Whitcomb saw the knife and recoiled, then lifted his stick overhead with both hands and screamed at Briar, "Push me, push me," and at Ranch, "Get her, get her," and Ranch stumbled off the ramp and Letty turned the knife at him, and Ranch ran at her and she ducked away and he kept going in a straight line and then stumbled over his own feet and fell facedown.

Letty turned back to Whitcomb, who was screaming at Briar, "Push me, get her," and unsatisfied with the progress, turned and slashed at Briar with the butt of his punishment stick. The butt caught her on the end of the nose and she went down, bleeding from the nose, and he screamed at her, "Get up, you bitch; you fuckin' ' gonna cut you a new goddamn nose…"

She got to her feet and Letty shouted, "Juliet, go back, go back in the house, the police are coming," but Briar pulled the wheelchair around in a circle and Whitcomb slashed at her again and screamed, "Not that way, you cunt, not that way…"

She'd aimed the chair at the back of the yard. The last renters had had a bad dog which they kept staked out at the back of the house, and the dog had worn the grass down to hard dirt; and behind that was the bluff that led down into Swede Hollow.

Briar said, "I loved you, Randy," and then she began pushing the chair toward the bluff, faster and faster, Letty calling, "Juliet, Juliet…" Ranch staggered to his feet and Letty turned toward him, pointing the knife at his chest, but he staggered around her, after Briar, as though he were trying to catch them-no chance of that; one of his legs was working harder than the other and he couldn't keep going in a straight line, but tended off in circles.

Whitcomb was still trying to thrash back at Briar with his stick, and tried to brake with one hand, but Briar was stronger than he was and at the end of the yard he grabbed both wheels and shouted, "Oh, shit," and she ran him right off the edge and Randy Whitcomb went screaming sixty miles an hour down a seventy-degree slope into a wall of trees.

He hit it with the impact of a small car driving into a brick wall.

Briar stood, looking down, stunned by what she'd done. Letty came up and looked over the edge; then Ranch got there, well away from Letty, and he peered down the bluff and then said to Briar, "You fuck."

Letty heard a siren: still a way out, but not too far. She said to Briar: "Juliet, don't tell them I was here. Lie. Okay? Don't tell them."

Briar nodded dumbly, and Letty ran across the yard, folded the switchblade, climbed on her bike, bumped back across the yard, across the street, and headed down the hill. The cop car was a block over, on Seventh, as they passed, so she managed to get down the hill unseen, pedaling furiously, through the backstreets, to the Capitol.

There, she stopped to turn her phone on, and found a dozen calls from home, and two more from Lucas's cell.

Lucas had gotten a fragmentary story from Carey, who'd been called by Weather when Letty hadn't gotten home on time. "I don't want her to think I'm betraying her, but I'm really worried," Carey said. Lucas had tracked down Whitcomb's address in a matter of a few minutes, and had broken off from the apartment surveillance.

Letty had always taken matters into her own hands, whatever the matters might be-she tended to believe that nobody could handle things quite as well as she could. Events had never proven her to be wrong. But messing with Whitcomb and one of Whitcomb's hookers, for whatever reason-and Carey had filled him in on the reason-could be an irretrievable error.

Whitcomb was a psychotic; people who got too close to him suffered because they did not-could not-understand the sheer uncontrolled malevolence of the man. Lucas believed that Whitcomb's condition was far beyond Whitcomb's own control. He'd been broken at some point, perhaps at birth, perhaps as a child, but he was simply wrong, a devil's child. There was really nothing to be done about it, other than to put him in jail forever, or kill him. Lucas thought that one or the other of those things was inevitable, a matter of time.

Now, as he rushed through the night toward Whitcomb's place, banging down onto the interstate, then almost immediately off again at the Sixth Street exit, he saw the flashers on a St. Paul squad running parallel to him, a block over on Seventh, heading up the hill past the university. He ran the red light and turned the corner and accelerated down the block, turned onto Seventh and saw the squad make the turn over toward Whitcomb's and he knew with a cold certainty where the squad was going.

If Whitcomb had done anything to Letty '

Letty had been right about that. If he'd known Whitcomb was stalking her, or anyone else in the family, Whitcomb would have died, one way or another. The problem with a psychotic was, there is no way to deflect them, once they've fixed on a course. You can't talk to them, because they're nuts.

With fear gripping his heart like an icy hand, he went after the squad.

Cohn, Cruz, and Lane spotted two bugout cars near the hotel, one in a skyway-level parking structure, another on the street. They all had keys in their pockets, and additional keys, in magnetic boxes, hung from under the bumpers of both vehicles. When they needed to move, they used the third vehicle, a rented Toyota Sienna minivan. Lane did most of the final scouting, because he was the unknown face, and what he said was what they wanted to hear: "You can't believe some of the stuff they're wearing. One woman, honest to God, she looks like she has a diamond Christmas tree hung on her. She was about a hundred years old, I could have taken it right off her neck."

"If only they're real," Cohn said. They were huddled in the back of the minivan in an underground parking ramp at a medical building near St. John's Hospital. They'd been moving since they abandoned the apartment, but the hospital turned out to be the best place to wait. People came and went at all times of the night, and sometimes sat in their cars, getting away from whatever it was that brought them to the hospital.

"There's gonna be some paste," Cruz told him. "But if you got it, when are you going to wear it? Tonight, the Academy Awards, maybe the number-one inaugural ball. Maybe the first big ball of the season in Palm Beach. A couple of other times, but tonight, for sure."

"Surprised the insurance company lets them wear it," Cohn said. He was looking sleepy, yawning, like he always did before a job. "For a thousand bucks, they could make a replica that nobody could tell but a jeweler."

"If you got robbed, it'd be almost as big an embarrassment to admit that you were wearing fakes, as losing the real thing," Cruz said. "Some of these people-not so much the Republicans as the Democrats, really-have so much money that they really don't care. They've got so much money that if they lost a five-million-dollar stone, they'd say, "So what? There's more where that came from."

"So why didn't we hold up the Democrats?" Lane asked.

"Because I didn't have the inside information on the Democrats," Cruz said. "When the moneymen would be there. And they didn't have a ball like this one, when all the big money was in one spot. They were more scattered around, movie stars in one place, hedge funds in another."

"I didn't know the Democrats had so much money," Lane said.

"An ocean of money," Cohn said. "Both of them, Republicans and Democrats. That's all that counts anymore."

"You think we'll elect a colored guy as president?" Lane asked Cruz.

"I hope so," she said. "I'm tired of all the racist bullshit that goes on. Maybe this will settle it."