The photos came up on his computer terminal. He pretended to be looking at something else and didn’t tell Letty about them. Henry Fuller no longer looked entirely human. He looked more like a badly butchered pig.

•   •   •

THE HONEY POTTS INTERVIEW had happened, and went on at six o’clock, after an hour of promos on the early news. About one second before the interview went on the air, WCCO reporters went looking for a comment either from Merion or his attorney. Merion refused to comment, but Raines, his attorney, said, “I want to know how she cut a deal like this. Did ’CCO pay for it? Were the police in any way involved? My client is being framed here, right out in public . . .”

•   •   •

AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK that night, Lucas got a call from a Joe Hagestrom, a highway patrolman from Wisconsin, who said he’d spoken to an agent named Bob Stern, from Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation. “He said you’d called down there earlier today, looking for a beige Winnebago Minnie with a big dent on the back left corner.”

“You find it?”

“I’m looking at it right now, or what’s left of it,” the trooper said. “It was back in the woods here . . . you know Northwest Wisconsin?”

“I’ve got a cabin up there, at Lost Land Lake.”

“You know where Highway 77 crosses the Namekagon River?” Hagestrom asked.

“Sure. I drive across there a dozen times a year,” Lucas said.

“Okay. There’s an informal campground off 77, north along the river. You can get there on a dirt trail, but it’s mostly for canoeists. We got a call that an RV was on fire back there, and the volunteer fire department went back, and it’d almost burned to the ground. The thing is, there was somebody inside.”

“You mean—dead.”

“Dead now, for sure. The firemen say the smell is unmistakable. They think the fire was deliberate. They could smell a lot of gasoline and the truck is a diesel.”

“Have they moved the body?” Lucas asked.

“Not yet. The metal part of the RV sort of shrank down and encapsulated the living quarters, where we think the body is. We’re waiting for the crime scene crew to get here.”

“What time did it blow up?”

“Around nine o’clock—couple of hours ago. The first responders were sheriff’s deputies and the fire department, and they didn’t know we were looking for a Winnebago Minnie with a dent in it. I just got here ten minutes ago, when I heard some guys talking about it on the radio.”

“All right. I’m coming.”

•   •   •

LUCAS WALKED UPSTAIRS to the bedroom to tell Weather. She was working in the morning, cutting on somebody, he didn’t know the details, but she’d gone to bed early.

“Don’t take Letty,” she said.

“I won’t. I’m gonna sneak out,” he said. He stuffed some underwear and socks, a couple of clean shirts, a pair of clean jeans, and his dopp kit in an AWOL bag, kissed Weather, collected his gun, a leather jacket, and a ball cap, and went back downstairs.

When he rolled out of the driveway in the Benz, he could see Letty’s silhouette in the lighted window of her bedroom, looking out after him.

Lucas feared that the body in the RV was Skye’s. Some things, he thought, Letty was still too young for: like the photos of Henry Fuller, like the roasted body of a woman she thought of as a friend.

•   •   •

LUCAS RAN STRAIGHT NORTH on I-35 to Hinckley, then east across the St. Croix River to Danbury, Wisconsin, and then farther east on Highway 77. There wasn’t much traffic and he ran with lights, but it still took him more than an hour and a half to get to the scene. A cop car was parked on the shoulder of the highway where it crossed the Namekagon, lights flashing in the night. Lucas identified himself, and the cop pointed him back into the woods, where Lucas could see light shining through the trees.

When he got there, he found Hagestrom, the highway patrolman, a couple of county sheriff’s deputies, and two firemen looking at the wreck of the Winnebago. The Winnebago had essentially melted around its core and was blackened with soot; but it was cold now, the fire thoroughly doused three hours earlier.

Hagestrom shook his hand and said, “I talked to Stern again. He said this is getting to be a big deal. He told me about California and South Dakota.” Stern was the DCI agent.

“It is,” Lucas agreed. “Does this thing have a license plate on it?”

“Doesn’t have a license plate, doesn’t have a VIN tag. I can see where it was, but somebody yanked the tag off before the fire. There should be a couple more numbers stamped on the frame rails, but we can’t get at those until crime scene is done.”

As they were talking, Lucas had circled around to the left rear corner of the RV, where he saw a bowling ball–sized and –shaped dent in the rear quarter panel. He took out his notebook, found the phone number for Larry Royce, the man from Duluth, and called him.

When Royce answered, sounding sleepy and annoyed, Lucas identified himself and said, “We might have found that RV you were talking about. You said there was a dent in the back left panel. The one I’m looking at, it’s like somebody might have whacked it with a bowling ball.”

“That’s it,” Royce said.

Lucas rang off and said to Hagestrom, “We need those VINs. They can get us to California plates and that’ll get us to the owner, and that’ll get us driver’s licenses and rap sheets and the whole thing.”

Hagestrom said, “Let me call the crime scene crew. See what they say.”

Lucas went and leaned against the fender of the Benz while Hagestrom negotiated. When he finished, he said, “They’re not happy, but I told them that the whole thing had burned, and been saturated with water and foam, and that the firemen had trampled all over the area around it . . . They said don’t mess with anything inside, but it’d be okay if we jacked up the side rails.”

“You got some jacks?” Lucas asked.

Between Hagestrom, Lucas, and the firemen, they had four car jacks, and they managed to get the RV’s side rail six inches off the wet ground, along the driver’s-side door. Hagestrom stretched out with an inspection mirror, which he carried in his car, and with a flashlight, looked at the bottom rail for ten seconds or so, then stood up and said, “Waste of time.”

“What?”

“Chiseled it off. Looks like a while ago—the chiseled part is rusty, and the number is gone. There’s another number, but we’d have to get under the engine to look at that one, and that ain’t gonna happen with a bunch of little jacks like these,” Hagestrom said. “Anyway, they wouldn’t know about the first number unless they looked it up, and if they did, they’d know about the second one. Bet that one’s gone, too.”

Lucas walked around the RV one more time, then down to the dark, shallow river flowing past the impromptu campsite. He called back to Hagestrom, “One thing you might do. This is a big canoeing river, there might be more campsites downstream.”

One of the deputies said, “There are. Half dozen of them, anyway.”

“Soon as it gets light, you might have somebody down at the different takeout sites, see if anybody saw the RV before it burned. Or people or cars who were with it.”

The deputy nodded and said, “I’ll get that going.”

“Good. That could be critical.” Lucas looked over at the RV. It’d be hours before the crime scene crew got inside it. He was fifty miles from his cabin, less than an hour with his flashers, or twenty miles back to a motel in Danbury.

“Hell with it,” he said to Hagestrom. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I’m going to run over to my cabin, get some sleep. I can’t think of anything else I can do here.”

•   •   •

HE MADE THE CABIN by three in the morning, stopping once at an all-night gas station in Hayward for gas, Diet Coke, a quart of milk, and a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. The cabin was dark and absolutely silent as he bounced up the driveway, until he triggered the motion-sensor floodlight on the garage. The only other visible light was on his neighbor’s porch. He was unlocking the front door when the neighbor came out in a T-shirt and underpants and yelled, “Lucas?”