“I think Clooney will probably play me in the movie,” he said. Frisell looked at Peters and Lucas. “How about you guys?” Peters said, “Tom Cruise.” Lucas thought for a moment and said, “Scarlett Johansson.”

Frisell said, “Really? Is there something you haven’t told us?”

“No, no. It’s just that I’m sure she’d need first-person coaching through the part, some in-depth consultation,” Lucas said.

“Probably,” Peters said, catching a drip that was running down the side of his cone. To Frisell he said, “I’m changing mine to Angelina Jolie.”

•   •   •

AT THE HOLIDAY INN that night, Lucas had just gotten out of the shower, when Weather called and said, “Is there any way to see Channel Three up there?”

“I don’t know how,” he said. “Why?”

“Because you’re in a couple of big stories,” she said. “We just saw the promo for them . . . Hang on, Letty wants to talk to you.”

Letty came on and said, “Dad . . .”

“You still hurting?”

“Yeah, but never mind. Can you get online?”

“I got Wi-Fi in the room,” he said.

“Then you can watch Channel Three online. You gotta hurry.”

•   •   •

LUCAS WAS RIGHT at the top of the news, in a way.

First was the story out of Michigan, video from the reporters who’d talked to Lucas, Laurent, Frisell, and Peters that afternoon, about the fight in Mellon, which was being headlined as High Noon in the UP.

The second item was a press conference called by the BCA, to announce that further important evidence had been discovered in the Ben Merion murder case, in the shape of a bloody club found near Merion’s Cross Lake cabin.

Henry Sands made the announcement, attributing the find to “hardworking BCA detectives” without mentioning names but his own, and to BCA laboratory personnel who would be processing the evidence through the St. Paul laboratory.

“We won’t know the DNA results for some days, but I have been told that there is a substantial evidentiary sample available to us.”

He talked for a while, with the TV people calling out, “Director Sands . . . Director Sands . . . Director Sands . . .”

Pilate and Kristen worked their way north to Prospect Avenue, got on I-75 and headed for Sault Ste. Marie, away from the blockaded bridge. They drove around town, and found what they were looking for on Tenth Avenue West, an area of older homes, probably from the post–World War II era, small houses on large lots.

They spent some time cruising the whole area, then did it again, and then a third time, until Pilate pointed and said, “There. Right there.”

A white-haired woman was pulling her Taurus station wagon into a detached two-car garage. There were no lights in the house and Pilate said, “She either lives alone or her old man ain’t home yet.”

The old lady dropped the garage door and limped into the house, carrying a bag of groceries. They waited until she was inside, parked the truck in the street, and walked up to the door and knocked.

The old lady came to the door and asked, “Can I help you?”

Pilate said, “Yeah, you can.”

He’d already checked the screen door to make sure that it was unlatched. Now he yanked it open, put his hand in the old lady’s face, and hurled her back against the entry wall, where her head rebounded with a wet smack. Kristen came in behind Pilate and shut the door while Pilate kicked the old lady in the head three or four times. When Pilate was pretty sure she was dead, the two of them checked out the house.

Everything suggested that the old lady lived alone, including a single plate and a cup and saucer sitting in the kitchen sink. They dragged the old woman to the basement stairs and threw her down, then went outside to move the vehicles. The second slot in the garage was half full of crap—boxes of family photographs, thirty-year-old skis, corroding bicycles. They managed to clear enough space to fit the truck inside, and pulled the doors down.

Back inside, they checked the grocery bag—potatoes, grapes, milk, cereal. They found a couple of chicken pot pies in the refrigerator, and half of a quart bottle of bourbon in the cupboard.

“Everything we need,” Pilate said. “We could hole up here for a couple days, if we have to.”

•   •   •

BUT THEY COULDN’T, REALLY. The UP was getting organized.

They caught the six o’clock news and found out what had happened in Mellon—and that they were national celebrities. The cops had dug up a driver’s license for Kristen Jones—Pilate said, “Jones? Jones?”—and had excellent identikit images of Pilate.

“While we’re waiting to get out of here, we gotta change the way we look,” he said.

“You could shave your beard,” Kristen said. “Though I’d miss your little beard braids.”

“My beard? I’m gonna cut it all off—beard, hair, everything. Shave my head. You could get one of those lesbo haircuts like Ellen had.”

“Wonder what’s she’s told the cops?” They’d seen pictures of Ellen in handcuffs, being led into a police station.

“Probably everything,” Pilate said. “I never trusted that bitch.”

•   •   •

THEY ATE, talking about the fight in Mellon, the last things they’d seen, then went into the bathroom to cut their hair. Pilate looked at himself in the mirror and said, “You know, I can’t cut it all off. I won’t feel like myself. How about a soul patch?”

•   •   •

THE OLD LADY had a wall of photos of herself and a man who must have been her husband, showing them through the years, with four children, and then a bunch of grandchildren. One of the photos showed the old lady, many years younger, giving the man a haircut with an electric clipper as he sat on a wooden chair in a bathroom, with a towel around his neck. They dug through the bathroom drawers and a linen closet and, sure enough, found the clippers.

The clippers were crude and Pilate kept flinching when the clipper-head yanked at his hair, but they got it done, and finished the job, both his face and scalp, with a throwaway lady’s razor.

When she was finished, Pilate looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and said, “I hate this. I look about twenty fuckin’ years older.”

“That’s a good thing,” Kristen said. “I’ll tell you something else: your head looks about half as big as it used to and your nose looks twice as big. You don’t look nothin’ like that drawing.”

Pilate cut Kristen’s hair, taking his time, looking at the way her hair lay across her head, and when he finished, Kristen turned this way and that, looking in the mirror, and then said, “You know, maybe you should have been a hairdresser. Looks pretty good. Makes me look like a boy.”

•   •   •

THEY WATCHED THE NEWS on satellite TV, and it was a scream-fest. They caught CNN first, Wolf Blitzer, and then a local station out of Traverse City.

Both CNN and the local station had video shot minutes after the shooting ended. The video had been shot by the woman artist, who said she’d been held captive and had been threatened with rape by the disciples.

She had apparently sold her video to every TV station in sight, and complained that the Michigan state cops had confiscated her original memory card and camera. She’d seen that coming, though, and had saved the video to her laptop before the cops got to her.