Naked Prey

10

LUCAS SLEPT FOR four hours. Then the alarm buzzer went, and he groaned, and Weather kicked him and said, "The clock, the clock," and he groaned again and swatted the clock hard enough to trigger the snooze feature for the next thirty years. Weather said, "Get up, you'll go back to sleep, get up."

"No, just give me a minute."

"Get up, c'mon, you're keeping me awake."

"Jeez… " He rolled out of bed, stunned by the early hour, staggered to the window, looked at the indoor-outdoor thermometer-it was stuck at -2°F-then parted the wooden slats of the shade and peered out at a surly, pitch-dark morning. The sun wasn't due up for a while, but a streetlight provided enough illumination that he could see the bare branches moving on a lilac bush. Not only bitterly cold, but windy. Good.

He turned back to the bed, but Weather said, "Go in the bathroom."

"Miserable bitch," he muttered, and heard her cruel laugh as he tottered off.

Lucas didn't care for mornings, unless he came on them from behind. He liked the dawn hours, if he could go home and go to bed after the sun came up. But getting up before the sun wasn't natural. Science had proven that early birds weren't as intelligent, sexually vigorous, or good-looking as night owls, although he couldn't tell Weather-she cheerfully got up every workday morning at five-thirty, and was often cutting somebody open by seven o'clock.

THE GOVERNOR WAS an early bird. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled two careful turns-a concession to the fact that it was Saturday-dark gray slacks and black loafers. A pale gray jacket hung from an antique coat tree in a corner of his office. He looked fine, but Lucas could take some thin comfort from Neil Mitford, who looked like a bad car-train accident. He was wearing jeans and a tattered tweed jacket over a black-and-gold Iowa Hawkeyes sweatshirt, and had lost his shoes somewhere-he wore gray-and-red woolen hunting socks. John McCord, the BCA superintendent, huddled in a corner in khakis and a sweater with a red-nosed reindeer on the chest. Rose Marie Roux was still among the missing.

"Coffee?" Henderson asked cheerfully. "Wonder where Rose Marie is?"

"Probably killed by the cold," Lucas grumped. "Or run over by a car in the dark. Gimme about six sugars."

"Good to get up at this time, get going," Henderson said. "You get a four-hour jump on everybody. You're on them before they know what hit them."

"Unless you have a heart attack and die," Lucas said.

McCord had a sixteen-ounce Diet Pepsi in his coat pocket, his own source of caffeine. Mitford drained one cup of coffee in fifteen seconds, and poured another. The governor settled behind his desk and sipped. "What's going on, and what do we do about it?"

Lucas outlined the theory, upon which everyone agreed-that Sorrell had somehow learned who had killed his child, and had killed them in return.

"That'd take some brass balls," McCord said.

"He might be like that," Mitford said. "I did some research… "

Rose Marie slipped into the room, said, "Sorry-it was just so damn cold and dark," and found a chair. Henderson gave her a one-minute update, and then turned back to Mitford. "You were saying?"

"I pulled everything I could find on the guy. After he graduated from Cal Tech, he turned down a bunch of heavy-duty jobs and enlisted in the Army. He spent six years as an infantry and then a Special Forces officer. There are some hints that he had combat decorations, but there wasn't a war going on, so… "

"So he did snoop-and-poops and maybe cut a few throats," Henderson said. He seemed pleased with the snoop-and-poops and the throat cutting.

"That's what I think," Mitford said.

"So." Henderson picked up a ballpoint pen and toyed with it, leaned way back, and asked the ceiling, "When do we take him? We have enough, I think."

"We should get the DNA back tomorrow morning," Lucas said. "We could go tomorrow, but if anything else comes up, it wouldn't hurt to wait until Monday."

Mitford seemed startled. "Monday?" He looked at Henderson. "We can't wait until Monday."

Henderson was shaking his head and said, "Lucas, when I said when… I meant before breakfast, or after? We can't wait until tonight, or tomorrow. Washington is killing us. Fifty states, you know, CBS… "

"Yeah, yeah, I know it."

