"What about the girls?" Lucas asked.

Carl's eyes involuntarily wandered."He'd come in alone…" he began.

"Don't bullshit us, Booger," Lucas said, scuffing his chair an inch toward the fat man. "We know about the girls, we know you introduced them. We need your help, and we're gonna get it one way or another. Now… was there one girl, or more than one? And where could we find them?"

After a moment of silence, Carl said, "They're gonna give me a ton of shit about this."

"We're talking about a serial torture killer. If there's any hint that he somehow met Rice here, through the girls, they'd want to know about it," Lucas said.

Carl sighed, put his hands over his belly, twiddled, then said, "He'd try to get Dove, a blondie. If she was busy, he'd take one or the other. But he'd usually ask if anybody had seen Dove."

"But he hooked up with some of the others, too."

"Yeah, he did," Carl said. "They'd go over next door, the girls got rooms. He'd get his blow job, and he'd come back here all weepy, have another beer then go on home."

"How often?" Sloan asked.

"Twice a week, maybe," Carl said. "How much?"

"For a blow job? Fifty if you wear a rubber, or seventy without," Carl said. "The extra twenty is, like, AIDS insurance."

"That's a good idea," Sloan said. "Nothin' like AIDS insurance."

"Hey, it's not me, the girls don't work for me," Carl protested. "They come in here, but what am I gonna do? I'm not a cop. I'm not their guardian. They don't do any business on the premises, and some of the guys… like to have them around."

Lucas: "Their names are Dove and…?"

"Andi and Aix, right now. The one girl's name is pronounced X, but it's spelled A-I-X, as she'll tell you every chance she gets. She thinks she's speaking French because she once went there with her boyfriend. There were a couple more girls, but they moved away, I couldn't tell you where. They come and they go."

"Dove is still here?"

"Should be right next door, unless they're shopping." He looked at his watch. "Mornings, lots of times, they run up to the Mall of America, but they're usually back by two-guys get off work a couple hours early, they like to stop by for an afternooner. You know, before supper."

"Wouldn't want a blow job on a full stomach," Sloan said.

"What rooms?" Lucas asked.

"Usually twenty-three, twenty-five, and twenty-seven, down at the end of the hall. Close enough that they can scream for help."

"They ever scream for help?" Sloan asked.

"Not lately, but who knows?"

"We may come back and talk to you some more," Lucas said, standing up. "Don't call the girls, huh?"

THE Y'ALL BUCK INN'S parking lot was separated from the Rockyard's lot by a fringe of grass. A shabby two-story building, it showed two long rows of gray-green doors facing the highway, with a small window next to each door. The parking lot was gravel, the stairs and walkways were concrete and outside in the weather: a fifteen-dollar-a-night motel used as a crash pad by truckers and refugees from the Rock-yard who were too drunk to drive home.

They didn't bother with the office; they climbed the stairs and walked south until they got to twenty-five and knocked. They were lucky the first time: Dove answered.

She probably looked good in a bar, in the evening, Lucas thought. During the day, and outside, she wasn't quite pretty. Twenty years old, maybe, with a pasty face that didn't like the light, and hips that already ran to wobbly fat. She answered the door wearing a yellow halter top, white shorts, three-inch-thick platform flip-flops, and too much makeup; she was chewing gum.

She saw Lucas first, and a frown flitted across her face: "You don't, uh…" Then she saw Sloan and blurted out, "Jesus Christ, don't arrest me. My mother doesn't know I do this."

"Your mother," Sloan said.

Lucas stepped toward her, and Dove backed into the motel room, and Lucas stepped in after her. Sloan followed and pushed the door shut. A soap opera was playing on the TV. A furry moose doll with crooked velvet horns sat on top of the TV. Lucas found the remote control, pushed the power button, and the noise went away. "Do you know Adam Rice?"

"Ohmagod," she said. She looked from Lucas to Sloan, chewed once on her gum. "I wasn't sure it was him." She sat on the bed, picked up a pillow, and squeezed it around her chest, looking up at them, eyes big.

"We're running down everything we can find," Lucas said. "We understand you were his favorite date."

She stared slack mouthed into the open bathroom. "We were wondering today if it was him in the newspaper."

"Anything unusual about him?"Lucas asked. "Strange sex stuff…"

She shook her head. "Nope. Always the same. Wanted me to get naked and go down on him.He'd watch. I mean mostly people watch, but he was like, you know, curious."

"Never pushed you around, never wanted you to push him around…"

She shook her head, her head bouncing around her shoulders. A dark streak ran down the middle of her part: she needed a new blond job. "Nope. When he was finished, he'd tip me, and then he'd wait until I got dressed, and if there was nobody else ready to go at the bar, he'd buy me a beer. He was a sweet guy, sort of. Maybe a little corny."

Lucas spotted her purse, picked it up. She said, "Hey," but he ignored her, took out her wallet, looked at her driver's license. It said Bertha Wolfe.

"Bertha-did he ever talk about friends, ever come in with friends?"

"C'mon, man, don't mess with my stuff…"

Lucas put the wallet back in the purse and tossed it back on the dresser.

"Friends?"

"Just one guy, he came along two or three times," she said. "The friend never went with one of us guys-Adam said he was an old school buddy, they knew each other for years."

"A name?" Sloan prompted.

She squinted, rolled her eyes, thinking, then, "Larry Masters? That's not right, but it's something like that."

Sloan suggested Andy Sanders, and Dove pointed her finger at him and said, "That's it. Exactly."

"Nobody else."

She turned down the corners of her mouth and said, "Nope. Not I can think of."

"Think harder."

She tried to put a thinking look on her face, but shook her head. "Do you guys… I mean, do you think whoever did it comes to the bar? This girl up in the Twin Cities, was she working?"

"We don't know any of that," Lucas said. "You might think of taking a vacation for a couple weeks, though. Until we get him."

"You're sure you're gonna get him." A small edge of skepticism?

"We'll get him,"Lucas said. "We just don't know how many more people he'll kill before we do." She shivered and said "The paper said Adam was mutilated."

WITH LUCAS PUSHING HER, Dove took them down to the next two rooms, rented by Andi and Aix; both, like Dove, were thin, a little flabby, and unnatural blondes. Andi claimed that she hardly remembered Rice and wasn't even sure she'd had sex with him.

Aix had had sex with him, twice, she thought, and with some prodding, said, "I did see him talking to a pretty strange guy, once. Kind of a snaky guy. He looked like a pool hustler, or something, somebody who works at night or maybe was in prison, because he was like dead white. Adam didn't know him, but he was teasing Adam about being such a fresh-faced guy hanging around with the likes of me… this guy knew, I guess, you know, even though I never went with him or anything."

"How often did you see the guy?"

"That was the last time," Aix said. "I might have seen him once before, shooting pool. He said he used, to be a sailor, and sailed yachts. I'm like, right, a yachtsman right here at the Rockpit."

"Rockyard," Sloan said.

Her little joke: "Pit. You look at the place?"