"When did you sell the computer? How long has he had it?"

"Two days… I sold it to him the night before last."

"Where?"

"At Moos Tower, the medical building. There's a cafeteria in the basement. He had a table. There are two or three guys who buy stuff there. Stolen stuff. In Moos Tower."

"Can you…?"

"I'm going to hang up now. I'm afraid you're tracing this call."

"No, no, please…"

But she was gone. And maybe, he thought, to LA, where they'd never find her.

"Ah, boy…"

Hoping she'd call back, Lucas left the room phone open, got on his cell phone and called the duty man at BCA offices in St. Paul. "The call would have gone into the main desk, and they transferred it up to my room: see if you can pin it down. Where it came from-we need the number."

Then he made another call, and a woman answered. "Marcy? Lucas."

She was happy to hear from him. "Hey, man, you haven't called for weeks. What's going on?"

Lieutenant Marcy Sherrill was head of the Intelligence Unit for the Minneapolis police, and a protege. He sketched in quickly what had happened, and said, "So I've got a problem. Is there any chance that you could put somebody over at the U, and see if you can figure out who this guy is? I'll come down and get him, but I need to get something started."

"I'll put somebody over there right now-it's a little late, there may not be too many people to talk to, but I can have somebody there in twenty minutes."

"Thanks, sweetie. How's the love life?"

"We gotta talk. Do you know Don Cary?"

"Yeah-but he was married the last time I checked." Lucas looked at his watch. Time was running…

"Not anymore," Marcy said. "His wife, you know, was a computer freak. She said, 'Fuck Minnesota,' and took off for California. He wasn't invited. The divorce was final last week."

"You might be moving on him a little too quick."

"Actually, he started mooning around here two months ago, and we've gone out for a lunch a few times. He was pretty much over her before she left… The marriage had been in trouble since about week one. He'd like to have a kid or two."

"He's a pretty good guy, for a lawyer. He plays a mean game of lawyer-league basketball," Lucas said. "Marcy, we gotta talk, and I gotta run, right now. I gotta."

"Keep your ass down; I'll get back."

He hung up, looked at the phone for five seconds, ten seconds, willing a call from the witness woman. Nothing; he tossed his keys up in the air, caught them, and took off, listening for the ring of the telephone until the door banged shut behind him.

Lucas kept a police flasher in the back of the truck, spent the ten seconds necessary to stick it to the roof of the car and plug it into the cigarette lighter, and took off, running at speed up the hill, through a couple of red lights, and out the back side of Duluth toward Virginia. As soon as he got free of traffic, he called Reasons, but got his wife.

"He is not here just now," she said, in an accent much like Nadya's. "He has a cell phone…"

Lucas took the number and redialed. Reasons came up after three rings, and Lucas said, "We got a problem, man."

He explained, and when he was done, Reasons said, "You want me to come?"

"I don't know what you'd do. The place is overrun by cops already, but I thought you oughta know."

"Jesus, I oughta come." Reasons sounded anxious. "But my wife… she's been giving me some shit about being gone all the time, and I was just on my way home."

"Go home then. I'll fill you in tomorrow."

"Thanks. If anything more comes up, let me know."

Lucas fumbled around in his pocket, found the numbers he'd scribbled down for the Virginia cops, and dialed in again. As he did, he looked down at the speedometer: he was pushing the car along at ninety-five, and the car didn't like it. The Virginia cops came up and Lucas identified himself: "What happened at Spivak's? Is my guy okay?"

"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't release any information on that," the woman said. Her voice was cool, almost bored. "It's an ongoing incident. If you could call back in an hour…"

"Jesus Christ, was anybody hurt? I'm with the fuckin' BCA." He was talking too loud again.

"Sir, this is being recorded…"

"Go ahead and record it, you moron!" he shouted. "I'm trying to find out if my guy is okay. What'd you do, shoot him?"

"Sir…"

He hung up, tried his man's phone, and got an answering-machine recording. He dialed Rose Marie Roux at her home in Minneapolis, was told by her husband that she was at a concert with a girlfriend. "Aaron Copland, the cowboy shit. I took a pass."

Frustrated, Lucas dropped the phone on the passenger seat and concentrated on driving. But he couldn't stand it, and ten minutes later, he picked up the phone and called Virginia again. Same woman: "Sir, I've reported this incident to my supervisor. I cannot give you any information…"

Lucas clicked off and pushed the car until it wouldn't push anymore, and instead, whimpered with the wind and tire noise. The side of the highway, for all practical purposes, was empty, the houses a half mile apart, and he was flying through a tunnel carved out by his not-especially-bright headlights. He got off at the first Virginia exit, throttled back to sixty as he went through town and still squealed his tires on the turn onto the main drag.

Two cop cars were parked outside Spivak's, light bars turning, a cop standing next to one of them. A silver civilian car was double-parked beside the cop cars. Probably another city car, Lucas thought. He dumped the Acura across the street from the bar, killed the engine, and headed for the bar entrance at a trot.

A cop was writing on a clipboard, using his car hood as a desktop. When Lucas started across the street, he looked up and called, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, where you goin' there?" and Lucas held up his ID and said, "BCA-you got one of my guys." He was at the door and the cop yelled, "Hey, wait a minute, buddy," and then Lucas was inside, moving through the bar into the back. The cop was behind him, and yelled, "Hey! Hey!"

Then Lucas was through the bar and past Setters and Pointers and into the back, into the party room where they'd interviewed Spivak. Three uniformed cops and two guys in civilian clothes were talking. Lucas's man, Micky Andreno, was perched on a chair to the side, legs crossed, hands cuffed. "You all right?" Lucas asked.

"I'm annoyed, not hurt," Andreno said. "But I'm very annoyed."

The cop who'd followed Lucas in said, "Hey, when I'm talking to you…"

Lucas pointed his finger at him and snarled, "Shut the fuck up. Who's running this clown factory?"

One of the men in plainclothes snapped, "I am. Who the fuck are you?"

"Who the fuck are you?"

"John Terry, I'm the chief."

"I'm a BCA agent, I work for the governor, and I'm running a double-murder investigation that was almost a triple murder if it wasn't for my guy here, and nobody in this fuckin' humpty police department would tell me what the hell was going on and now I find my guy all chained up and let me ask you-you caught the guy who went running out of here, right? The double murderer who went running out of here because you put the call on your fuckin' unscrambled police frequency…" His voice was rising and he could feel the blood in his forehead.

Andreno said, "Tell 'em, brother," which didn't help, and added, "They didn't catch him-they didn't even chase him. A guy went outside and looked around with a fuckin' flashlight."

"That's not fuckin' true," said Terry. He was a weathered sixty, maybe, with a red drinker's face and a pushed-in nose. "We've got a team looking for him."

"Yeah, now," Andreno said. "By now the guy's down in the fuckin' Twin Cities shootin' pool and playing with his girlfriend's tits."