"They want me to go over to Channel Three and do a segment at eleven o'clock," Henderson said. "Then they're switching out to Fargo for a segment with Washington. I want to be able to say that we've made an arrest, and I want to say something about what we think happened. If I do that, we'll fuck the guy. Washington. I'd love to fuck him. Love it." He turned in his chair, once all the way around, and then again, his pink tongue stuck on his bottom lip as if tasting the word fuck, his glasses glittering from the overhead lights. "Love to fuck him."

"It'd be good," Mitford said. "And it'd be national."

Lucas began, "If we're trying to build a case… "

"It doesn't matter. Look, we've got X amount of information to arrest him with, and to get a DNA sample from him. Then we've got to wait a day or two to process his sample. So… why not grab him now?"

"Just… " Lucas looked at Rose Marie. "Doesn't seem orderly."

"Can I get some of that coffee?" Rose Marie asked. "I talk better when I can see."

"Of course," Henderson said. "Let me… "

"Lucas, everybody else is right and you're wrong," Rose Marie said as Henderson poured her a cup. "We've got two things going: a big crime and a big publicity problem. We can strangle the publicity problem before it gets out of control, and not do much harm to the criminal case."

"If we do hurt the criminal case," Mitford said, "what we've done is, we've fucked up a case against a bright, hard-working guy who employs hundreds of Minnesotans, and who killed a couple of thugs who kidnapped and presumably cold-bloodedly murdered his daughter. So fuckin' what?"

Lucas said to Mitford, "Don't get your shorts in a knot," and then, to the governor, "You say take him, we'll take him. It's seven-thirty now, I can kick Del out of bed, we'll go down and get him. We can have him by, say, ten at the latest, and you can make your announcement. I've got Neil's cell-phone number, if he'll be with you."

"I will," Mitford said. He jumped up and rubbed his hands together like a cold man in front of a fire. "Hot damn. We came, we saw, we kicked ass. And… he's a Republican."

"Poor bastard," said Rose Marie.

"You making the call?" Lucas asked, looking at Henderson.

"Get him," Henderson said.

DEL WAS AS much a night owl as Lucas, and was not happy when Lucas shook him out of bed. Del's wife, Cheryl, was already awake and writing bills in the kitchen when Lucas arrived, and she sent Lucas back to the bedroom to do the dirty work. Lucas stuck his head in the door and cooed, "Get up, sleepyhead. Time to work."

Nothing.

"Sleepyhead, get up… "

"I hope you die of leprosy," Del moaned. He pushed himself up on his elbows. "What do you want?"

"It's not what I want," Lucas said. "It's what the governor and Rose Marie and McCord want. They want Sorrell busted at ten o'clock this morning, and you and I are going down, with a couple of BCA guys in another car, and we're gonna drag him kicking and screaming out of his mansion."

"Can't you do it by yourself?"

"I could, but then I'd feel bad, knowing that you were up here in a nice warm bed sleeping late while I was dragging my ass all the way down to Rochester."

"All right." He dropped back on the pillow. "Just give me one more minute."

Lucas wasn't buying that routine.

JENKINS AND SHRAKE were the BCA's official flatfeet. Most of the other agents had degrees in psychology or social work or accounting or computer science, and worked out for two hours a day in the gym. Jenkins and Shrake had graduated from Hennepin Community College with Law Enforcement Certificates, and, as far as anyone knew, that was the last time either had cracked a book that didn't have Tom Clancy's name on the cover. Both of them smoked and drank too much, both had been divorced a couple of times, and Lucas knew for sure that they both carried saps. They were the pair most often sent to arrest people because, they admitted, they liked the work.

Lucas and Del were eating scrambled eggs at a Bakers Square restaurant on Ford Parkway, six blocks from Lucas's house, when the other two arrived. Jenkins was a heavyset man, unshaven, with gray hair and suspicious eyes. Shrake was tall and lean, closely shaven with a pencil-thin white mustache, also gray-haired with suspicious eyes. They both wore hats and buttoned-up woolen overcoats and Shrake had an unlit cigarette pasted to his lower lip. They didn't sit, they stood outside the booth looking down, their hands in their coat pockets, like a couple of wandering East German Stasi thugs. They finished each other's sentences.

