"So goddamn bright that you don't need your headlights," Del said.

"Yeah?" Lucas reached out and turned off the headlights. They were immediately hurtling through a darkness so intense that it should have had Elvis paintings on it.

"Turn the fuckin' lights back on," Del said after a few seconds. "There might be a curve somewhere."

"No curves," Lucas said. "I could tie the wheel down, crawl in the back seat and go to sleep." But he turned the lights on, and they crossed the Red River into North Dakota thirty-three minutes after blowing out of Armstrong.

LUCAS DROVE THE first two hours, then Del took two, and Lucas took them into the Cities six hours after leaving the Law Enforcement Center. He dropped Del at his house, then drove through the quiet streets to Mississippi River Boulevard and the Big New House. He left the Olds in the driveway, got his bag from the trunk, fumbled his house keys out of his pocket, and trudged inside.

Weather woke when he tiptoed into the bedroom by the light from the hallway. "That you?"

"No. It's a crazed rapist."

"How'd it go?"

"We cracked it." He started to undress.

"What?" She pushed herself up. "You can turn on a light. Here… "

Her bedstand light came on. "Are you working tomorrow morning?" Lucas asked. Weather operated almost daily.

"No. I might do a palate in the afternoon, but they've got to finish some tests on the kid, so it's not a sure thing. What happened with the lynching?"

"Not a lynching," Lucas said. "It was a revenge killing. You remember that Hale Sorrell who was in the paper a month ago, his kid got kidnapped?"

"Yeah?"

"It was him."

She was amazed, and a little entertained. "Lucas, you're joking."

"No. We haven't made an arrest, but the bodies were really clogged up with somebody else's DNA, and I'll tell you what: it's gonna be Sorrell's. He found out who killed his kid, he tracked them down and he hanged them. I don't know the details, but we're gonna find out."

"Oh, God. That poor family. That poor family."

"You don't really go around hanging people," Lucas said.

"What would you do if somebody kidnapped Sam and killed him?"

Lucas got in bed but didn't answer.

She pressed him: "What would you do?"

"I don't know."

"Oh, bullshit, Lucas, I know what you'd do and so do you," she said. "You'd wait until the police weren't looking, then you'd find them and kill them."

"All right," Lucas said. Then, after a while, "Make a spoon."

She rolled away from him, and Lucas snuggled up behind her, arm around her waist. "See anything about it on TV?"

"Yeah. That Washington man and the sheriff had a press conference, and Washington lost it and started screaming at the sheriff about being a redneck bigot and the sheriff kept apologizing. It was like he admitted it, or something."

"Aw, man, we told him… "

"It was pretty funny, if you like assassinations," Weather said. "And this little girl was on. She had this amazing face, like in those pictures from the Dust Bowl."

"Letty West. I'll tell you about her in the morning," Lucas said. They snuggled for a while, and then Lucas rolled away and said, "I gotta sleep. I'm supposed to be downtown at seven o'clock or some fuckin' thing."

"Set your clock," Weather said. "Are you going to arrest him? Sorrell?"

"No, no. It's just that the goddamn governor's aide is a maniac. He wants an early meeting. Nothing's gonna happen with Sorrell for a day or two."

LOREN SINGLETON AND his mother, unaffected by the crystal clarity of the night and the rippling northern lights, were passing through Fargo as Lucas snuggled up against Weather's butt. And as Lucas stirred under the drone of the alarm clock, and Weather kicked him and he groaned, and thrashed toward the snooze button, they were rolling up the long landscaped driveway at Hale Sorrell's house in the countryside east of Rochester.

Sorrell himself, wearing blue silk pajamas, let them in the house. Singleton, in his deputy sheriff's uniform, asked, "Is your wife up yet?"

"Oh, God. Oh, my God, you found her?" Sorrell asked, his eyes wide. They clicked over to Margery, but didn't ask the question: maybe she was some kind of social worker. He turned and shouted, "Mary! Mary!"

From up the stairs: "Who is it?"

"You better come down."

"You have any relatives in the house?" Singleton asked. "Any help, any friends?"

"No, no-Mary could call her mother… " Mary Sorrell came down the stairs and said, "Is it Tammy?"

"No, it's not Tammy," Singleton said. He thought about the warm bundle he'd carried outside.

"Then what…?" Sorrell asked.

Was there fear in his eyes? Did he think Singleton was here because of the hangings? Better get it done with.

"It's just… " Singleton said, digging in his coat pocket. He glanced at his mother: they'd worked this out. "It's just… " The Sorrells were looking at his pocket, as though he were about to produce a paper or a photograph. Instead, Singleton produced a snubby.380 automatic, pushed it toward Sorrell's eyes and pulled the trigger.

At the last moment, Sorrell flinched. Even at the short distance, Singleton might have missed-but Singleton flinched the same way, and the bullet struck Sorrell between the eyes and he fell backward. After a second of stunning gun-smoked silence in the aftermath of the blast, Mary Sorrell backed a step away, and began to scream, looking at her husband's body, and then, realizing, up at Singleton.

The gun was pointing at her head and Singleton pulled the trigger and flinched again, just as Mary Sorrell flinched the opposite way, and, though he was four feet from her, the bullet clipped only the corner of her ear, and she staggered away and turned and tried to run.

"Goddamn you," Margery shrilled, and to Singleton: "Shoot her. Shoot her."

She was now six feet away, and Singleton, shaking badly, shot her in the back and she went down, hurt but still able to scramble, weakly, to her hands and knees. She made a coughing noise, like a lion, coughing from the blood in her lungs and crawled away from him, trailing brilliant red lung-shot blood now. Still shaking, he stepped carefully around it and shot her in the back of the head and she went down for good.

Then Singleton and Mom both stood there until Singleton groaned, "Oh, God."

"Shut up, dumb shit," his mother said. "Just listen."

They listened together. For running feet, for a call, for a question. All they heard was the crinkling silence of the big house. They knew from Tammy that the Sorrells had no live-in servants, although there was a housekeeper who would be arriving after eight o'clock.

"We ought to check around," Margery said, looking up and down the entry hall. "There's money in this place. I can smell it."

"Mom, we gotta get out of here," Singleton said. "We can't touch anything. I told you. They got microscopes, they got all kinds of shit. Don't touch anything."

So they left, in the wan light of the predawn, locking the door behind them. They had at least a couple of hours before the housekeeper showed up. Not enough time to get back to Armstrong, but certainly enough time to arrive early in the day, to be astonished if Singleton was called upon to be astonished.

"Left some money back there," Margery said as they rolled out of the driveway. "Left some goddamned money on the table."