"The leases are $500 a month for fifteen years plus a two-percent rent increase per year, and that's that. They're great apartments for the price, and the price doesn't even keep up with inflation," Greave said. "That's why these people didn't want to leave. But they might've anyway, because the Joyces gave them a lot of shit. But this old lady wasn't intimidated, and she held them all together. Then she turned up dead."

"Ah."

"Last week, she doesn't make it to school," Greave continued. "The principal calls, no answer. A cop goes by for a look, can't get the door open-it's locked from the inside and there's no answer on the phone. They finally take the door down, the alarms go off, and there she is, dead in her bed. George Joyce is dabbing the tears out of his eyes and looking like the cat that ate the canary. We figured they killed her."

"Autopsy?"

"Yup. Not a mark on her. The toxicology reports showed just enough sedative for a couple of sleeping pills, which she had a prescription for. There was a beer bottle and a glass on her nightstand, but she'd apparently metabolized the alcohol because there wasn't any in her blood. Her daughter said she had long-term insomnia, and she'd wash down a couple of sleeping pills with a beer, read until she got sleepy, and then take a leak and go to bed. And that's exactly what it looks like she did. The docs say her heart stopped. Period. End of story."

Lucas shrugged. "It happens."

"No history of heart problems in her family. Cleared a physical in February, no problems except the insomnia and she's too thin-but being underweight goes against the heart thing."

"Still, it happens," Lucas said. "People drop dead."

Grave shook his head. "When the Joyces were running the flops, they had a guy whose job it was to keep things orderly. They brought him over to run the apartments. Old friend of yours; you busted him three or four times, according to the NCIC. Remember Ray Cherry?"

"Cherry? Jesus. He is an asshole. Used to box Golden Gloves when he was a kid…" Lucas scratched the side of his jaw, thinking. "That's a nasty bunch you got there. Jeez."

"So what do I do? I got nothing."

"Get a cattle prod and a dark basement. Cherry'd talk after a while." Lucas grinned through his teeth, and Greave almost visibly shrank from him.

"You're not serious."

"Mmm. I guess not," Lucas said. Then, brightening: "Maybe she was stabbed with an icicle."

"What?"

"Let me think about it," Lucas said.

There were two landfills in Dakota County. Adhering to Murphy's Law, they went to the wrong one first, then shifted down a series of blacktopped back roads to the correct one. For the last half-mile, they were pinched between two lumbering garbage trucks, gone overripe in the freshening summer.

"Office," Greave said, pointing off to the left. He dabbed at the front of his lavender suit, as though he were trying to whisk away the smell of rotten fruit.

The dump office was a tiny brick building with a large plate-glass window, overlooking a set of truck scales and the lines of garbage haulers rumbling out to the edge of the raw yellow earth of the landfill. Lucas swung that way, dumped the Porsche in a corner of the lot.

Inside the building, a Formica-topped counter separated the front of the office from the back. A fat guy in a green T-shirt sat at metal desk behind the counter, an unlit cigar in his mouth. He was complaining into a telephone and picking penny-sized flakes of dead skin off his elbows; the heartbreak of psoriasis. A door behind the fat man led to a phone booth… size room with a sink and a toilet. The door was open, and the stool was gurgling. A half-used roll of toilet paper sat on the toilet tank, and another one lay on the floor, where it had soaked full of rusty water.

"So he says it'll cost a hunnert just to come out here and look at it," the fat guy said to the telephone, looking into the bathroom. "I tell you, I run up to Fleet-Farm and I get the parts… Well, I know that, Al, but this is drivin' me fuckin' crazy."

The fat guy put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, "Be with you in a minute." Then to the phone, "Al, I gotta go, there's a couple guys here in suits. Yeah." He looked up at Lucas and asked, "You EPA?"

"No."

The fat man said, "No," to the phone, listened, then looked up again. "OSHA?"

"No. Minneapolis cops."

"Minneapolis cops," the fat man said. He listened for a minute, then looked up. "He sent the check."

"What?"

"He sent the check to his old lady. Put it in the mail this morning, the whole thing."

"Terrific," Lucas said. "I really hope he did, or we'll have to arrest him for misfeasance to a police officer on official business, a Class Three felony."

Greave turned away to smile, while the fat man repeated what Lucas said into the phone, then after a pause said, "That's what the man said," and hung up. "He says he really mailed it."

"Okay," said Lucas. "Now, we're also looking for a guy who supposedly hangs around here. Junky Doog…" The fat man's eyes slid away, and Lucas said, "So he's out here?"

"Junky's, uh, kind of…" The fat man tapped his head.

"I know. I've dealt with him a few times."

"Like, recently?"

"Not since he got out of St. Peter."

"I think he got Alzheimer's," the fat man said. "Some days, he's just not here. He forgets to eat, he shits in his pants."

"So where is he?" Lucas asked.

"Christ, I feel bad about the guy. He's a guy who never caught a break," the fat man said. "Not one fuckin' day of his life."

"Used to cut people up. You can't do that."

"Yeah, I know. Beautiful women. And I ain't no softy on crime, but you talk to Junky, and you know he didn't know any better. He's like a kid. I mean, he's not like a kid, because a normal kid wouldn't do what he did… I mean, he just doesn't know. He's like a… pit bull, or something. It just ain't his fault."

"We take that into account," said Greave, his voice soft. "Really, we're concerned about these things."

The fat man sighed, struggled to his feet, walked around the counter to a window. He pointed out across the landfill. "See that willow tree? He's got a place in the woods over there. We ain't supposed to let him, but whatcha gonna do?"

Lucas and Greave scuffed across the yellow-dirt landfill, trying to stay clear of the contrails of dust thrown up by the garbage trucks rumbling by. The landfill looked more like a highway construction site than a dump, with big D-9 Cats laboring around the edges of the raw dirt; and only at the edges did it look like a dump: a jumble of green plastic garbage bags, throwaway diapers, cereal boxes, cardboard, scraps of sheet plastic and metal, all rolled under the yellow dirt, and all surrounded by second-growth forest. Seagulls, crows, and pigeons hung over the litter, looking for food; a bony gray dog, moving jackal-like, slipped around the edges.

The willow tree was an old one, yellow, with great weeping branches bright green with new growth. Beneath it, two blue plastic tarps had been draped tentlike over tree limbs. Under one of the tarps was a salvaged charcoal grill; under the other was a mattress. A man lay on the mattress, faceup, eyes open, unmoving.

"Jesus, he's fuckin' dead," Greave said, his voice hushed.

Lucas stepped off the raw earth, Greave tagging reluctantly behind, followed a narrow trail around a clump of bushes, and was hit by the stink of human waste. The odor was thick, and came from no particular direction. He started breathing through his mouth, and unconsciously reached across to his hipbone and pulled his pistol a quarter inch out of the holster, loosening it, then patted it back. He moved in close before he called out, "Hello. Hey."

The man on the mattress twitched, then subsided again. He lay with one arm outstretched, the other over his pelvis. There was something wrong with the outstretched arm, Lucas saw, moving closer. Just off the mattress, a flat-topped stump was apparently being used as a table. A group of small brown cylinders sat on the stump, like chunks of beef jerky. Beside the stump was a one-gallon aluminum can of paint thinner, top off, lying on its side.