Jenkins: "If we can bust this asshole at ten… "

Shrake: "We can get back up here in time to watch the playoff game."

Jenkins: "If you guys don't fuck something up."

Shrake: "In which case, we'll miss the game."

Jenkins: "Then we'll tell everybody in the BCA that you guys are queer."

Shrake: "And that Davenport is the girlie."

Lucas continued to chew and Del put a piece of bacon in his mouth, and stared out the window at the Ford plant across the street.

"I think we can get it done by ten," Lucas said, after swallowing. "But you guys oughta know-Del actually is gay, and you've probably violated about six diversity guidelines."

Del turned and stared steadily at the pair, unsmiling, until Jenkins said, "Not that it really matters," and they all tried to laugh, but it was too early in the morning and too cold, and Shrake's hoarse laughter trailed away into a spasm of tobacco coughs. The sun was just up, and the car exhausts were melting the frost on the streets, leaving behind nasty little streaks of black ice. Too fuckin' early.

THE TRIP THROUGH the frozen countryside took an hour and a half, with an orange sun finally groaning up over the horizon. There was more snow around the Cities than in the northwest, and for twenty minutes, they ran down the highway alongside a snowmobile rally in the adjoining ditches, a couple of dozen sleds making a fast run south.

"Canadians call them snow machines," Del said, shaking himself out of a slumber, and looking out the window at the riders. They were in Lucas's new Acura SUV, which Lucas had begun to suspect was a disguised minivan.

"What?"

"They call them snow machines, instead of snowmobiles. Or sleds."

"Fuckin' Canadians."

"They are the spawn of the devil," Del agreed, yawning. "Want me to drive for a while?"

"If we stop, those goddamn flatfeet are gonna pull that Dodge off the road, and then they're gonna get stuck, and then it'll take another half hour to get down there, and we'll all be freezing and our socks will be wet."

"Good. I didn't want to drive. Wake me up when we get there."

SORRELL'S HOME WAS eight miles outside of Rochester on a rolling piece of country that might have made a decent golf course. Though the driveway was open, Lucas had the feeling that they'd triggered security sensors when they crossed between the two stone pillars that marked its entrance. The driveway leading to the hilltop house was blacktopped, carefully plowed, and though it seemed to pass through a woodlot, the trees were too aesthetically pleasing to be natural.

The house itself seemed modest enough from the bottom of the drive, a kind of Pasadena bungalow of redwood and brick, with a wing. Only when they got closer did Lucas realize how big the place was, and that what looked like a wing was a garage.

"I could put the Big New House in the garage," Lucas said, as they neared the crest of the hill.

"You paid what, a million-five for that?" Del said. Del had been trying to worm the price out of him.

"Nothing near that," Lucas said. "But this place-this place would go for a million-five."

"Or maybe six million-five… "

The driveway disappeared around the corner of the wing, apparently to hide the utilitarian commonness of garage doors. They stopped in front of the house, got out, waited until Jenkins and Shrake joined them. Jenkins parked his car beside Lucas's SUV, effectively blocking the driveway. They walked as a group, blowing steam in the cold air, up the steps of the low front porch. The porch had a swing, as did Lucas's Big New House, and a stone walkway along the front, under an overhanging eave.

Lucas looked at Jenkins and Shrake, said, "Ready," and Jenkins said, "Unless you want me around back." Lucas shook his head. "Let's everybody be polite," he said.

"Probably at work anyway," Shrake said. "The place feels empty."

Lucas pushed the doorbell and heard the empty echo. Shrake was right: there was something weird about houses-they felt either occupied or empty, and even without looking inside, most street cops could feel whether there were people inside.

