Jenkins, "I think we better check her into Ramsey County."

"What does that mean?" she asked.

"Gonna hold you in jail for a while," Lucas said.

She thought about the money in her purse and said, "Oh, no. You said we were going to a hotel."

"Can't take a chance that you'd run," Lucas said. "You're in this up to your neck."

She said, "If you put me in jail, I'll get a lawyer and I won't say one more goddamn thing to you. If you need help, you can go fuck yourself. I'm trying to help, maybe I can help if you ask different questions, or maybe I can help some other way. If you put me in jail, I won't say one more goddamn word."

"I don't know if you can give us any more help," Lucas said. "You're looking at a murder one, and you're still stonewalling."

"I'll help you with Joe," she said. "Who else are you going to get to talk to him? That he'll trust? You can go fuck yourself on that one," she said.

Lucas looked at Jenkins. "What do you think?"

Before Jenkins could say anything, Honey Bee added, "I've got my truck. I've got my horses. I've got my farm. I can't run away. I'm forty-three years old and I got nothing else in my whole life."

Jenkins said, "I thought your driver's license said thirty-seven or thirty-nine. Like that."

"I might've cut a couple years off," she said. LUCAS CALLED MARCY, told her about the straw from the driveway, about the storage unit, about Honey Bee's willingness to talk to Joe.

"He's not answering, but his phone is ringing, still in Kansas, and not moving," Marcy said. "I got a bad feeling about it. I think they ditched it. Threw it out the window." LUCAS AND JENKINS drove Honey Bee out to Lake Elmo, to a self-storage place, and got the manager to open the unit. The floor was covered by wooden pallets, on which were stacked a couple of dozen TVs and computer monitors, computers, including a half-dozen Apple laptops, a gift box of Wusthof knives, paper shredders, printers, speakers and audio receivers, Blu-ray and DVD players, a dozen GPS handhelds, fish-finders and marine tracking units, six new-looking Yamaha 25-horsepower outboard motors, and one snowmobile.

No drugs. Because, Lucas thought, the drugs had been at Ike's.