They were. Dickerson, a tall man in a tan parka, with straw-colored hair and gold-rimmed glasses, introduced himself and the other two agents, Barin and Woods. All of them gawked at the bodies as they talked. "The crime scene and special operations guys are about five minutes behind us," Dickerson said. "The ME's out on the road right now. The special ops guys'll get it on film and we'll process the scene, then we'll get those folks out of the trees."

"We need a careful sweep," Lucas said. "I mean like, crazy careful."

"Pretty screwed up already," Dickerson said. Then he second-thought himself, with the sheriff right there, and diplomatically added, "We're getting set up now. We're bringing in a propane heater, and after we get finished crawling the place, we'll melt out the snow and make sure nothing was trampled down into it."

"Excellent."

"You and I ought to go off somewhere, and decide who's going to do what." Again, a bureaucratic wariness.

"Del and I don't have anything to do with crime scene stuff," Lucas said. "That's all yours-but make sure the ME takes a close look at the woman's mouth. That blood on her face looks likes it might not be hers. We'll want a DNA on it and we'll want her mouth cleaned out."

"Sure."

"Otherwise, we can chat if you want, but basically, Del and I just go around and talk to people." Lucas said. "Your guys should do the same thing-interview whoever you want. Duplicate us. No problem."

"So we're not… one investigation." Dickerson looked skeptical.

"Nope." Lucas shook his head. "Del and I have done this a lot, in Minneapolis. We find it's handy, with the hard ones, to have two investigations running side by side, if you can do it without a lot of in-fighting. You get different ideas going."

Dickerson shrugged. "It's all right with me. These two guys"-he turned a thumb to Barin and Woods-"will be doing all the work. I'm going to get us set up, hang around today and maybe tomorrow, and then I'll be on call down in Bemidji. I understand the governor's taken an interest."

Lucas said, "He has. He's worried about the image. Two people hanged, naked, the man's black."

"Got a pretty good dick on him, too," said Schnurr, the sheriff's deputy.

Lucas turned on him, his teeth showing. "Shut the fuck up. Honest to Christ, if I hear anybody talking like that, I'll personally slap the shit out of him."

"Didn't mean nothin'," Schnurr said. He shuffled his feet like a child who'd been bad in class; but he had mean eyes.

"If a reporter heard that, or even heard you'd said it, sheriff's deputies making cracks like that, we'd have twice as much trouble as we do now. So keep your fuckin' mouth shut," Lucas finished. To Anderson: "I don't know how much you like your job, but your whole goddamn county is about to get smeared in the national media. Do you understand that?"

"I… don't know," Anderson said, uncertainly.

"Believe me, it's gonna happen. And one asshole making comments like this guy, it could mean that you don't only lose your job, but you gotta move to Arizona and change your name."

Anderson glanced nervously at Schnurr and said, "We'll keep a lid on it."

Dickerson was peering up at the bodies, embarrassed, Lucas thought, to be from the same agency as Lucas. "You better," Lucas snarled. He looked again at Schnurr, nailing him in place, then asked Anderson, "The little girl who found the bodies-is she in town?"

"Giving a statement," Anderson said.

"We'd appreciate it if you'd have somebody call in, tell them to keep her there until Del and I have a chance to talk to her."

Anderson nodded.

Lucas said to Dickerson, "Good luck. You guys got it."

"We got it," Dickerson said.

"NEED TO GET to that little girl," Lucas said, as they walked back out to the line of cars. "If the sheriff's crew is as bad as it looks, we need to talk to her before somebody fucks her up."

"Gotta get some wheels," Del said.

"Get them at a car dealer, probably, if we get there fast," Lucas said. "Tomorrow morning, you won't be able to rent a car anywhere north of Fargo."

"Zahn oughta know."

ZAHN DID KNOW. "Holme's Motors in Armstrong," he said. "Fix you right up. How many do you want?"

"Two?"

As they bounced slowly down the dirt road, past the girl's house to the highway, Zahn fumbled out a cell phone, pushed a speed-dial button, and said, "This is Ray Zahn. Let me talk to Carl." And a moment later, "Hey. I gotta couple of cops in town from St. Paul. They need two cars, good shape. Uh-huh." He turned to Lucas: "What kind of credit card?"

"American Express or Visa, whatever they take," Lucas said.

"American Express or Visa… yeah. Yeah. Ten minutes. Yeah, see you then." He hung up. "All fixed," he said. "One of you gets a loaded three-year-old Oldsmobile, the other one gets a six-year-old five-liter Mustang."

"I'll take the one with the best heater," Del said.

"We need to get over to the sheriff's department, quick as we can," Lucas said. "Is that the courthouse?"

"Law Enforcement Center," Zahn said. "Three years old, state-of-the-art, behind the courthouse and right across the street from Holme's car lot. The LEC is the reason Dick Anderson's the sheriff."

"He built it?" Lucas asked.

"No. The last sheriff did. Bobby Carter," Zahn said. He grinned at Lucas and pumped his eyebrows. "Don't tell anybody I said so-Bobby's a friend of mine-but he got a little too close to the construction process. Nobody went to jail, but people around here figure that a good chunk of money stuck to his fingers. He's back to farming."

"What was Anderson? Not a deputy?"

"He was a lawyer, private practice. Real estate, mostly. He worked with the county attorney, sometimes. When Bobby got into trouble and figured he better get out, he put up one of his good old boys to run. That pissed people off. Anderson jumped in at the last minute and got elected."

"A political wizard, huh?" Del said.

Zahn smiled into his steering wheel as they bumped over the last set of ruts onto the highway, and turned south toward Broderick and Armstrong. "Never heard anybody use the word wizard around him," he said. "He's pretty much wholly owned by Barry Wilson, who's the head of the county commission. That's okay, most of the time. Doesn't work too well when there's an actual crime, or something."

THE TOWN OF Broderick was a few hundred yards down the highway, and Zahn took them through it at a crawl.

The town was built along two streets that intersected the highway at right angles. A big four-square farmhouse sat on the north edge of town, on the west side of the highway. A sheriff's car sat in the driveway, in front of the garage, and Zahn said, "That's the victims' place."

"Okay." It looked like a rural murder scene on a CNN report, a lonely white farmhouse surrounded by snow, with a cop car in the yard.

Farther south, still on the west side of the highway, they passed Wolf's Cafe, which looked like a shingle-sided rambler; the Night Owl Club; and a building with a wooden cross fixed above the door and a bare spot where a sign had been pulled down. "That used to be the Holy Spirit Pentecostal Church-holy rollers," Zahn said. "They eventually rolled out of town. Now a bunch of women work there. Like religious women, do-gooders, I guess. Some Catholics and some Lutheran women from Lutheran Social Services, and I heard one of them's a Quaker. One of the Catholics is a looker. The other ones are the blue-tights kind."

Scattered among the buildings were a half-dozen small houses, a couple of trailer homes, a corrugated-steel corn silo with a cone-shaped roof, and a red barn.

The east side of the highway was sparser: a Handy Mart gas station and convenience store; Calb's Body Shop amp; Tow, in a long yellow metal-sided pole barn; Gene's 18, an over-the-road truck rehab place; and two more houses.