Ojibway County wasn’t Minneapolis. If someone came after him in Ojibway County, he’d bring a deer rifle or a shotgun, not some bullshit .22 hideout piece. And if somebody came with a scoped .30-06, the .45 would be about as useful as a rock. Still, it felt good. He touched the zipper tag again with his left hand and mentally slipped the right hand into the coat.

The truck had been sitting in the brutal cold overnight, but the motel provided post outlets for oil-pan heaters. Lucas unplugged the extension cord from both the post and the truck, tossed the cord in the back seat, cranked up the engine and let it run while he went down to the motel office for a cup of free coffee.

“Cold,” he said to the hotel owner.

“Any colder, I’d have to bring my brass monkey inside,” the man said. He’d been honing the line all morning. “Have a sweet roll, too, we got a deal on them.”

“Thanks.”

Cold air was still pouring from the truck’s heater vents when Lucas returned to it, balancing the coffee and sweet roll. He shut the fan off and headed into town.

There were only two real possibilities with the LaCourt killings, he thought. They were done by a stranger, a traveling killer, as part of a robbery, picked out because the house was isolated. Or they were done for a reason. The fire suggested a reason. A traveler would have hauled Frank LaCourt’s body inside, locked the doors, turned off the lights, and left. He might be days away before the murders were uncovered. With the fire, he couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes away.

A local guy who set a fire meant either a psychotic arsonist—unlikely—or that something was being covered. Something that pointed at the killer. Fingerprints. Semen. Personal records. Or might the fire have been set to distract the investigation?

The gun he’d found with Claudia LaCourt, unfired, suggested that the LaCourts knew something was happening, but they hadn’t called 9-1-1. The situation may have been somewhat ambiguous . . . Huh.

And the girl with the missing ear might have been interrogated. Another suggestion that something was going on.

The image of the ear in the Ziploc bag popped into his mind. Carr had bent and retched because he was human, as the LaCourt girl had once been. She’d been alive at this time yesterday, chatting with her friends on the telephone, watching television, trying on clothes. Making plans. Now she was a charred husk.

And to Lucas, she was an abstraction: a victim. Did that make him less than human? He half-smiled at the introspective thought; he tried to stay away from introspection. Bad for the health.

But in truth he didn’t feel much for Lisa LaCourt. He’d seen too many dead children. Babies in garbage cans, killed by their parents; toddlers beaten and maimed; thirteen-year-olds who shot each other with a zealous enthusiasm scraped right off the TV screen. Not that their elders were much better. Wives killed with fists, husbands killed with hammers, homosexuals slashed to pieces in frenzies of sexual jealousy. After a while it all ran together.

On the other hand, he thought, if it were Sarah . . . His mouth straightened into a thin line. He couldn’t put his daughter together with the images of violent death that he’d collected over the years. They simply would not fit. But Sarah was almost ready for school now, she’d be moving out into the bigger world.

His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. He shook off the thought and looked out the window.

Grant’s Main Street was a three-block row of slightly shabby storefronts, elbow to elbow, like a town in the old west. The combinations that would have been strange in other places were typical for the North Woods: a Laundromat-bookstore-bar, an Indian souvenir store-computer outlet, a satellite dish-plumber. There were two bakeries, a furniture store, a scattering of insurance agents and real estate dealers, a couple of lawyers. The county courthouse was a low rambling building of fieldstone and steel at the end of Main. A cluster of sheriff’s trucks sat in a parking lot in back and Lucas wheeled in beside them. A Bronco with an unfamiliar EYE3 logo was parked in a visitor’s slot by the door.

A deputy coming out nodded at him, said, “Mornin’,” and politely held the door. The sheriff’s outer office was behind a second door, decorated with curling DARE antidrug posters and the odors of aging nicotine and bad nerves. A reporter and a cameraman were slumped in green leatherette chairs scarred with cigarette burns and what looked like razor cuts. The reporter was working on her lipstick with a gold compact and a small red brush. She looked up when Lucas stepped in. He nodded and she nodded back. A steel door and a bulletproof glass window were set in the wall opposite the reporter. Lucas went to the window, looked at the empty desk behind it, and pushed the call button next to the window.

“It’ll just piss them off,” the reporter said. She had a tapered fox-face with a tiny chin, big eyes and wide cheekbones, as though she’d been especially bred for television. She rubbed her lips together, then snapped the compact shut, dropped it in her purse, and gave him a reflexive smile. The cameraman was asleep.

“Yeah? Where’re you guys from?” Lucas asked. The reporter was very pretty, with her mobile eyes and trained expressions, like a latter-day All-American geisha girl. Weather could never work for television, he thought. Her features were too distinctive. Could be a movie star, though.

“Milwaukee,” she said. “Are you with the Star-Tribune?”

“Nope.” He shook his head, giving her nothing.

“A cop?” The reporter perked up.

“An interested onlooker,” Lucas said, grinning at her. “Lots of reporters around?”

“I guess so,” she said, a frown flitting across her face. “I heard Eight talking on their radios, so they’re up here somewhere, and I heard the Strib came in last night. Probably out at the lake. Are you one of the lab people from Madison?”

“No,” Lucas said.

A harried middle-aged woman bustled up behind the glass, peered through, and said, “Davenport?”

“Yes.” The reporter was wearing perfume. Something slightly fruity.

“I’ll buzz you in,” the woman said.

“FBI?” the reporter pressed.

“No,” he said.

The woman inside pressed her entry button and as Lucas slipped through the door, the reporter called, “Tell Sheriff Carr we’re gonna put something on the air whether he talks to us or not.”

Carr had a corner office overlooking the parking lot, the county garage and a corroded bronze statue of a World War I doughboy. The beige walls were hung with a dozen photographs of Carr with other politicians, three plaques, a bachelor’s degree certificate from the University of Wisconsin/River Falls, and two fish-stamp prints with the actual stamps mounted in the mats below the prints. A computer and laser printer sat on a side table, and an intricate thirty-button decorator-blue telephone occupied one corner of an expansive walnut desk. Carr was sitting behind the desk, looking gloomily across a tape recorder at Henry Lacey.

“You got reporters,” Lucas said, propping himself in the office door.

“Like deer ticks,” Carr said, looking up. “Morning. Come in.”

“All you can get from deer ticks is Lyme’s disease,” said Lacey. “Reporters can get your ass fired.”

“Should I let them shoot pictures of the house?” Carr asked Lucas. “They’re all over me to let them in.”

“Why wouldn’t you?” Lucas asked. He stepped into the office and dropped into a visitor’s chair, slumped, got comfortable.

Carr scratched his head. “I dunno . . . it doesn’t seem right.”

“Look, it’s all bullshit,” Lucas said. “The outside of a burnt house doesn’t mean anything to anybody, especially if they live in Milwaukee. Think about it.”