In the shop, the stolen car would be repainted to match the beater. Some of the parts and trim-the dashboard graphics indicating kilometers per hour, instead of miles-the ID numbers, and papers of the high-mileage Toyota would be transferred to the low-mileage machine.

A nun would then drive the truck back across the border, where it would be resold. The remnants of the beater would be shipped to a junkyard, where it would be crushed into a cube and sent to a smelter.

The money was great: a battered, busted-up two- or three-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser, often owned by the kind of long-distance salesman who'd put fifty thousand rough miles a year on his car, would be purchased at a used-car auction for a few thousand dollars Canadian. Three weeks later, it would turn up on a working ranch in Saskatchewan or Alberta, in near-new condition, with all the right papers. The buyer would pay the equivalent of $20,000 for a $50,000 machine.

After all the work was done, and the employees paid, and the investment in the vanishing truck was accounted for, Calb and Shawn Davis would split $5,000 on each Toyota sale, give or take. Two trucks a week added up to a quarter-million tax-free dollars a year, each. Hiding the cash was almost as much trouble as making it, but they found ways.

THERE WERE A few flies in the ointment.

The nuns made everybody nervous. They weren't paid anything, which meant that Davis and Calb didn't have a good hold on them. The women were using the trucks and the body shop's expertise to smuggle drugs south across the border. Although they had no economic hold on the women, Calb believed that they were safe. The women were, he thought, the next thing to fanatics. Nice fanatics, like Ruth Lewis, but they would go to prison before they talked about the deal.

Another fly was Deon Cash, and his old lady, Jane Warr. Cash wasn't quite right. Shawn Davis had given him a job reluctantly, paid him $432 per delivery, because he was a cousin, and because he had shown in jail that he could keep his mouth shut. But Cash was a bad man; and worse, he was stupid.

A third fly, and lately a big juicy one, was Cash's friend, Joe Kelly. Kelly stayed with Cash and Warr between runs. Then, a month earlier, he'd disappeared. Nobody knew where. Everybody wanted to know. Calb had begun to suspect that Kelly had made a move on Jane Warr, and that Cash had buried him out in the woods.

Now this.

CALB WASN'T LISTENING to Ruth Lewis's appeal. He was staring past her, out into the shop, thinking about the whole mess, and calculating. He had to have something going out there when the cops arrived. Maybe he could haul one of his own trucks in, tear it down, start repainting it. The place couldn't be empty, with a bunch of guys sitting around staring at the walls…

"Gene! Gene!"

Calb looked back at Ruth: "Sorry-I was thinking about… getting something going out in the shop. Before the cops get here. It looks weird, being empty."

"Give us the cash to buy a truck," Ruth said. "One truck."

"Listen. Guys. We've got to figure out what's going on here. You have to figure it out, too-I mean, you're doing the driving. I thought maybe Joe Kelly just took off, but there was no sign he was going and Deon said all his clothes are still hanging in his closet… "

"You think Joe's dead, too?" Katina asked.

"Well, where is he?" Calb asked. "Nobody in Kansas City has heard from him."

"There's an auction Saturday morning in Edmundston that's got the perfect truck," Ruth said. "Three years old, two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers, runs good enough to get across."

"I gotta talk to my Kansas City guy… "

"Gene, we've got to do this," Ruth said urgently. "We've got a load waiting. We're desperate."

"Let me talk to my guy." He looked around the office. "You know, if this doesn't get settled quick, we might have to start worrying about where we talk. What we say."

"You could always come over to the church to talk," Katina said. "I don't think they'd have the guts to bug the church."

"Maybe… " Calb looked out the window. "I wonder what happened? I heard they were just hanging there, like icicles, all… messed up."

"Jane Warr. She was not a nice woman. Deon was worse," Katina said. She turned to Ruth. "The Witch used to hang around with Jane. I hope she's not involved with this somehow."

"Ask Loren," Ruth suggested.

"I will. But Jane and Deon… "

"May God have mercy on their souls," said Ruth, and she crossed herself.

ARMSTRONG, THE COUNTY seat, came over the horizon as a hundred-foot-tall yellow concrete chimney with a plume of steam hanging over the prairie, then as a couple of radio towers with red blinking lights, then as a row of corrugated steel-sided grain elevators along a double set of railroad tracks. They followed the tracks past the elevators, past a few broken-down shacks on what had once been the bad side of town, into a quiet neighborhood of aging Cape Cod houses, all painted either white or a dirty pastel pink or blue, over a bridge labeled CROSS RIVER, and into the business district.

"What's that smell?" Del asked, as they came into town.

Zahn looked at him. "What smell?"

"Paper plant, or chipboard plant," Lucas said.

"Chipboard," Zahn said. "I don't smell it anymore."

"Jesus. It smells like somebody's roasting a wet chicken, with the feathers on," Del said.

"Ain't that bad," said Zahn.

"Yes, it is," Del said.

The downtown was a flat grid, mostly brick, yellow and red, with meterless curbs along blacktopped streets, three or four stoplights. Lucas could see both a Motel 6 and a Best Western, Conoco and BP stations on opposite corners with competing convenience stores, a Fran's Diner followed by a Fran's Bakery followed by a Fran's Rapid Oil Change, a McDonald's on one corner and a Pizza Hut halfway down the block, a sports bar called the Dugout.

At the heart of the town was a scratchy piece of brown grass, patched with gray snow, with a two-story, fifties-ish red-brick courthouse in the middle of it. A newer red-brick Law Enforcement Center hung on to the back of the courthouse, with a fire station even farther back.

Three cops and a couple of firefighters were outside in the cold, leaning against the walls of their buildings, smoking.

Holme's Motors was across the street from the LEC, in a metal building with a single plate-glass window looking out at a dozen used American cars. Red, white, and blue plastic pennants hung down from a wire stretched above the lot; there was just enough wind to keep them nervously twitching. Zahn pulled into the lot, and through the window they could see a man poking numbers into a desk calculator. "That's Carl," Zahn said.

Carl Holme was broad and bald-headed, with a cheerful smile. "Heard about the Negro getting hung," he said to Zahn, when they pushed through the door. "That's gonna dust things up, huh?"

"I'd raise your prices before the TV people get here," Zahn said.

"Really? You think?"

Five minutes after they walked in, they walked back out into the cold. Lucas took the Olds and Del cranked up the Mustang and they trundled behind Zahn, a three-car caravan, sixty feet across the street to the Law Enforcement Center.

The smoking cops said hello to Zahn, looked with flat curiosity at Lucas and Del. Zahn took them inside, was buzzed through a bulletproof-glass door to a reception area, where he introduced them to Zelda Holme, the car dealer's wife, a pretty, round-faced woman who was also secretary to the sheriff.

"Sheriff Anderson called and said you wanted to talk to Letty. We've got her back in the lounge," Holme said, smiling and friendly. "Come right along."

"I'm gonna take off," Zahn said to Lucas, lifting a hand. "You've got my number. Call if you need anything."