One of Lucas's old friends with the Minneapolis police force, Harrison Sloan, theorized that people who were tiptoeing, or even breathing, gave off vibrations that the house amplified, and that you could subconsciously feel the vibrations. Lucas told him he was full of shit, but secretly thought he might be onto something.

He pushed the doorbell again, and then a third time. Jenkins moved down the walkway to a line of windows, and tried to see inside, trying one window after another. Halfway down, he stopped and moved his head up and down, his hand against the glass of the storm window, blocking reflections. Then he shook his head and said, "I'll be right back."

He went out to the Dodge, popped the trunk, and fished out a twenty-pound, yellow-handled maul. As he climbed back up the porch, Lucas said, "What are you doing?"

"Gonna knock the door down," Jenkins said.

"What are you talking about?" Del asked.

Jenkins sighed, as if instructing a slow student. "If you look through that window, you'll see a hand and an arm. Just a hand and an arm, sticking out of a hallway into the kitchen. It looks to me like a dead hand, but I can't be sure. It might still be a live hand, that dies while we stand here bullshitting. So if you'll stand back… "

Lucas turned to Del who said, "Oh, boy," and to Shrake, who said, gloomily, "There goes the fuckin' playoff game."

JENKINS HAD A nice smooth wood-chopping swing, and the edge of the maul hit just above the doorknob, blowing the door open. Jenkins stepped back, and Lucas slipped his.45 out of its holster and pushed the door open with his knuckles. Del, to one side, with his Glock pointed overhead, said, "I'm going… " and then he was inside, with Lucas two steps behind, and Jenkins behind him. Shrake had jogged around to the back, just in case.

"Guy down here," Del said, and Lucas moved forward, and then Del said, "Another one," and Lucas saw the first body sprawled in the hallway, one arm sticking like a chicken claw into the kitchen. Sorrell. Lucas recognized him from the photographs, except that the photographs didn't have a bullet hole in the face.

Del was moving, and Lucas moved with him, and Lucas saw the woman, facedown in a puddle of blood. Like Sorrell, she was wearing a bathrobe, and one leg stuck out toward Lucas. As he'd done with the door, he stooped and touched her leg with his knuckles. Not cold; still some warmth.

"Not long ago," Lucas said.

"Let's clear the first floor," Del said.

Lucas spoke over his shoulder to Jenkins. "Put a gun on the stairs. We're gonna clear the floor."

"Gotcha," Jenkins said. He moved to the base of a curling stairway with a blond-wood railing, his pistol pointed generally up the stairs. Lucas and Del took two minutes clearing the first floor, slowing to pop the back door and let Shrake in. When the floor was clear, Shrake and Jenkins took the basement and Lucas and Del took the second floor, although all four believed the house was empty, except for themselves and the bodies.

And it was.

Lucas came back down the stairs, tucking the gun away, and said, "Let's move it out on the porch… make some calls."

The first call went to the Olmsted County sheriff's office. Lucas identified himself, gave the dispatcher a quick summary of the situation for the recording tape, and got the sheriff's cell phone. The sheriff took the call on the second ring, listened for a moment, then said, "Oh, my God. I'm on my way."

"Bring the ME and tell him we're gonna need some fast body temps."

Then he called the governor, through Mitford. "Neil. Get me a number for the governor. Like right now."

Mitford said, "He's next door. Hang on, I'll walk the phone over. Did you get him?"

"Not exactly," Lucas said.

Henderson took the line. "Get him?"

"We busted down the door of his house and found Sorrell and a woman who I expect is his wife, dead in the front hallway. Shot to death. Looks like executions. Looks like they'd just come down in their bathrobes and were shot. Like somebody got them out of bed. Bodies aren't quite cold."

"Good lord. Did you… touch them?"

"Yeah. The sheriff's on the way with the ME," Lucas said. He was standing on the porch, and down at the bottom of the hill, he could see a patrol car flying down the approach road, slowing for the driveway. "We've got one coming in right now."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know. I'm a little stunned. But I'd say that either Joe's not dead, and he came back, or that there's another player."

