“Yeah?” The fat cop looked up from his winning ticket.

“You won’t forget to tell the IRS about the six hundred?”

“Of course not,” the cop said, offended. Lucas grinned and walked away and the fat cop muttered, “In a pig’s eye.” He looked at his ticket again and then noticed that the woman with the violet eyes was hurrying after Lucas. She caught him just before he got inside, and the fat cop saw Lucas grin as they walked together into the building.

“Look at this,” he said to the thin cop. But the thin cop was looking at the tote board and his lips were moving quietly. The fat cop looked at his partner and said, “What?”

The thin cop put up a hand to hold off the question, his lips still moving. Then they stopped and he turned and looked after Lucas.

“What?” said the fat cop, looking in the same direction. Lucas and the woman with the violet eyes had disappeared.

“I don’t know much about this horse-race bullshit,” said the thin cop, “but if I’m reading the tote board right, this exacta payoff, Davenport took down twenty-two thousand, two hundred and fifty bucks.”

The office of the chief of police was on the first floor of City Hall, in a corner. Windows dominated the two walls that faced the street. The other two walls were covered with framed photographs, some in color, some in black and white, stretching back in time to the forties. Daniel with his family. With the last six Minnesota governors. With five of the last six senators. With a long and anonymous chain of faces that all looked vaguely the same, faces that took up space at chicken dinners for major politicians. Directly behind the chief was the shield of the Minneapolis Police Department and a plaque honoring cops who had been killed in the line of duty.

Lucas sprawled in the leather chair that sat squarely in front of the chief’s desk. He was surprised, though he tried not to show it. It had been a while since anything surprised him, other than women.

“Pissed off?” Quentin Daniel leaned over his glass desktop, watching Lucas. Daniel looked so much like a police chief that a number of former political enemies, who were now doing something else, made the mistake of thinking he got the job on his face. They were wrong.

“Yeah. Pissed off. Mostly just surprised.” Lucas did not particularly like Daniel, but thought he might be the smartest man on the force. He would have been surprised—again—to know that the chief thought precisely the same about him.

Daniel half-turned toward the windows, his head cocked, still watching.

“You can see why,” he said.

“You thought I did it?”

“A couple of people in homicide thought you were worth looking at,” said Daniel.

“You better start at the beginning,” Lucas said.

Daniel nodded, pushed his chair away from his desk, stood up, and wandered to a wall of photographs. He inspected the face of Hubert Humphrey as though he were looking for new blemishes.

“Two weeks ago, our man made a run at a St. Paul woman, an artist named Carla Ruiz,” he said as he continued his inspection of Humphrey’s face. “She managed to fight him off. When St. Paul got there, the sergeant in charge found her looking at a note. It was one of these rules he’s leaving behind.”

“I haven’t heard a thing about this Ruiz,” Lucas said.

The chief turned and drifted back to his chair, no hurry, his hands in his pockets. “Yeah. Well, this sergeant’s a smart guy and he knew about the notes in the first two killings. He called the head of St. Paul homicide and they put a lid on it. The only people who know are the St. Paul chief and his chief of homicide, the two uniforms who took the call, a couple of people in homicide here, and me. And the artist. And now you. And every swingin’ dick has been told that if this leaks, there’ll be some new foot beats out at the land-fill.”

“So how’d it point to me?” Lucas asked.

“It didn’t. Not right away. But our man dropped his gun during the fight with the artist lady. The first thing we did was print it and run it. No prints—checked everything, including the shells. We had better luck on the ownership. We ran it down in ten minutes. It went from the factory to a gun store down on Hennepin Avenue, and from there to a guy named David L. Losse—”

“Our David L. Losse?”

“You remember the case?”

“Shot his son, said it was an accident? Thought somebody was breaking into the house?”

“That’s him. He fell on a manslaughter, though it was probably a straight-out murder. He got six years, he’ll serve four. But there’s still an appeal floating around. Because of the appeal, the evidence was supposedly up in the property room. We went up and looked. The gun is gone. Or it was gone, until the killer dropped it.”

“Shit.” Things had disappeared from the property room before. Five grams of cocaine became four. Twenty bondage magazines became fifteen. As far as Lucas knew, this was the first time a gun had gone missing.

“You had access to the evidence room a couple of times. During the Ryerson case and during that hassle over the Chicago burglary gang. We cross-referenced everything we had from the killings and the witness. Times, places, the artist’s description. We could eliminate as suspects all the women who had access to the room. We could eliminate cops who were confirmed on-duty when the killings took place. People have been killed or attacked in all three shifts . . . Anyway, we got it down to your name, basically. You’re the right size. Nobody ever knows where you’re at. You’re a games freak and this guy is apparently playing some kind of game. And the gun came out of the property room. I never really thought you were the one, but . . . you see how it went down.”

“Yeah, I see,” Lucas said sourly. “Thanks a lot.”

“Hey, what would you have done?” Daniel asked defensively.

“Okay.”

“Now we know you’re clean,” the chief said. He leaned back in his chair, stretched, and crossed his legs. “ ’Cause our man did another one. Four to six hours ago. We figure it was just about the time you were sitting out on the lawn eating that apple.”

Lucas nodded. “Where’s this one?”

“Down by Lake Nokomis. Just west of the lake, up in those hills.”

“Can you contain it?”

“No.” Daniel shook his head. “This is three. If we tried to contain it, we’d be leaking like a rusty faucet by tomorrow afternoon. That’d cause more trouble than if we go out front with it. I’ve already called a press conference for nine o’clock tonight. That’ll give the TV stations time to make the ten-o’clock news. I want you to be here. I’ll outline the killings, appeal for help, all that. And I’m assigning you to the case, full-time.”

“I don’t want it,” said Lucas. “Homicide bores me. You walk around all day talking to civilians who don’t know anything. There are other guys do it better. And I got a lot of stuff going on this crack business. I got a half-dozen guys picked out—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely fuckin’ wonderful, but the media is going to hang us all by our balls if we don’t get this freak,” Daniel said, cutting Lucas off in mid-sentence. “You remember back a few years when those two women got killed in the parking ramps? Like two, three weeks apart, different guys? Pure coincidence? You remember how the media went out of their minds? You remember how the TV stations were having seminars on self-defense? How they had reports every night on progress? You remember all that?”

“Yeah.” It had been a nightmare.

“This is going to be worse. Those guys in the parking ramps, we grabbed one the same day, we got the other one a couple days after he did it. We still got hysteria. This guy, he’s killed three, attacked another one, raped them and stabbed them, and he’s still on the loose.”

Lucas nodded and rubbed his jaw with his fingertips. “You’re right. They’ll go berserk,” he admitted.