Del Capslock would leave Minneapolis at the same time, to join Lucas's team. Lucas had also quietly offered a job to his old friend Sloan, but Sloan had decided to stay with the city: He was nonpolitical, liked what he was doing, didn't need the double dip, and suspected that the state job would take him out of town too much.

When they finished the personnel talk, Rose Marie leaned back in her chair, lit a cigarette with a blue plastic Bic, and asked, "Was it Rinker?"

"Yes. They think she's headed up to St. Louis. Gonna kill a few assholes."

Rose Marie shrugged and said, "Part of the overhead."

Lucas agreed. If you went into organized crime, sooner or later you'd get the bill. "Yeah. For Rinker, too. They're gonna try to trap her. They're already papering the motels and hotels and bars with the old photographs and the composites. They're moving a big special team in, all hush-hush. They've mostly cut out the St. Louis cops."

"Are you going back down?"

"If they ask, I guess," Lucas said. "It's an interesting situation-a top killer turning on her own people, with all her special knowledge. With her record of successful hits, the knuckleheads gotta be pretty freaked out."

"And no matter what happens, the FBI wins," Rose Marie said, peering at the ceiling. "If she kills a few people, they can squeeze the rest of the assholes with protection deals. If they catch her, they can squeeze her with the death penalty."

"Yeah-and she's out for revenge, too, so if the feebs get their hands on her, they've got that going. Another reason for her to talk. Not much downside."

Rose Marie puffed on the cigarette, exhaled, smiled, and said, "The governor liked that shit we did with Qatar." Qatar was a recently deceased serial killer. "If we could squeeze a little more good PR out of St. Louis, it'd be worth doing. Elmer got elected on his family money, and everybody considered him a pencil-necked geek. He likes the idea of having his own goon squad. Makes his testicles swell up."

"I thought it was idealism," Lucas said.

Rose Marie snorted. "Let me know when anything happens."

ON THE WAY OUT of the building, an old-timer cop sidled toward him and Lucas said, "Ah, Jesus, Hempsted, go away."

"I just got a business tip for you," the cop protested. "You heard about the big Pillsbury merger, right?"

"Something about it," Lucas admitted.

"Well, after everything was said and done, Pillsbury wound up owing the Trojan company."

"What?"

"Yeah. They're coming up with a self-rising condom."

"Get away from me, dickweed."

"You're laughing to yourself, Davenport," Hempsted called after him. "I can always tell."

WEATHER KARKINNEN WAS sitting at her desk in her office at Hennepin General, peering into a computer monitor. Lucas caught her unaware, and leaned in the doorway, watching her face. She'd put on weight with the pregnancy, had gone rounder and softer. She'd always been a sailor, the girl on the foredeck hauling on the spinnaker, wide shoulders and crooked nose, the sun-bleached hair and windburned cheekbones. The softness and weight was so different-he'd seen her, just out of bed in the morning, standing naked in front of a door-mounted mirror, measuring the changes in herself.

She moaned about the weight, about the changes in her figure. But it all sounded to Lucas like the war stories he'd heard from other women who'd gone through childbirth, stories akin to male basic-training tales, but female, a bunch of women sitting around talking about water weight and stretch marks and ultrasounds and episiotomies.

"YOU LOOK TERRIFIC,"he said, and she jumped.

"God, don't do that," she said, smiling, blue eyes crinkling at the corners. She stood up, stretched, and came around the desk, put her arms around his waist, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him.

"I mean it," he said. He had her hands on her waist, his thumbs near her navel, the growing part of her. "You make my heart feel funny when I look at you."

"That kind of talk could get you somewhere," she said. "When did you get back?"

"Just a few minutes ago," Lucas said. "Talked to Rose Marie-the conspiracy is flourishing. She'll quit Minneapolis in the middle of October and move over to the state on November first."

"That'll be the busy season, with the baby coming."

Lucas nodded. "I don't have to be there the exact minute she is. I'm thinking, I could quit Minneapolis when she does, but not move over to the state until December or January. Have a couple of months off to get the house together and you and the kid set up."

She tapped him on the chest. "That's the best idea you've had in weeks."

"So we'll do that," he said.

"How about Rinker? Was it her? Are you going to be involved?"

"Maybe. The feebs think she's headed for St. Louis. As soon as something happens, they'll let me know what they want to do."

BUT NOTHING HAPPENED. A week went by. Lucas and Weather spent one Sunday sailing in a regatta on Lake Minnetonka, and Lucas took two days to work on his Wisconsin cabin, never far from the cell phone.

Finally, he called Mallard. "What's up?"

"Malone's been out in L.A., squeezing the brother. Not getting much."

"He probably doesn't know much, if that file was right."

"It's a little more than that… He's borderline mentally impaired. Not dumb, exactly, but not quite right. The public defender is giving us a hard time about holding him, but we're gonna hang on anyway. We figure we can keep him for a couple of months before we have to go to trial."

"How about Clara?"

"Nothing. She's gone," Mallard said.

"You still think…?"

"Doesn't matter what I think. St. Louis is what I've got, and that's what I'm sticking with."

DOROTHY POLLOCK WAS A HEAVYSET, hard-faced woman, pale from a life under fluorescent lights, a duck waddler with bad feet from standing on concrete floors, a victim of Ballard-McClain Avionics, where she worked at a drill-press station.

Her job came to this: She would take a nickel-sized aluminum disk from a Tupperware pan full of disks, and an extruded aluminum shaft, about the length and thickness of a pencil, from a pan full of shafts.

Each disk had a collar at the center, with a hole through the collar, so it looked like a small wheel. Pollock would fit the end of a shaft through the hole, make a1 32-inch freshly drilled hole through the collar and shaft, and then tap an aluminum rivet into the hole. Finally, she'd use a pair of hand pinchers to crush the ends of the rivet, fixing the disk to the shaft. She'd drop the finished shaft, which would become a tuning knob on a radio, into another plastic bin. Then she'd make another one.

Every hour or so the foreman would come by and take away the finished shafts. Pollock was expected to finish a hundred shafts every shift. She got two fifteen-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and a half hour for lunch, which she could stretch to forty minutes if she didn't do it too often. She made $9.48 an hour, and the year before had gotten a 28-cent-an-hour raise, which worked out to a little more than three percent, or $11.20 a week.

She'd taken the raise, but hadn't been doing any handsprings about it. If she saved all the extra money for a month, she'd have just enough, after deductions for Social Security, state and federal income taxes, and union dues, to pay for a bad haircut. She wasn't all that unhappy when Clara Rinker came along and offered to pay her a thousand dollars a week for her spare room.

Not that she had much choice, if she'd thought about it. Twelve years earlier, in Memphis, Pollock had killed her husband, Roger, in his sleep, by hitting him six times on the head with a hammer. While she was hiding out in Alabama, she'd read a smart-ass newspaper column in the Commercial-Appeal that quoted a prosecutor as saying the first four whacks could have been emotional, but the last two indicated intent: They were looking for her on a first-degree murder warrant.