"I didn't," Lucas said. "I tend to agree."

They got out of the truck and looked up and down the street. "Two slim possibilities," Sloan said. "The grocery store or the bookstore. Take your choice."

"I'll take the bookstore," Lucas said.

"Maybe they got some poetry," Sloan said. He looked across the street toward the grocery. "Park's Grocery. With any luck, Park is a Korean. They tend to stay open late."

SLOAN WALKED ACROSS the traffic-free street; Lucas headed down the sidewalk toward Krim's Rare and Used Books. The store occupied a twenty-foot-wide retail space with a single large window and a door to the side. The window was rimed with dust and showed two dozen fading hardback covers under an arc of hand-painted black letters: KRIM'S: THE COLLECTOR'S PLACE.

An overhead bell tinkled when Lucas went through the door, and he was hit by the odor of paper mold: not unpleasant, he thought, if you liked books.

Inside, two men huddled together over a book that sat squarely on the counter between them. The book's dust jacket was carefully covered with protective cellophane; collectors did that, Lucas knew.

"Can I help you?" The man behind the counter was overweight, blond, with smooth, ruddy cheeks. He filled a pink golf shirt as though he'd been poured into it; squinted at, he resembled a strawberry milk shake.

"Are you the owner?" Lucas asked.

"Mmm- hmmm." He nodded, friendly.

Lucas glanced at the second man, who was the physical opposite of the owner-reed thin with dark-plastic-rimmed glasses perched on a knife-edge nose, and under the nose, a mustache that looked like it had been sketched in with a pencil. He wore a seedy gray suit and yellow-brown shoes. A tie hung around his neck like a cleaning rag.

Lucas held up his ID: "I'm an investigator with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Do you have a security camera in here?"

The owner's eyebrows arched, and he shook his head: "No. Not much to steal. Never had a break-in. What's going on?"

Out of the corner of his eye, Lucas saw the thin man casually lay his arm on top of the book that he and the owner had been looking at, then slip it off the counter and out of sight. "Just doing a check," Lucas said. "What time do you close?"

"Five, usually?"

"Yesterday?"

"Yeah, five o'clock. Nothing down here after five."

"Okay…" Lucas stepped back toward the door, then paused. Never hurt to ask the question. "What was the book you were looking at when I came in…if I might ask?"

The thin man was nervous. "Just a thriller." He flashed it up and down.

"Could I look at it?" Lucas asked. He put a little thug into his voice. "I like thrillers."

"Uhhh…" The thin man glanced at the store owner, who shrugged. The thin man said, reluctantly, "I guess."

He handed over the book: Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Met O. "I read this guy," Lucas said, flicking a finger at Block's name. "Who's O?" He flipped through the book: Was there something hidden inside?

As he did it, there was a quick intake of breath by the thin man, who said, "Please… you'll break the binding. That'll cut the value in half."

"What's special about it?" Lucas asked, frowning at the book "It's just a commercial-"

"Please." The thin man took the book back, closed it carefully. His glasses had slipped down his thin nose, and he pushed them back up with a forefinger. He nearly whispered it: "Printed in France. An edition of five hundred in English, five hundred in French. A hundred dollars a copy at the press, they go for a thousand dollars now."

"Well, maybe," the store owner said. He was skeptical. "If you can find somebody to pay the thousand."

"In a big metropolitan area…"

"There's one right up north of us," the owner said."If you want to go try."

Lucas: "What? It's dirty or something?"

"No," the thin man said, offended. "It's sophisticated."

"Huh. Who's O?"

The thin man shook his head: "There was a famous book, The Story of O. If you haven't read it… well, I can't explain. You'd have to get into the literature."

The owner changed the subject: "So what's going on with the security camera?"

Lucas shrugged and let the book go. "We're trying to find somebody who might have taken a picture of that phone across the street. Guy we're looking for might have used it."

The owner snapped his fingers, then pointed a finger-pistol at Lucas: "I've seen you. You were on TV. You're looking for the killer, right? The crazy guy from Owatonna?"

Lucas nodded: "Yes."

The owner looked out the window, as though Pope might suddenly pop up in the window, like a Punch puppet. "You think he made a call from across the street?"

"We think he might have. Last night, about eleven."

The owner's eyes narrowed. "I wasn't here at eleven. Long gone. But have you talked to Mrs. Bird upstairs?"

"Mrs. Bird?"

"She sits up there and looks out the window all day and night," the store owner said. "Says she's waiting to die. If she didn't die last night, she might've seen something."

Lucas nodded: "Thanks. I'll go ask." As he went out the door, he looked back at the thin man with his Burglar book: "Sophisticated?"

The thin man nodded. "European."

MRS. BIRD WAS TOO OLD to look thin-she looked wasted; she looked like she was going away for good. Lucas thought she might be ninety-five. She peeked at him over the chain on her door, pale blue curious eyes over lightly rouged cheeks. When Lucas showed her his ID, she opened the door.

"I don't believe I've ever spoken to a policeman…" She was a small woman with narrow shoulders, wrapped in a polyester housecoat printed to resemble a quilt, with peacocks and cockatoos on the quilt squares. She had short curly hair, like a poodle's, but silvery white, and looked at Lucas through cat's-eye glasses that might have been briefly fashionable in the fifties. A television rambled in the background, a shopping channel selling used Rolexes.

But she'd seen a man by the telephone. "I do remember that; yes. A man in a white shirt. That phone is not used very much."

"Do you remember what he looked like?" Lucas asked. He edged inside the door; she apparently had three rooms, a living room overlooking the street, a bedroom, and a small kitchen. Lucas couldn't see a bath, but he could see a half-open door in the bedroom, and thought that might be it. The place smelled of Glade deodorizer.

She frowned, was uncertain. "Well, I don't know… He was only there for a minute or two."

"Would you mind if I looked out the window?"

"Please do," she said. He crossed her living room in three Steps, looked out the window. The phone was directly across the street and only fifteen feet from a streetlight.

"Did you see more than one man last night?" Lucas asked.

"No, not last night," she said.

"Did you see a car?"

Again she frowned. "Yes, I did. He got out of a car, he parked just over there…" She pointed a bony finger just up the street from the phone. "A white Oldsmobile."

"An Oldsmobile."

"I think so."

"New? Or old."

"New, I think."

"You say, you've said, you think. You've said it several times…"

"I was watching television. That's all I do now, watch television and look out the windows, except on Mondays and Wednesdays when the social lady comes and takes me to the store. But I wasn't paying too much attention to the telephone…"

"Okay… If we showed you some photographs, could you see if you recognize the man? Or the car?"

She smiled; she had improbably small, white, pearly teeth. "I could certainly try, but I'm pretty old."

"Mrs. Bird, I'll be back in a minute, okay?" Lucas said. "Just give me a minute or two."

"I'm not going any place. I hope."