Lucas's job was officially designated "Director, Office of Regional Studies." The ORS had been planted within the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and drew its budget and support from the BCA-but Lucas reported directly to Rose Marie Roux and through her to the governor. The governor had already been burned by a couple of outstate murder cases that had gone unsolved, and he'd had enough of that.

In both cases, the local sheriff's departments had investigated the murders, before calling in the BCA. When the cases proved too complicated or politically touchy, they started screaming for help-and blamed the BCA, and the state, when the cases went unsolved.

That the cases had been mucked up by the locals hadn't cut any ice with the hometown newspapers. Where was all the scientific investigation stuff they kept seeing on the Discovery Channel? Why were they sending all that taxpayer money to St. Paul? What was the governor doing, sitting on his ass?

Questions that a 44 percent governor didn't appreciate.

So the governor created the Office of Regional Studies in consultation with Roux. The office was intended, as the insiders all knew, to "fix shit." The BCA director, John McCord, hated the idea. Nobody above him really cared. They just wanted shit fixed. Lucas smiled at the thought. He hadn't fixed anything big yet, but this call sounded like others he'd gotten from Roux over the years.

Lucas smiled often enough-he liked his job and his life-but the years had given him a hard face and French-Canadian genes had left him with crystal-blue eyes. His hair was dark, with flecks of gray, and a white scar ran across his forehead and one eyebrow onto the cheek below. Another scar dimpled his throat, a nasty round white spot with a slashing tail. He'd been shot by a little girl and had been choking on his tongue and on the blood from the wound, passing out, and a surgeon-the same one he'd later married-had opened his throat and airway with a jackknife.

That had all been years ago.

Now, he thought, he spent too much time in a chair. In an effort to fight what he saw as sloth, he'd been playing winter basketball with a group of aging jocks from Minneapolis. He was broad-shouldered, quick-moving, and not quite gaunt.

HE BRUSHED BY a redheaded woman who was leading a muffin-sized red dog in a muffin-sized red Christmas sweater down the sidewalk. The woman smiled and said, "Hi, Lucas," as they passed. He half-turned and blurted, "Hey. How ya doin'?" and smiled and kept going. Where'd he know her from? Somewhere. He was up the steps, inside the shopping mall that led to the DPS, in an elevator: A bartender, he thought. She used to be a bartender. Where? O'Brien's? Maybe…

ROSE MARIE ROUX'S office was a twenty-foot square that she'd furnished with her own money: a good cherry-wood desk, two comfortable visitors' chairs in green leather, a couch, a few prints and photographs of politicians, a bookcase full of reference books and state procedure manuals.

Rose Marie was sprawled in a chair behind her desk, an overweight woman with improbably blond-tinted fly-away hair, wearing a rumpled blue dress, with an unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. Word around town was that when she took the job, she'd moved the commissioner's office across the building so she could get a window that opened. At any time of day, you were likely to see her head sticking out the window, it was said, with a plume of smoke hanging over it.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"Sit down," she said. She pointed at a green leather chair. "The governor's a couple of minutes out, but I can give you an outline." She took a breath. "Well… "

"What?"

"We've had a lynching." The statement hung in the air like an oral Goodyear blimp.

"Tell me," Lucas said after a moment.

"Up north, a few miles outside of Armstrong. You know where that is?"

"By Thief River, somewhere."

"Very good. A black man and a white woman were found hanging from a tree out in the countryside. They were naked. Handcuffed, legs taped with strapping tape. They'd been living together in some flyspeck town north of Armstrong."

"Lynched," Lucas said. He thought about it for a few seconds, then said slowly, "Lynched means that somebody is suspected of a crime. The townspeople take justice into their own hands and the law doesn't do anything about it. Is that-?"

"No. What actually happened is that they were murdered," Rose Marie said, twisting in her chair. "Sometime last night. But it's a black man and a blond woman and they're hanging from trees, naked. When the word gets out, the shit's gonna hit the fan, and we can say murder all we want, and the movie people are going to be screaming lynching. We need to get some shit up there."

"Does Bemidji know?" Lucas asked. The BCA's Bemidji office handled investigations in the northern part of the state.

"I don't know-they don't know from me. What we've got is an informal contact with Ray Zahn, the state patrolman out of Armstrong," Rose Marie said. "He called in about forty-five minutes ago, and had the call switched to me, at home. He seems to be a smart guy. He was first on the scene, a couple of minutes ahead of the first sheriff's deputies."

"Maybe the sheriff'll handle it," Lucas suggested.

"Zahn says no. He says the sheriff is a new guy who's scared of his own shadow. Zahn says the sheriff'll call us as soon as he looks at the scene."

"And I'm going."

"Absolutely. That's the first thing the governor said when I called him. We've got a National Guard chopper getting ready. You can fly right into the scene."

"That's all we know?" Lucas asked.

"That's everything," Roux said.

"Then I'll get going," Lucas said, pushing up from the green chair. He felt a hum, a little spear of pleasure breaking through the blue. An evil bastard to hunt: nothing like it to cheer a guy up. "You can call me in the air if anything changes."

"Wait for the governor. He's only a minute or two away."

WHILE THEY WAITED, Lucas got on his cell phone and called Del: "Where are you?"

"In bed." Del Capslock had come over from Minneapolis with Lucas.

"Get up. I'll pick you up in fifteen or twenty minutes. Bring some clothes for a couple of days. Bring some boots, too. We're going up north. We're gonna be outside."

"Uh-oh."

"Yeah. Exactly right. I'll tell you when I see you."

ROSE MARIE'S TELEPHONE rang, and she picked it up, listened for one second, then dropped it back on the hook. "Governor just came through the front door."

GOVERNOR ELMER HENDERSON was six feet tall and willowy, with lightly gelled blond hair fading to gray, long expressive hands, and watery blue eyes. He wore narrow, gold-rimmed glasses that gave him a scholarly look, and conservative gray, blue, or black suits handmade in London, over handmade English shoes.

Henderson's clan had money and a history in Minnesota politics, but Elmer hadn't been expected to carry the family banner. He had, in fact, always been the family weenie, with a whiff of sexual difference hanging around him from his college and law-school days.

He'd been expected to spend his life as a second-stringer in the boardrooms of large Minnesota corporations, while his two brothers grew up to be governors and senators and maybe presidents. But one of the brothers turned to cocaine and multiple divorce, and the other got drunk and powered his antique wooden Chris Craft under a dock and made a quadriplegic of himself. Elmer, by default, was chosen to soldier on.

As it happened, he'd found in his soul a taste for power and a talent for intrigue. He'd created a cabal of conservative Democratic state legislators that had decapitated the Democratic Party machine, and then had taken it over. He'd maneuvered that victory into a nomination for governor. A little more than a year into his first term, he looked good for a second.