"Or maybe run a beauty salon," Letty was saying. "We've got three beauty salons in Armstrong, two good ones and one bad one."

"Mmm," Lucas said.

"If I was a cop, I'd put secret agents in every beauty shop in town. Teach them to be hairdressers, but, y'know, they'd all have tape recorders and cameras hidden away. Like spies."

"Take a lot of cops," Lucas said.

"Yeah, but you'd know everything. I go to Harriet's Mane Line with my mom, and the salon ladies know everything that's going on. Everything. That'd be pretty good for a cop."

Lucas looked at her again, more carefully. "You're right. That's absolutely right. Maybe you'll grow up to be a cop."

"I could do that," she said comfortably. "Wouldn't mind carrying a gun. If I'd had a real gun this morning, I wouldn't have been scared at all. All I had was that crappy.22."

THE THING THAT made traveling across the land so strange, Lucas realized, was that you did nothing: you simply sat in the car and time passed. Driving almost anywhere else, the road moved: you went up and down hills and around curves and past houses, speed zones came and went, cars and trucks went by, and something new was always popping up. Out here, the road was dead straight, with hardly anything on it, or at the sides. Rather than whipping around a curve over the crest of a hill, and finding a town tucked away, surprising you, here the towns came up as a slowly growing lump on the horizon; you could see them, it seemed, for hours before you arrived.

Though Broderick arrived quickly enough: Lucas slowed as they came into town. "So what's where?"

"Okay. So there's the church," she said, pointing across the highway. "It used to be run by Don Sanders. He's kinda crazy and I stay away from him. For the last, I don't know, maybe two or three years, there are a bunch of women living there. People call them the nuns."

"Are they nuns?"

"A couple of them are. They wear old-fashioned dresses."

"Okay. You know them?"

"I talk to them in the diner, when I see them, but my mom says I should stay away from them because they might be lesbians. They claim that they're church people, and say that they take food and clothes to poor people."

"Do they?"

She nodded: "I guess. I got some jeans from them once. Chics. I know a couple of them, the nuns, and one of them, Ruth Lewis… I really like her. She doesn't take any shit from anyone. She says I'm as good as anybody and I should remember that."

"How about the Sanders guy? Why do you say he's crazy?"

"I just don't like the way he looks at me. I get a bad feeling."

"Like what? Like he might hurt you?"

"Like he might try to make me do something with him," she said.

"Okay." He didn't comment; he simply filed it until he knew her better. Young girls, in his experience, were sometimes psychic in their ability to pick out predators. At other times, they were capable of straight-faced accusations against the absolutely innocent. "He's been replaced by lesbians?"

"That's just my mom," Letty said. "I know that Ruth's sister is going out with a guy in town. The word is, she's no lesbian."

Lucas said, "Huh," and took another look at her, and thought she might have blushed. She hurried on, pointing over the dashboard. "Those two big yellow buildings belong to Gene Calb, he fixes up cars and trucks. He's a real good guy. If I'm out with my traps, he'll let me come in and warm up. I can't go into the bar or the cafe because sometimes I'm a little stinky, but he doesn't care. I think Mom had a crush on him once, but he's married. I heard that sometimes the lesbians drive for him, like when he needs a car delivered somewhere. I could do that, if I had a license."

"And you probably ought to wait for the license," Lucas said.

"Yeah-yeah." She pointed: "That's the bar, the guy who runs it is named Pete. Mom used to go there when Randy Pearce ran it, but she says she doesn't feel welcome anymore. She says it's a dive now, a bunch of paint sniffers from the body shop. She says they're all jailbirds."

"Are they?"

She shrugged. "Some of them been in jail, I guess, but they seem like pretty good guys."

On the other side of the highway: "The diner is run by Sandra Wolf, she's pretty nice, and John McGuire has the gas station, he's okay. And down there, right across from the barn… " She pointed down a side street, where a low rambling house sat across a graveled street from a small white barn. "… I don't know what those guys do, but if I was a cop, I'd take a close look at them."

"Yeah? Why?"

"I was walking through there, taking a shortcut back from the lake, and the guy came out of the house and yelled at me to get off his property. I was only about ten feet on it. And he's got dogs, big black-and-brown ones. He had these little paper flags around his property for a while. They said, 'Dog Training, Invisible Fence,' but I think if he sicced one of those dogs on you, that invisible fence wouldn't do any good. They'd go through it like it was, you know, invisible. "

"But all he did was yell at you."

"I thought it was pretty suspicious. I mean, he's got ten acres there, and I was about three steps on it."

"What's the guy do for a living?"

"Works at Calb's. Sometimes he's got a woman in there. I've seen a couple of them, different ones. He sure does keep you off his property."

They were coming to the north end of town, and the house where Jane Warr and Deon Cash had lived. Two sheriff's cars were parked outside now, along with one of the BCA cars from Bemidji.

"If you want to stop, I can wait," Letty said. "You might want to ask me some more questions after you look inside."

HE WAS BEING steered, Lucas thought-she'd shown signs of the female steering gene during the interview at the LEC, and even more on the way to Broderick. On the other hand, she was right. He pulled in and parked. A sheriff's deputy stepped off the porch and walked toward them. Lucas got out, said, "I'm Davenport, with the BCA."

The deputy nodded. "Okay. One of your guys is inside."

Lucas stuck his head back inside the car and said "Wait," shut the door, and followed the deputy up to the porch.

"Where'd you get the kid?" the deputy asked, bending down a bit to get a look at Letty. She lifted a hand to him.

"She was downtown making a statement. You know her?"

"Sure. I know everybody around here. She's a pretty interesting kid. Don't let no grass grow under her feet, that's for sure. Gonna wind up rich."

"Got a nice line of bullshit," Lucas said.

"First thing you notice," the deputy said. He pushed the door open and Lucas stepped into the house, into an entry with a coat closet to one side. He continued into a living room, where one of the BCA guys he'd been introduced to that morning was standing at the bottom of a double-wide staircase, talking on a cell phone. He saw Lucas and held up a finger. Lucas nodded and looked around.

The place smelled of macaroni, cheese, marijuana, and blood, not a new smell in the few hundred houses he'd been through on homicide cases. To his right, in the corner, was a wide-screen Panasonic television, and on a table next to it, a big Sony. A game console was plugged into the Sony, while the Panasonic had boxes for a DVD and satellite dish. A love seat and a leather chair faced the TVs.

Straight ahead, behind the BCA guy, on the other side of the staircase landing, a hallway led to the kitchen. Lucas could see a breadmaker sitting on a counter next to a microwave.

To the right, an archway led into another room, with a dining table in the center of it. The table was stacked with boxes, most of them from small electric appliances. Fifty or sixty magazines, mostly on sex, European cars, or travel, were in heaps along one wall. A Bose Wave Radio sat upside down under the table, as though it had fallen off; it was still plugged into a wall socket. A set of earphones, one earmuff broken off, lay on the other side of the table, along with a generic-brand bottle of ibuprofen. A box of Wheat Thins sat on top of the litter of boxes on the table.