Lucas called, “Del.” Del looked around in the gloom, saw them in the booth, and walked over.

Sloan said, “My tone just got lowered.”

“Jenkins said you might be here,” Del said to Lucas. “I was in the neighborhood…”

He waved at the bartender. “'Nother Coke. On the house.” To Sloan, he said, “Whyn't you turn on some goddamn lights?” And to Lucas, “People have been trying to call you. Your cell phone is turned off.”

“I feel like such a fool,” Lucas said, groping for the phone. He turned it on and waited for it to come up.

“That's what they thought you'd feel like,” Del said. “Anyway the governor's calling.”

Lucas's eyebrows went up. “What happened?” His phone came up and showed a list of missed calls. Six of them.

“You know Constance Bucher?” Del asked. “Lived up on Summit?”

“Sure…” Lucas said. The hair prickled on the back of his neck as he picked up the past tense in lived. “Know of her, never met her.”

“Somebody beat her to death,” Del said. He frowned, picked at a nit on his jeans jacket, flicked it on the floor. “Her and her maid, both.”

“Oh, boy.” Lucas slid out of the booth. “When?”

“Two or three days, is what they're saying. Most of St. Paul is up there, and the governor called, he wants your young white ass on the scene.”

Lucas said to Sloan, “It's been wonderful.”

“Who is she?” Sloan asked. He wasn't a St. Paul guy.

“Constance Bucher-Bucher Natural Resources,” Lucas said. “Lumber, paper mills, land.

Remember the Rembrandt that went to the Art Institute?”

“I remember something about a Rembrandt,” Sloan said doubtfully.

“Bucher Boulevard?” Del suggested.

“That Bucher,” Sloan said. To Lucas: “Good luck. With both cases.”

“Yeah. You get any ideas about your pal, give me a call. I'm hurtin',” Lucas said.

“And don't tell Del about it.”

“You mean about Burt Kline?” Del asked, his eyebrows working.

“That fuckin' Flowers,” Lucas said, and he went out the door.

Lucas was driving the Porsche. Once behind the wheel and moving, he punched up the list of missed calls on his telephone. Three of them came from the personal cell phone of Rose Marie Roux, director of the Department of Public Safety, and his real boss; one came from the superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, his nominal boss; the other two came from one of the governor's squids. He tapped the phone, and Rose Marie answered after the first ring.

“Where are you?” she asked without preamble. He was listed in her cell-phone directory.

“In Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “I'm on my way. She's what, four doors down from the cathedral?”

“About that. I'm coming up on it now. About a million St. Paul cops scattered all…

Ah! Jesus!”

“What?”

She laughed. “Almost hit a TV guy… nothing serious.”

“I hear the governor's calling,” Lucas said.

“He is. He said, quote, I want Davenport on this like brass on a doorknob, unquote.”

“He's been working on his metaphors again,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. He thinks it gives him the common touch,” she said.

“Listen, Lucas, she was really, really rich. A lot of money is about to go somewhere, and there's the election coming.”

“I'll see you in ten minutes,” Lucas said. “You got an attitude from St. Paul?”

“Not yet. Harrington is here somewhere, I'll talk to him,” Rose Marie said. “I gotta put the phone down and park… He'll be happy to see us-he's trying to get more overtime money from the state.” Harrington was the St. Paul chief.

“Ten minutes,” Lucas said.

He was on the west side of Minneapolis. He took Highway 100 north, got on I-394, aimed the nose of the car at the IDS building in the distance, and stepped on the accelerator, flashing past minivans, SUVs, pickups, and fat-assed sedans, down to I-94.

Feeling all right, whistling a little.

He'd had a past problem with depression. The depression, he believed, was probably genetic, and he'd shared it with his father and grandfather; a matter of brain chemicals.

And though depression was always off the coast, like a fog bank, it had nothing to do with the work. He actually liked the hunt, liked chasing assholes. He'd killed a few of them, and had never felt particularly bad about it. He'd been dinged up along the way, as well, and never thought much about that, either. No post-traumatic stress.

As for rich old ladies getting killed, well, hell, they were gonna die sooner or later. Sometimes, depending on who it was, a murder would make him angry, or make him sad, and he wouldn't have wished for it. But if it was going to happen, he'd be pleased to chase whoever had done it.

He didn't have a mission; he had an interest.

Emmylou Harris came up on the satellite radio, singing “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight,” and he sang along in a crackling baritone, heading for bloody murder through city traffic at ninety miles per hour; wondered why Catholics didn't have something like a St. Christopher's medal that would ward off the Highway Patrol. He'd have to talk to his parish priest about it, if he ever saw the guy again.

Gretchen Wilson came up, with Kris Kristofferson's “Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down,” and he sang along with her, too.

The day was gorgeous, puffy clouds with a breeze, just enough to unfold the flags on buildings along the interstate. Eighty degrees, maybe. Lucas took I-94 to Marion Street, around a couple of corners onto John Ireland, up the hill past the hulking cathedral, and motored onto Summit.

Summit Avenue was aptly named. Beginning atop a second-line bluff above the Mississippi, it looked out over St. Paul, not only from a geographical high point, but also an economic one. The richest men in the history of the city had built mansions along Summit, and some of them still lived there.

Oak Walk Was a three-story red-brick mansion with a white-pillared portico out front, set back a bit farther from the street than its gargantuan neighbors. He'd literally passed it a thousand times, on his way downtown, almost without noticing it. When he got close, the traffic began coagulating in front of him, and then he saw the TV trucks and the foot traffic on the sidewalks, and then the wooden barricades-Summit had been closed and cops were routing traffic away from the murder house, back around the cathedral. Lucas held his ID out the window, nosed up to the barricades, called “BCA” to the cop directing traffic, and was pointed around the end of a barricade and down the street.

Oak Walk's driveway was jammed with cop cars. Lucas left the Porsche in the street, walked past a uniformed K-9 cop with his German shepherd. The cop said, “Hey, hot dog.” Lucas nodded, said, “George,” and climbed the front steps and walked through the open door.

Just inside the door was a vestibule, where arriving or departing guests could gather up their coats, or sit on a bench and wait for the limo. The vestibule, in turn, opened into a grand hallway that ran the length of the house, and just inside the vestibule door, two six-foot bronze figures, torchieres, held aloft six-bulb lamps.

Straight ahead, two separate stairways, one on each side of the hall, curled up to a second floor, with a crystal chandelier hanging maybe twenty feet above the hall, between the stairs.

The hallway, with its pinkish wallpaper, would normally have been lined with paintings, mostly portraits, but including rural agricultural scenes, some from the American West, others apparently French; and on the herringboned hardwood floors, a series of Persian carpets would have marched toward the far back door in perfectly aligned diminishing perspective.

The hall was no longer lined with paintings, but Lucas knew that it had been, because the paintings were lying on the floor, most faceup, some facedown, helter-skelter.

The rugs had been pulled askew, as though somebody had been looking beneath them.