"Hows it going?"

"Fine. They're a lovely bunch of people."

Lucas punched off, dropped the phone back in his coat pocket. Del could take care of himself. At his office, he yawned, peeled off his jacket, and locked himself in, leaving the lights off. He pulled open a desk drawer, dropped into his chair, and put his feet on the drawer. Not quite seven o'clock; He'd gone to bed a little after two, and normally wouldn't have gotten up until ten.

Years beforebefore he'd inadvertently gotten richhe'd invented board games as a way of supplementing his police salary. The games were created in all-night sessions that now, in memory, seemed to merge with his time of running the streets. The games eventually became computer-based, with Lucas writing the story and a hired programmer from the University of Minnesota writing the computer code.

That work led to Davenport Simulations, a small software company that specialized in computer-based simulations of law-enforcement crises, intended to train police communications personnel in fast-moving crisis management. By the time the company's management bought him out, Davenport Simulations were running on most of the nation's 911 equipment.

The simulations hadn't much interested him. They'd simply been an obvious and logical way to make money, more of it than he'd ever expected to make. And while games still interested him, he'd lost his place in the gaming world. The new three-dimensional computer-based action/strategy games were far beyond anything he'd been able to do as recently as five years before.

When he'd gotten rich, when he'd gotten political, he'd stepped off the streets. But in the past six months, his life had begun to shift again. He was wandering the Cities at night. Looking into places he hadn't seen in years: taverns, a couple of bowling alleys, barbershops, a candy store that fronted for a sports book. Strip joints, now masquerading as gentlemen clubs. Putting together rusty connections.

And he was talking to old gaming friends. He began to consider a new kind of game, a game set in the real world, with real victories to win, and a real treasure at the end, maybe using palm computers and cell phones. He'd been staying up late again, working on it. He was still in the pencil-twiddling stage, but now had a block of scratchy flow charts pinned to his drafting table. One idea a night, that's all he wanted. Something he could use. But an idea a night was a lot of ideas.

He leaned back in the chair, yawned, closed his eyes. In his mind's eye, he saw Maison on the floor, her foot sticking out from behind the bed, and the woman crumpled on the floor below the closet. Maison and her friends were dopers, and dopers got killed; it happened forty or fifty times a year in Minneapolis, thousands of times a year across the country.

As far as he was concerned, dopers were crap, and if they died, well, that's what dopers did. That Alie'e was famous cut no ice with Lucas. Her fame was entirely ephemeral, not the result of hard work, or intellectual or moral superiority, but simply a by-product of her appearance.

He felt no impulse to revenge; he did feel the first tingles of the hunt. That was something else altogether. That had nothing to do with Alie'e, but was purely between his guys and the other guys.

Then he saw, in his mind's eye, the image of Catrin as a young woman. Man, the last time he saw her

Lucas's eyes were closed, and the corners of his mouth turned up. A small smile, and not a particularly attractive one. Feeling a little wasted; feeling some pressure from the politicals; feeling a killer out there, somewhere, maybe running, maybe not. And a woman on the mind, somebody to wonder about.

Thiswas how life was supposed to be. Propped up in a chair, wishing you still smoked, worried about twenty-four things at the same time. Not that laid-back, going nowhere slowly feeling that prosperous, rich-guy, hand-shaking shit.

Likethis.

He was sleeping like a baby when the phone rang.

Dark. Bad taste. Lucas pushed himself up in the chair, the phone still ringing. Confused for a moment, he realized he was in his office, that he'd dozed off. He sighed and fumbled for the phone. "Yeah?"

Sloan: "I got this Amnon kid coming down here. And his sister, uh, Jail, however you pronounce it. Ya-el, whatever."

"Yeah. Jael." Lucas rubbed his eyes, held on to the phone and stumbled to the light switch, and then looked at his watch. Seven-fifteen. "When are they due in?"

"Amnon's in St. Paul. He said he was in the middle of something, but he could leave there in ten minutes or so. He ought to be here in a half an hour. The sister said she'd be here about nine. She sounded pretty freaked out. I could hear somebody crying in the background. Anyway, you said you might want to sit in."

"Yeah, I would. Are they bringing lawyers?"

"I don't know. I do know that they moved Maison to the ME's, and he was coming in to take a look. I'm going over."

"Wait for meI'll walk along."

The ME was a middle-sized man with long graying hair tied in a neat ponytail, gold-rimmed glasses, and a distracted air. They talked in his office, a routine government cubicle with no bodies in sight. "I've taken a preliminary look, is all I've donewe'll get right on the full autopsy. I'll do it myself. We'll start getting some chemistry back by late afternoon. But I can tell you three things," he said. "Your guys told me that she was strangled, and I can confirm that that's almost certainly the case. This wasn't accidental sexual asphyxiation or anything like that. Her hyoid bone's broken, and that takes direct pressure, probably with the thumbs, from a pair of strong hands."

"A man, then," Sloan said.

Lucas frowned. "Why wouldn't it be?"

"There are some rumors that she swung the other way," Sloan said. "Really, that she swung both ways, but recently, mostly with women."

The ME shook his head. "I can't tell you that it was a man, for sure. Just that it was somebody with strong hands. The second thing is this: The crime-scene people say that her condition suggested sexual activity before her death. And I can tell you that shedid engage in sexual activity, not long before her death, but at leastsome time before. An hour, maybe as many as two hours. There are two or three small scratches and some light bruising next to her vulva. Fingernails, I think, just enough to draw a little bloodbut the bruises had time to develop before she was killed. And it appearsI'll tell you for sure after the autopsythat while there is light bruising suggestive of rough sexual play, she was not fully penetrated. Not by a penis, anyway. It appears that the sexual play was primarily manual and oral. There's no semen."

Lucas looked at Sloan, who asked, "Is that two things or three things?"

"Two things," the ME said.

"What's the third thing?" Lucas said.

"There are no defensive wounds. No other bruises, no indications of a struggle, no sign that the killer had to fight to hold his grip. She didn't scratch himher fingernails are clean. I couldn't even find any signs that she thrashed around. She just let herself go. For whoever did it, she was an easy kill."

"Dope," Sloan said. "She might not even have known she was dying."

"Oh, yeah, that's a fourth thing," the ME said. "Thatis a needle stick on her arm, and there are more between her toes. She was taking a lot of sticks."

"An addict?"

"Tell you later. None of this is final. I'll have some definitive stuff this afternoon."

Lucas stopped at the chief's office, gave her a quick capsule of what the ME had said, She made a few notes and said, "So it reallycould be drug-related."

"Yeah. Maybe evenprobably."

"We got half an hour before the press conference," she said. "I've promised everybody that you'll drag the killer in and hurl him to the floor in front of the microphones."