"What do I do with the CBS interview?"

"You got what, an hour? I'll talk to the sheriff about notifying the next of kin, tell them that it's critical to move fast. If we can get that done, you could make the announcement. I wouldn't make the announcement, though, before the next-of-kin notification. Not unless we get some media out here, or something, as cover. If you do, it'll come back to bite you on the ass-some relative talking to TV about how he heard it first from you, and how awful it was."

"Let me think about that," Henderson said. "In the meantime, get the sheriff to find the next of kin."

"Okay," Lucas said.

"Take down a number," Henderson said. He read off a phone number, and Lucas jotted it in the palm of his hand. "That's the red cell phone. About ten people have the number, so don't call it too often. But call me on this."

"Okay."

"You know, if you look at this one way… our problem was solved pretty quickly."

"I wouldn't look at it that way," Lucas said. "Not in public, anyway."

"Call me back," Henderson said, and he was gone.

THE SHERIFF'S CAR reached the top of the hill and pulled around Jenkins's Dodge, slid to a stop in the snow. An apple-cheeked deputy jumped out of the driver's side, and, staying behind his car, hand on his holstered six-gun, the other hand pointed at the cops on the porch, shouted, "All right. All right."

"Jesus Christ, calm down," Shrake said, from where he was leaning on the porch rail. He blew a stream of cigarette smoke at the kid. "We're really important state cops and you're just a kid who's not important at all."

That confused the deputy, and slowed him down. "Where are the casualties?" he asked, no longer shouting.

"There are two dead bodies inside: Hale Sorrell and, we think, his wife," Lucas said.

"Oh, God." The kid jumped back inside the car and they could see him calling in.

Lucas's cell phone rang, and Rose Marie was on the line. "You gotta be kidding me."

He moved down the walkway under the eaves. "We're not. We don't know anything except that there's probably nobody inside the house, except the dead people. I haven't had a chance to think about anything."

"Sorrell for sure?"

"Yeah. You ever meet his wife?"

"A time or two-Sorrell's age, mid-forties, probably, dark hair, a little heavy, short."

"That's her, ninety-nine percent," Lucas said.

"Do I need to be there?"

"No. The locals are arriving, and I've got Henderson's direct line. If I were you, I'd get next to the governor and guide his footsteps, so as to avoid the dogshit."

"I'll do that. Call if you need anything," she said, and was gone.

THE SHERIFF'S NAME was Brad Wilson, and he arrived ten minutes after the first car came in. By that time, there were four sheriff's deputies on the scene, two of them on the porch, two more sent around to "cover the back-just in case," but mostly to get them out of Lucas's hair.

The sheriff was an older, barrel-chested man wearing a pearl-handled.45 on a gunbelt. He and Lucas had met once, when Lucas was working with Minneapolis. Lucas thought him competent, and maybe better than that. "You attract more goddamned trouble, Davenport," the sheriff said as he came up. "Hale's dead? And Mary?"

"Come on and take a look. We've been keeping everybody out so the crime scene guys'll have a chance."

The sheriff nodded and followed Lucas inside, stepping carefully. They stood back, but the sheriff, leaning over Sorrell, said, "That's Hale. And that's Mary. God bless me. How'd you come to find them?"

"We came up here to arrest him on murder charges," Lucas said. "Sorrell's the guy who hanged those two people up north."

The sheriff's mouth dropped open, then snapped close. After a moment, he said, "You wouldn't be pulling my leg, would you?"

"No. The two people he hanged were probably the people who kidnapped his daughter."

"You better tell me," the sheriff said. He looked a last time at the two figures on the floor. "Holy mackerel." And, "I got to call the feds. They are going to wet their pants."

AFTER THE SHERIFF called the FBI, Lucas got him to dispatch pairs of deputies to local homeowners. "We want to know if anybody saw a car or any other kind of vehicle here, this morning or late last night. Or anything else, for that matter. Ask them if they ever saw Sorrell in a red Jeep Cherokee."

