"That's it?"

"That's it, that's the town," Zahn said, as they rolled out into the countryside.

Del asked, "What's with all the truck places, the body shops? Isn't that pretty heavy industry for a place like this?"

"Naw… I don't know. Would you drive your car nine miles to get it fixed? We're nine miles from Armstrong."

"I guess I would," Del admitted. "Actually, I know I would, 'cause I have."

"And it was an inheritance deal. Gene inherited the body shop from his old man, and then he added the truck rehab business. Truck rehab, you can do anywhere. He does pretty good. He's why the town started coming back. Most everybody who lives here works for him. Not a bad guy."

"A long way out," Del said.

"Some people like it lonely," Zahn said. "Some people don't."

Then they were out of town, out in the countryside. A crow or a raven was flying south, parallel to the highway, a fluttering black speck against the overcast sky, the only thing besides themselves that was moving. Del said, "Jesus Christ, it's flat."

They rode in silence for a couple of minutes, then Zahn started a low, unconscious whistling. Lucas recognized the tune, probably from an elevator somewhere. "What's that song you're whistling?"

"Didn't realize I was whistling," Zahn said. He thought a minute. "It's that thing from Phantom of the Opera."

"That's right." After a second, "You don't seem to be too upset, you know, by the bodies."

"Well, you're with the Patrol, you learn not to be a pussy, like a homicide cop or something," Zahn said.

"All right, pussy," Del drawled from the back seat.

Zahn glanced over the seat and said, "Every time I go out to an accident and there are a couple of high school kids bleeding to death right in front of my face, and screaming for their dad or their mom, I know them. They're kids from down the street. You do that for a few years and a couple strangers up in a tree won't bother you much. Unlike some homicide pussies."

KATINA LEWIS GOT out of bed at one minute to ten o'clock in the morning, the goose bumps like oranges in the chilly morning air. She padded barefoot across the cold wooden floor, into the bathroom. She was a round woman who no longer fought the roundness, thirty-six years old, five years divorced. With her dark brown hair, she was a rarity in this corner of the country, where it seemed everybody was blond or towheaded. She had good English skin from her father, a short nose and a bow lip from her German mother, and she had her hopes and her religion.

She desperately hoped for children, though she felt the time running out. She prayed to the Lord to help her, and had faith. More than faith: she had fine discriminating morals-she could run drugs for God, knowing that she was on a mission of love, knowing that God was love.

Katina Lewis wasn't silly about love, didn't walk around with a moony glow on her face, and she could get as cranky as the next woman. She simply thought of love as something real and tangible and everyday, like crackers or soap, that she simply hadn't been able to acquire. But if you looked for love long enough, she believed, if you kept the idea in your heart, if you had faith, you would surely find it. God would not keep it from you.

Now she'd found it in this unlikely place-this bleak, gray, flat prairie. As she headed for the bathroom, she glanced back at the bed and the top of Loren Singleton's towhead.

She loved him, she thought.

He'd make a good father, if he let himself go. If he loosened up. But she wouldn't want him to loosen up too much. She loved that cowboy thing, that sandpaper jaw in the morning, those bitten-off words, the stoicism that rode on his face. She loved the look of him, lounging with a shoulder against a wall, feet crossed, showing his boots, a Marlboro hanging from the corner of his mouth.

She'd begun to talk to him about it. She'd talk more, maybe today, or someday soon. Time passed-that was one thing she'd learned in her twenties, and in her first marriage. Time passed and was gone and you couldn't get it back.

LEWIS HAD SET her alarm clock for ten. In her urgency to make it to the bathroom, she'd forgotten about it. At ten o'clock exactly, the hourly livestock report trickled out of the two-inch speaker, five feet from Loren Singleton's ear.

Quietly.

As though a strange man had stolen into his house, to whisper in his ear, "… slaughter steers, choice two to three, 1,125 to 1,637 pounds, sixty-one dollars to sixty-two seventy-five. Select and choice two to three, 1,213 to 1,340 pounds, sixty-one to sixty-one ten… "

The voice took a minute to penetrate, and then Singleton stirred, squeezed his pillow around and cocked an eye at the clock, and the man said, "That's the South St. Paul stockyard report. Ed Wein will have updates through the day, right here on your feeder-cattle central. Now, from our news bureau, we have a report here from Broderick, Minnesota, where two people have been found hanged in a grove of trees just north of Broderick. The first reports said that two people, a black man and a white woman, were found hanging… "

The words were so flat and so unbelievable that they took a few seconds to connect. When they did, Singleton's head popped up: "What?"

Lewis called from the bathroom, "Did you say something?"

"Shut up," he shouted back.

The man on the radio said, "… Anderson confirmed that two people were dead, but deferred further comment until the medical examiner could reach the scene. We will follow this story during the day, so keep your dial set here to North Dakota's All-News Central… "

The voice was both tinny and tiny. Singleton rolled across the bed, grabbed the clock, tried to find the volume control, heard the weatherman come up and say, "You never know what life's gonna bring, Dick… " and then his voice was lost in the noise of the flushing toilet.

LEWIS CAME OUT of the bathroom, pulling her cotton nightgown down over her hips, her heavy legs jiggling at him: she was annoyed. She didn't like being shouted at, being told to shut up.

She opened her mouth to say so, when Singleton, still staring at the radio, said, "Did you hear that?"

"I heard you shouting at me," she said, letting a little of the annoyance seep into her voice.

"Somebody killed Deon and Jane," Singleton blurted.

The irritability vanished. "What?"

"Gotta call… " he said. Over his shoulder he added, "They were found hanged in a tree."

He trotted naked out of the bedroom and down the hall. Nothing bounced or bobbled when he moved: he was solid. Lewis looked at the radio, which was now firmly into the weather. More gloom. That was the essence of it. Cold and gray and maybe, if we were unlucky, a lot of snow, followed by more cold and gray.

Jane and Deon? She called after him, "What did the radio say? What did they mean, hanged?"

Then she heard him talking on the phone, and turned around, like a dog in its bed, looking for her jeans, couldn't find them, and heard the phone clatter back on the hook. A moment later, Singleton came back. "Deon and Jane were found hanging in a tree across the Nine Mile Ditch. That Letty kid found them. This morning, about two minutes after I went off duty. They were naked and dead. Somebody beat the shit out of them before they were hanged."

"No." She was astonished, but not distraught.

"Yup. People are coming in from all over. State police are flying in from St. Paul. They might already be here. Ray Zahn's going up to meet them, take them around." He had a few more details, but not much.

"I've got to go," Lewis said. She turned her back, stepped toward the bathroom and he said, "You smell like vanilla," and she said, absently, "That perfume… I wonder if your mom knows anything?"