"Beats the shit outa me."

"CALB WAS RIGHT about the travel time," Lucas said, glancing at his watch as they rolled into the casino's parking lot.

The casino looked like a larger version of Calb's truck shop, but a truck shop on steroids: a huge, rambling, two-story yellow-and-green metal building with a prism-shaped glass entry built to resemble a crystal tepee. "Liquor in the front, poker in the rear," Del said.

"Bumper sticker," Lucas said. "But I don't think they sell booze."

THE MOOSE BAY security chief was a cheerful Chippewa man named Clark Hoffman, who hurried down to meet them after a call from the reception desk. "Figured you'd get here sooner or later," he said, shaking their hands. He looked closely at Del. "Did you hang out at Meat's in the Cities?"

"Yeah, I'd go in there before it closed," Del said.

"It closed? Shit."

"Couple years back."

Hoffman thought about that for a moment, then said, "I used to kick your ass at shuffleboard. I thought you were a wino."

Del grinned and shrugged. "I remember. You told me you were at Wounded Knee."

"That's me," Hoffman said. "Sneaking through the weeds with a hundred pounds of frozen brats in a backpack. Fuckin' FBI-no offense. C'mon this way."

They followed him upstairs to his office, Del filling him in about Meat's. "Trouble with the health inspectors," Del told him. "You name it, they had it: mice, rats, roaches, disease. The only thing that kept you from dyin' was the alcohol."

"Everything did have a… particular flavor," Hoffman said. "Ever notice that?"

"Yeah."

"I always sorta liked it. What happened to Meat?"

"He moved to San Clemente and opened a porno store."

"Not much money in retail porno anymore," Hoffman said, shaking his head. "Not since they started piping it into every motel room in the country."

JANE WARR'S EMPLOYMENT file sat in the center of Hoffman's desk. He pushed it across at Lucas and said, "Not much there. She learned to deal at a school in Vegas, held a couple of jobs there, worked at a Wal-Mart for a while, outside of Kansas City, then came up here."

"We heard a rumor that she might have had a relationship here with a guy named Terry Anderson."

Hoffman frowned. "Where'd you hear that?"

"Downtown. Can't tell you exactly who mentioned it," Lucas said.

"I'll check, and I'll find out. I hadn't heard anything, but then-I might not have. About anyone else, but not about Terry."

"Why not Terry?" Del asked.

"He's my brother-in-law," Hoffman said. He grinned at Lucas, but it wasn't a happy face. "He's married to my sister."

"Aw, shit," Lucas said. "Listen, all we heard was one guy, who didn't like Warr, but maybe got turned down by her and knew we'd be up here talking to you. Maybe just a wise guy."

"One way or the other, I'll know in the next half hour," Hoffman said. He interlinked his fingers, stretched his arms out in front of him, and cracked his knuckles. "I'll let you know."

"Take it easy," Del said.

"I'll take it easy," Hoffman said. "My sister, on the other hand, might kill his ass. If it's true."

"Tell her to take it easy, too," Del said. "I mean, Jesus."

"You have any cocaine going through here?" Lucas asked after an awkward pause.

Hoffman spread his hands. "Sure. On the res, and some of the customers bring it in. We try to keep it out-we make so much money that we try to keep everything spotless. We don't need to give some asshole state senator an excuse to build state-run casinos. When we see it, we call the cops. Anybody caught with it is banned, no matter what the cops do."

"Any chance Warr was dealing?" Del asked.

"Not in here," Hoffman said. "We watch the dealers, and they know it. We tape them every minute they're working."

"Really? Do you still have last night's tapes?" Lucas asked.

"Sure do. We've got tapes for the last month, and tapes of anything that might ever come up in the future. Catch people stealing, they'll be on tape until the next glacier comes through."

Del said, "We don't have a line on who did this, but we'd sort of like to see a guy, big guy, new beard, dark watch cap or ski cap, dark parka and jeans, drives a Jeep Cherokee."

"I don't know about the Cherokee, but I know who you're talking about. We've got him on tape," Hoffman said.

"You know him?" Lucas asked. "Who he is?"

"Not who he is, but I looked at him pretty good. He'd be on the tapes, though most of what you'd see is the top of his head. The camera coverage on the slots isn't as good as it is on the tables, because the slots aren't as much of a problem."

"When can we see them?" Lucas asked. And, "How do you know it was him?"

"Right now. And I know who you're talking about, because some people don't act right, and you tend to notice them. This guy wasn't interested in gambling. I couldn't tell what he was interested in. I noticed him the night before last, and then he came in again last night," Hoffman said. "He was plugging dollar tokens into the slots, but slow, and he hardly paid attention when he won, like he didn't care. People don't act like that in casinos. They're always walking around counting their coins and looking at machines, or they get perched up on a chair and they start pounding away. One thing they don't do, is they don't not give a shit."

Del looked at Lucas. "Hell of a long thread, from the motel guy to here."

"Gotta pull it," Lucas said. To Hoffman: "Let's go see the tapes."

Hoffman took them to a surveillance room-on the way, he asked, "You really think your info on Terry might be good?" and Lucas said, "Jeez, I hope not"-where a half-dozen women roamed along twenty monitors, watching the activity on the floor below. There were good overhead shots of all the blackjack tables, but most of the cameras over the slots looked straight down. Only a few looked at the slots from shallow angles, and those were farther back.

"The main problem with the machines is theft-guys dipping coins out of other people's coin buckets," Hoffman explained. He pointed at a monitor showing a woman who was sitting in front of a machine feeding in quarters. All they could see was the top of her head, her shoulders, and her arms. "See, like this lady, she's pushed her coin bucket halfway around the machine. If you're on the next aisle over, you can reach across and dip her. We get one of those a week, guys who never think about cameras. Dumb guys. But you can't see them dipping from the side. You can only see them reach from the overheads."

He led them to a cubicle at the back of the room, where an Indian man with two careful red-ribbon-tied braids was poking at a computer. "Les, are we still on last night's tapes on Number Twelve?"

"Yeah. That's good for another couple of days." The man looked curiously at Lucas and Del.

"State police," Hoffman said. "Looking into the Jane Warr thing."

"Hanged," Les said. He toyed with the end of one of his braids. "That sort of freaked me out when I heard it. She won't be on Twelve, though… "

"We're looking for another fella. Go to ten o'clock. Start there."

The computer guy typed in a group of codes, and they waited, fifteen seconds, then twenty, and finally a wide-angled color film came up. The people in the film moved in a herky-jerky motion, indicating that the camera was shooting at a super-slow rate. "There he is," Hoffman said, tapping the camera.

The camera was looking down a long row of slots from slightly above. Two-thirds of the way down the row, a tall man in a dark coat, watch cap, and glasses was playing one of the machines.

"Can we get a closer shot of him?" Lucas asked.

"Not from that camera-we could have zoomed in if we thought he was up to something, but he never did anything," Hoffman said. "I just noticed him when I was down there because he didn't seem right. I forgot about his glasses, though."