The first media trucks from Rochester began arriving fifteen minutes later. Twenty minutes after that, a Twin Cities media helicopter flew over. Hale Sorrell's parents and Mary Sorrell's mother were notified of the deaths by the sheriff's chaplain, and said that they would notify other family members. Lucas called Henderson. "You're good to go. Next of kin are notified."

"Excellent. How are things down there?"

"We're just mostly standing around, waiting for the medical examiner. He was off somewhere, but he's on his way now."

AT ELEVEN O'CLOCK, still waiting for the medical examiner, they filed into a home theater, turned on the fifty-inch flat-panel television, and watched Henderson do the interview with CBS. Somebody-Mitford, probably-had roughed him up. His hair wasn't quite as smooth as it usually was, and a fat brown file envelope sat on the table in front of him. He looked like the harried executive with bad news, and he delivered it straight ahead, no punches pulled.

"Jesus, he looks almost… tough," Del said.

Washington came on, a moon-faced black man with a dark suit and white shirt, a man who knew he'd been seriously one-upped. The dead people were dope dealers and kidnappers? The hangman and his wife had been executed in their hallway?

"I feel there were some serious investigative shortcomings in Custer County, and I'm calling on the federal government to blahblahblahblah… "

"Bullshit bullshit bullshit," Del said. "It ain't workin'."

Fifteen minutes after they were off the air, Henderson called. "Anything new?"

"No. You looked pretty good."

"Thanks. We heard Washington is on his way home to Chicago."

"God bless him."

JENKINS AND SHRAKE were in the media room, watching the playoff from premium leather-paneled theater seats. Del was prowling the house, checking desks and bureaus and calendars and computer files. Twenty minutes after he began, he handed Lucas a piece of paper: an Iowa title transfer application from a Curtis Frank, of Des Moines, to a Larry Smith, of Oelwein, Iowa, on the purchase of a 1996 Jeep Cherokee, dated three weeks earlier.

"Check the Oelwein address?" Lucas asked.

"No, but I will. Bet you a buck it's fake."

THE MEHAD arrived, and after fussing around, checked the blood puddles and body temps. Sorrell and his wife had certainly been killed sometime after midnight, he said, and after he got some weights and checked the accuracy of the house thermostat and the floor-level temperatures, he said he could probably do better than that.

"Off the top of my head, I'd say they were killed this morning," he said. "They're a little too warm to have lain on the floor all night, and the blood is a little too liquid. But we'll have to do the numbers before we know for sure."

Sheriff Wilson was standing by the door and said, "Here come the feds. Just what we needed."

"Who?"

"Lanny Cole and Jim Green. Pretty good guys, actually."

"Mmm. I know Cole, I don't know Green."

Del came back and said, "There's no such address in Oelwein. It's fake. There is a Curtis Frank, and he says he sold the truck for cash. I talked to Des Moines homicide cops and they'll take a picture of Sorrell down to his house for an ID." He saw the men in suits coming up to the door and said, "Feebs."

COLE, THE FBI agent, shook hands with the sheriff and said, "How ya doing, Brad?" and nodded at Lucas and asked, "They got any more jobs over there at the BCA?"

"I got a slot for a female investigator," Lucas said.

"I can investigate females," Cole said. "So what happened here?"

Wilson and Lucas took him through it, Lucas connecting Sorrell with the hangings in Custer County. "I gotta call in on that," Cole said, squatting next to Sorrell. "We got civil rights guys on the way to take a look at it. You say Hale did it?"

"Most likely."

Cole nodded, and looked at his partner who said, "We knew something was seriously screwed up."

"Didn't know it was that screwed up," Cole said. He looked down at the body again and said, "Goddamnit, Hale. What'd you do?"

"You guys want in on this act?" Lucas asked.

Cole shook his head. "We're gonna want to know all about it, if you could forward your findings… but we're not going to get directly involved. We just don't have the manpower, what with discovering Arab terror plots at the Washington County courthouse."

