“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Good, I don’t have to shoot you. How long you up for?”

“Just overnight,” Lucas yelled back.

“Have a good one.”

He went inside and had a bowl of cereal, the moon hanging low out over the lake, putting a long streak of silver on it. It was cool, almost cold. He got a spinning rod from a closet, went out on the dock and spent five minutes casting a Rapala into the moonshine, trying for bass or pike, but not trying too hard, smelling the North Woods night, looking at all the little dots of light from the cabins around the lake; then he went inside and tried not to dream about Skye, and what might have happened to her.

•   •   •

HE WAS BACK AT the burned RV seven hours later. Hagestrom was gone, replaced by another trooper, more deputies, and a DCI agent named Mike Maddox, who’d come in with the crime scene crew. The crew had cut through the melted side of the RV and a tech in white coveralls and a face mask was inside, working around the body, which was lying on one side in the center of the RV’s cramped living area.

Lucas knew right away that it wasn’t Skye inside: the victim was male.

“All we know is that the victim is male, average height,” Maddox told Lucas. “He’s too burned to get anything else, unless we get a DNA hit. No face left, fingers are gone, hair’s gone, eyes are gone, toes are gone . . . We’ll get DNA out of the body, of course, but it’s unlikely we’ll get it from anywhere else, given the fire. Identification is . . . problematic.”

“Maybe,” said the tech, from inside the van.

Lucas and Maddox stepped closer. Maddox: “Maybe? I thought you said there was no chance.”

“That’s before I turned him,” the tech said. “I think I can see the edge of something that might be a wallet. He was lying on it, protected it from the fire.”

“That would be pretty interesting,” Maddox said. “Fish it out of there.”

“I’ve got some work to do before I get there,” the tech said. “But I’ll get to it.”

•   •   •

WHILE ONE TECH worked inside, another was working to get at the second VIN number; and when he got to it, found that it, too, had been chiseled away.

Then they got a break. The inside tech took fifteen minutes to get at it, finally extracting a thin black leather wallet. Another tech took it to a working table and after photographing it, opened it. Inside they found a slightly melted, but still readable, Wisconsin driver’s license for a Neal Ray Malin, showing an address in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, an expired membership card for an Eau Claire gymnasium, an insurance card for a two-year-old Ford pickup, and nothing else.

“No credit cards, no money. Whoever killed him took the money and credit cards, which means that they might be using them,” Lucas said. “If one of them was a debit card, and they tortured him for the code . . .”

“We could get a picture,” Maddox said. “Let me get on that.”

Maddox tracked it all down in five minutes: Malin was no longer living at the address on the driver’s license, but his ex-wife was. She wasn’t home and Maddox spoke to the babysitter. She didn’t know Malin personally, but said the ex-wife was working at a beauty parlor in Eau Claire.

“I’m going to stick here, but I’ll get an Eau Claire cop to track down his ex and give her the news, and get the credit card numbers,” Maddox told Lucas.

“Wonder what a Chippewa Falls guy was doing with these L.A. freaks?”

“A question we’re gonna ask,” Maddox said. “Maybe he was like that guy in South Dakota—picked up and killed for the hell of it.”

“Don’t think so,” said the crime scene guy inside the RV. “There’s blood everywhere. All over the place. Why would they do that, and wind up having to burn their RV?”

Lucas stuck his head inside the RV: “Have you checked all his pockets? Did he have a cell phone on him?”

“I’ve checked all the pockets, no phone.”

Lucas turned back to Maddox. “Have the Eau Claire cops ask his ex if he had a cell phone. People steal phones—if he had one, and they’re using it, we might get a GPS location on it.”

A few minutes later, Lucas, watching the slow progress inside the RV, said to Maddox, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to run down to Chippewa, just to . . . observe. You know, if they locate his apartment.”

“Fine by me,” Maddox said. “I’ll call ahead and tell them that you’re coming.”

•   •   •

CHIPPEWA FALLS WAS an hour and fifteen minutes away, rolling fast across country on back roads, then down Highway 53. When he arrived, he found that the Chippewa cops had waited for Bob Stern, the Wisconsin investigator, to arrive from Madison. Stern had gotten to Chippewa Falls a few minutes before Lucas, had stopped at the courthouse to pick up a search warrant, and then the cops and Stern had driven in a convoy over to Malin’s apartment.

Lucas followed his nav system up the hill on the west side of town, and caught the Wisconsin cops as they were gathering on the lawn of an old clapboard mansion. Stern saw Lucas getting out of his truck and walked over to shake hands. “How’s the old lady?”

“Cutting somebody open, about now,” Lucas told him. “You divorced yet?”

“Let’s not go there,” Stern said. “I think she’s gonna get the season tickets for the Packers.”

“Man, that’s . . . inhuman,” Lucas said. He looked up at the house, which had an expansive front porch, including a comfortable-looking swing, and a bunch of white, life-sized, wooden-chicken flower boxes showing off bunches of geraniums, marigolds, and petunias. “Nobody’s gone in yet?”

“Doing that now,” a deputy said.

They watched as a sheriff’s deputy with the search warrant climbed the porch and knocked on the door. A minute later an elderly woman in an apron answered, nodded a few times, and then pushed the screen door open.

“Let’s go,” Stern said. As they crossed the porch he said, “Ugly chickens. Ugly.”

•   •   •

THE OLD LADY WAS the owner of the house. Her name was Ann Webster, and she hadn’t seen Malin in two days. Malin, she said, rented the top floor of the house, and had a separate exit out back. One of the deputies was sent around back to cover it, and the rest of the cops climbed a wide oak-floor stairway to a second entry, apparently added when the top floor had been converted into an apartment.

“I was never using it, the stairs are too high, so I thought maybe somebody would rent it,” Webster told them. “I had the nicest family here for three years, and then Mr. Malin. He’s very quiet. No wild parties or anything like that.”

She opened the apartment door with a shiny new key, and they all pushed inside. The apartment was huge, as apartments go, and oddly shaped, as it once had contained an oversized master bedroom, with four more bedrooms down a long hallway, plus two bathrooms. The former master bedroom had been converted into a living room, with a cook’s kitchen at the far end, behind a newly built partition.

One of the four bedrooms had been converted into a den, with a comfortable couch, and a compact bar, a stereo system, and a fifty-inch television; another had been converted into an office. The other two were still used as bedrooms, although Webster said she was unaware of any overnight visitors.

“Hell of an apartment,” Stern said.

Webster said Malin paid two thousand eight hundred dollars a month for it, and one of the cops said, “That might be the most expensive apartment in Chippewa.”

Webster watched as the cops probed the place; she was rolling her hands together as if washing her hands of her tenant. He was a salesman, she said, for horse barns and pole barns, at a place called Collins Metal Buildings in Chippewa.

Lucas and Stern walked through with the cops, looking behind books and under desks, and then the cops got serious about the search, and began pulling the place apart. They found four guns hidden in various drawers, all compact .38 caliber revolvers, fully loaded; and in one drawer, under the revolver, found a couple hundred packs of orange and double-wide Zig-Zags.