"Their idea of culture is a wet-T-shirt contest," Dove said, snapping her fingers, as though flicking a flea off her shirt.

"This guy, this sailor… you said he was snaky. How? What do you mean?" Lucas asked.

"Like he was thin, but he looked strong, wiry, you could see these muscles working in his arms. Black hair but really pale white. Oh: he had a tattoo, one of those barb-wire dealies that go around your biceps."

"A biker," Lucas suggested.

She nodded and wrinkled her nose: "He might've known his way around a Harley," she said. "But he never mentioned anything."

They all sat looking at her for a moment, then Sloan said to Lucas, "Not much."

"No."

Aix shook her finger at him: "But it was something. You know? There was something going on. One of those things you think might go on and be a fight. The guy kept teasing Adam about his fresh face… This newspaper story made me think there might have been something gay going on…"

"What made you think that?"

"Just… something. You know how you can tell sometimes? And the thing is, the thing that was going on with the snaky guy… there was something a little gay in that, too. Neither one of them looked gay, or talked gay, but there was something there."

A FEW MORE MINUTES of pushing got them nothing. Lucas turned to Sloan and said, "You happy?"

"I guess."

Dove said, "You're not going to arrest us, are you?"

Lucas shook his head. "Nah. But really-maybe take a vacation?"

And to Aix: "If you see the snaky guy again, call us. And if you see him, get somebody to walk you out to the parking lot. Somebody you know."

Andi, shivering: "You really think he's around here?"

Sloan stood up and said, "Listen, if any of you'd seen the woman up in Minneapolis, you wouldn't want to take any chance.Any chance."

THEY ALL NODDED, and Lucas and Sloan backed out of the room. As they walked down to the Car Sloan said, "If you wind up in Room twenty-seven at the Y'All Duck Inn, you probably made a bad career choice somewhere."

"What if everybody in three counties calls you Booger?"

"Another bad sign," Sloan said. "A bad sign."

THE PRESS CONFERENCE was held in a beige-walled, tile-floored, odor-free, windowless meeting room with a podium and rostrum at one end, in front of a blue Minnesota state flag that hung slightly askew on the wall behind the rostrum. The room was full of cheap Chinese plastic chairs with loud steel feet, which scraped and squealed when they were pushed around.

Reporters started drifting in a half hour before the press conference, led by the TV cameramen, who pushed the chairs around to make room for themselves and their lights. The newspaper guys, scruffy next to the TV on-air people, pushed the chairs around some more, the bet-ter to bullshit with one another. They were a little noisier than usual, a combination of off-camera cheer and on-camera solemnity, because the story was a good one.

All of it was enhanced in the eyes of the attendees by an entertaining spat between Sloan and Ruffe Ignace.

AT FIVE, THE TV PEOPLE brought the lights up, and Lucas did the intro:

"We have two murders. As you may have read in the paper, there is a possibility that the two are related. Representatives of the two jurisdictions in which the murders occurred are with us today and will describe the murders and the scenes…"

Nordwall, large and intense in a jowly, paternal, slow-moving way, said that his men were following several leads in the most recent murder but that overall coordination had been moved to the BCA. Then Sloan stood up and said that Minneapolis was coordinating with Nordwall and the BCA and that Minneapolis also had several investigators running down leads, which was a bald-faced lie but was not contradicted.

Lucas, following Sloan, said that the BCA had established and staffed a co-op center to coordinate information on the case.

Some of the reporters had started looking at their watches when he announced that they were looking for Charles "Charlie" Pope, a convicted Level-2 sex offender who had been recently released from the St. John's Security Hospital and who had cut off a leg bracelet and disappeared.

The reporters stopped looking at their watches.

"At this point, we have no reason to believe that he is involved, except for general proximity and the fact that he has violated parole," Lucas said. "We'd like to know where he is and what he's been doing. If he sees this, we urge him to call us. If anybody has seen him, please call. Photographs are available and are being distributed. They were taken at St. John's before his release and are only about two months old."

Channel Three's principal talking head, self-assigned to his semiannual story, one that wouldn't wrinkle his shirt, jumped up and demanded, "Are you telling us that the state of Minnesota recently an insane sex offender who immediately went into the community?"

That got it going; Nordwall, improbably, kept it going when he said, gruffly, "We don't have lifelong preventive detention in the United States, and we won't get it, no matter what the media wants, because we're not Nazis."

Lucas winced, and a happy Pioneer Press reporter, jabbing a yellow number-2 pencil at Nordall, asked, "Are you implying that Channel Three in some way supports the tenents of National Socialism…?"

AFTER BLEEDING OUT all the details on Charlie Pope, Lucas was pushed into admitting that the details in Ignace's story were generally accurate. "They weren't disclosed at the time of the murders to spare the victims' families the trauma of seeing these brutal murders used as entertainment on television," Lucas said.

Channel Eight's weekend fill-in talking head leaped to his feet: "Are you trying to imply… "

Well, yes. Lucas's implication pissed a few people off, in a pro-forma way, but since they all knew that the story would be used as entertainment, and were hoping that it might be used for several days if not weeks, the irritation was more about the public rudeness of mentioning the fact than because of any inherent unfairness. They wouldn't use the clip of Lucas's comment anyway, so no damage would be done.

Besides, Lucas knew most of the reporters, including the talking heads, and got along with them. He hadn't met Ruffe Ignace, though, and when Ignace asked the predictable self-aggrandizing question "Would you say the recent Star-Tribune story on the murders spurred this sudden effort to track down Pope and create this so-called co-op center?"

Sloan jumped in. "Well, uh, Rufus…"

"Ruffe," Ignace snapped, looking up at him suspiciously.

"Roo- fay? Okay. Roo-fay. Sorry. No, I don't really think that the story got us moving any faster on anything, to tell you the truth. We were already pounding on it. This killer is a monster. We know that. We're working on it as hard as we can, including using civilian experts to advise us. Your story was okay. Some of your details of the supposed display in the Larson case weren't exactly correct, but I really can't go into the precise problems…"

"They were exactly correct," Ignace said. He added something under his breath, which might have been, You fucking twit, or something close to that.

Sloan stepped away from the microphone, as if to have a personal word with Ignace; but he spoke loud enough that everyone could hear. "Not exactly," he said, "You weren't at the scene, and I was.That whole thing about the way, mmm…" He glanced at the TV cameras. "… about the sexual aspects of the arrangement of the body, were not exact. I don't know where you got your information, but you have to be more careful about hearsay… or maybe the way your imagination works."