Sheriff Wilson looked at Lucas and said, "Doesn't make any sense for us to do it-it doesn't sound like the killer's from around here. So you got it. I'll call John McCord right now, and ask you in."

"Good enough," Lucas said. "If your guys come up with anything, they can pass it up to me, and I'll coordinate with Lanny and Jim." To the feds: "Any problem getting your files on the kidnapping?"

"I'll talk to the SAC from here. We should be able to give you the file this afternoon."

Back to Wilson: "Can you handle the press down here?"

"I can do that."

"So we're set."

THE FBIAGENTS visited, nothing more, and at noon they left. A BCA crime scene crew arrived from the Twin Cities, and Lucas eventually joined Del in turning over the house, looking at pieces of paper. They found nothing of interest, but couldn't get into three of the Sorrells' four computers.

The two desk-top machines, one in a library and another in a home office, and a laptop in Sorrell's briefcase, were password-protected, and would have to be cracked by computer people. A fourth laptop, apparently belonging to Mary Sorrell, was not protected, but contained nothing but letters, a personal calendar, and a few documents relating to a heart disease research foundation.

Lucas was returning Sorrell's machine to the briefcase when he found an envelope with a bank letterhead. Inside were twenty separate receipts for bank drafts, each for $50,000, with each check made to a different, major Las Vegas hotel.

"A million dollars," Del said. "High roller. Maybe that had something to do with the kidnapping? Gambling debts or something?"

"These can't be all for him," Lucas said, looking at the receipts. "Every one of the hotels is different."

"Maybe it's a business thing, a convention."

"It's weird. We oughta look at it."

AT ONE O'CLOCK, with Del getting restless, Lucas was ready to leave. He turned control of the house over to Carl Driscoll, the head of the BCA crime scene crew, who said he'd get the computers to St. Paul. "If anything comes up, call me," Lucas told him. "All the routine stuff, get it in your own computer-I think Del and I are probably headed back to Custer County, and you can e-mail it to me."

The sheriff had just come back up the hill, after talking with reporters, shook his head and said, "This is gonna get goofy. The governor's statement… it's gonna get goofy."

"Never was gonna be any other way," Lucas said. "Not after those two people went up in that tree."

Lucas got his coat, collected Del, and as they headed for the door, saw a fortyish man in a gray overcoat walking around the line of cop cars in the driveway, closely trailed by a deputy. He was carrying a wallet-sized box, and when he saw the sheriff step out on the porch with Lucas, he called, "Hey, Brad."

"George… you heard about Hale, I guess." Wilson said to Lucas, "Hale's lawyer."

"My God. I was at a wedding, Ken Hendrick's kid," the lawyer said, as he came up to them. He looked back down the hill-"I got here as fast as I could, but I had a heck of a time getting through your boys down there."

"Not much for you to do, here, George."

"Yes, there is. A week ago, Hale gave me a box… " He handed the box to the sheriff. It was about four inches by five, an inch thick. A tough-looking lock was set flush to the polished steel surface at one edge. "He said, I swear to God, that if he should die, I should give this to the authorities. I asked him if it was anything illegal, and he said no, it's just some information that he felt should come to official attention. I thought maybe it was business, but now… "

"What's in it?"

"I don't know," the lawyer said. "He gave it to me, told me to file it and forget it. He said it couldn't be opened without destroying the contents, unless you used a key. He said the key was on his key ring with his car keys."

Wilson looked at the box, then handed it to Lucas. "Ever see anything like that?"

"Yeah. It looks like a magnetic-media safe, for carrying around computer Smart Cards and so on. It's bigger than most of them, and I've never seen a lock before."

"His key ring is on the bedside table," Del said. "I checked to see if there was a Jeep key on it."

"Let's go look," Lucas said.

"Maybe we ought to do it in a lab," Wilson said doubtfully.

"It's not a bomb. It's something he wanted us to get," Lucas said.

DEL RETRIEVED THE key ring, which contained one key with a circular blade. Lucas popped the top on the safe, and inside was an old-fashioned 3.5-inch computer floppy disk.

"Laptop," Del said.

They took Mary Sorrell's IBM laptop out of her briefcase, put it on the floor of the home office. The base unit had no floppy drive, but they found the drive in a separate pouch and plugged it in. Lucas brought the laptop up, slipped the floppy into the drive, and found one file. He clicked on the file. Microsoft Word began opening on the screen, and then the file itself.

A note-a brief note.

Tammy Sorrell was kidnapped by Joe Kelly, Deon Cash, and Jane Warr. Cash is a driver for the Gene Calb truck rehabilitation service in the town of Broderick, near Armstrong, Minnesota. Jane Warr is a card dealer at the Moose Bay casino near Armstrong. Warr and Cash live together in a farmhouse in Broderick. They killed Tammy on Dec. 22 and buried her somewhere nearby. The exact location is unknown. This information has been confirmed.

"Jeez. There it is," Wilson said, looking up at Lucas. "Where did he get the information? The FBI says that the kidnappers never called. The feds even started looking at Hale's background to see if he might have had something to do with Tammy… you know."

Lucas touched the computer screen. "He says Kelly, Cash, and Warr did the kidnapping, and that Cash is a driver for the truck place. He doesn't say anything more about Joe. I think he must've got the information from Joe. Where else would he get it?"

Wilson pursed his lips. "So Joe… "

"I think Joe's outa here," Lucas said. "If Sorrell was Special Forces… maybe he had some training with pliers and fingernails."

"You don't think Joe did this?" Wilson gestured out toward the kitchen, where the two bodies still lay on the floor.

"It's possible-but how the hell would Sorrell know about Cash and Warr? I think he probably grabbed Joe when Joe came for the money," Lucas said. He looked at the note again, frowned. "I thought all the stories were about the rich girl being kidnapped on Christmas Eve, and all the gifts around the tree… "

"She was… " Wilson shook his head. "Maybe it's a typo. Maybe he meant the twenty-fourth, and typed the twenty-second."

"Pretty unlikely," Del grunted. "That's one thing you'd get right, in that kind of note."

"Those bank draft receipts, the ones that went to Vegas… " Lucas had returned them to the briefcase where he found them, to have them checked later. Now he retrieved them, and looked at the dates. "They're dated December twentieth. He took a million dollars in cashier's checks to Las Vegas on the twentieth."

"What do you think?" Wilson asked.

"Could you get one of the bank managers to check on when the drafts were cashed?" Lucas asked.

Wilson looked at his watch. "It's Saturday. Maybe. Let me call somebody."

"Maybe… " Lucas scratched his chin and looked at Del. "Maybe he was collecting money in Vegas. He got drafts from his bank, then spent three days withdrawing the money from his Vegas accounts. He was collecting cash to pay the kidnappers."

Del nodded. "Couldn't just walk into a bank and ask for a million in cash. How else would you get it? But a bunch of bank drafts for Vegas hotels… He could've even passed it off as a business thing, with the banks."

"So Tammy wasn't kidnapped on the twenty-fourth," Lucas said. "They got her sooner than that. Huh." They'd been squatting next to Mary Sorrell's computer, and now they all stood up. "But there was something that Sorrell didn't get from Joe or Cash or Warr. There must be a fourth man. Or woman. Or maybe a fourth, fifth, and sixth. Somebody who knew what it meant when Cash and Warr got hanged."

"And didn't want Sorrell talking about it," Del said. "Couldn't risk it."

"Why couldn't he risk it?" Wilson asked.

Del said, "Because he didn't know if Sorrell was finished-didn't know whether or not Sorrell had his name. Didn't know what Jane and Deon might have told him."

Wilson scratched his head and said, "Shoot," and a moment later, "Goldarnit."

Lucas said to Del, "We better get back up north."

Del nodded. "But we wouldn't get up there before dark, if we left now. We should catch a nap this afternoon, leave really early tomorrow. Three in the morning. Get there when the sun comes up. Take that little town apart."