"How about this doctor, the guy she talked with at parties…" Lucas asked.

"That's under way," Daniel said.

"You doing it?" Lucas asked Sloan.

"No. Andy Shearson."

"Shit, Shearson? He couldn't find his own asshole with both hands and a pair of searchlights," Lucas said in disbelief.

"He's what we've got and he's not that bad," Daniel said. He stuck the end of the cigar in his mouth, nipped it off, took the butt end from his mouth, examined it and then tossed it into a wastebasket. "We're getting a little more TV on this one-random-killer bullshit. I'd hate to see it get any bigger."

"The story'll be gone in a week. Sooner, if we get a decent dope killing," Sloan said.

"Maybe, maybe not," Daniel said. "Stephanie Bekker was white and upper middle class. Reporters identify with that kind of woman. They could keep it going for a while."

"We'll push," Swanson said. "Talk to Bekker some more. We're doing the neighborhood. Checking parking tickets in the area, talking to Stephanie Bekker's friends. The main thing is, find the boyfriend. Either he did it or he saw it."

"He says the killer looks like a goblin," Lucas said, reading through the letter. "What the hell does that mean?"

"Fuck if I know," said Swanson.

"Ugly," said Daniel. "Barrel-chested…"

"Do we know for sure that the goblin's not Bekker? That Bekker was actually in San Francisco?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, we do," Swanson said. "We wired a photo out, had the San Francisco cops show it to the desk people at Bekker's hotel. He was there, no mistake."

"Hmph," Lucas grunted. He stood up, slipped his hands in his pockets and wandered over to Daniel's wall of trophy photos. Jimmy Carter's smiling face looked back at him. "We're leaning the wrong way with the media. If Bekker hired a killer, the best handle we've got is the boyfriend. The witness…"

"Loverboy," said Sloan.

"Loverboy," said Lucas. "He's got some kind of conscience, because he called and he wrote the letter. He could've walked out and we might never have suspected…"

"We would have known," Swanson said. "The M.E. found that she'd had intercourse not too long before she was killed. And he did leave her to die."

"Maybe he really thought she was dead," Lucas said.

"Anyway, he's got some kind of conscience. We ought to make a public appeal to him. TV, the papers. That does two things: it might bring him out of the woodwork, and it might put pressure on the killer, or Bekker, to make a move."

"No other options?" asked Daniel.

"Not if you want to catch the guy," Lucas said. "We could let it go: I'd say right now that the chance of convicting Bekker is about zero. We'll only get him one way-the witness has to identify the killer and the killer has got to give us Bekker on a plea bargain."

"I hate to let it go," Daniel said. "Our fuckin' clearance rate…"

"So we get the TV people in here," Lucas said.

"Let's give it another twenty-four hours," Daniel said. "We can talk again tomorrow night."

Lucas shook his head. "No. You need to think about it overnight, 'cause if we're going to do it, we got to do it quick. Tomorrow'd be best, early enough for the early evening news. Before this boyfriend, whoever he is, gets his head set in concrete. You should say flatly that we don't believe the boyfriend did the killing, that we need all the help we can get. That we need him to come in, that we'll get him a lawyer. That if he didn't murder the woman, we'll offer him immunity-maybe you can get the county attorney in on this angle. And that if he still doesn't think he can come in, we need him to communicate with us somehow. Send us letters with more detail. Cut out pictures from magazines, people who most look like the killer. Do drawings, if he can. Maybe we can get the papers to print identikit drawings, have him pick the best ones, change them until they're more like the killer."

"I'll think about it."

"And we watch Bekker. If we make a heavy-duty appeal to the boyfriend and if Bekker really did buy the hit, he'll get nervous. Maybe he'll give us a break," Lucas said.

"All right. I'll think about it. See me tomorrow."

"We gotta move," Lucas urged, but Daniel waved him off.

"We'll talk again tomorrow," he said.

Lucas turned back to Jimmy Carter and inspected the former president's tweed jacket. "If it's Bekker who did it, or hired it, if he's the iceman Sloan thinks he is…"

"Yeah?" Daniel was fiddling with his cigar, watching him from behind the desk.

"We better find Loverboy before Bekker does," Lucas said.

The evening sky shaded from crimson to ultramarine and finally to a flat gray; Lucas lived in the middle of the metro area, and the sky never quite got dark. Across the street, joggers came and went on the river path, stylish in their phosphorescent workout suits, flashing Day-Glo green and pink. Some wore headsets, running to rock. Beyond them, on the other side of the Mississippi, the orange sodium-vapor streetlights winked on as a grid set, followed by a sprinkling of bluer house lights.

When the lights came on across the river, Lucas pulled the window shade and forced himself back to the game. He worked doggedly, without inspiration, laying out the story for the programmer. A long ribbon of computer paper flowed across the library table, in and out of the puddle of light around his hands. With a flowchart template and a number-two pencil, he blocked out the branches of Druid's Pursuit. He had once thought that he might learn to program, himself. Had, in fact, taken a community college course in Pascal and even dipped into C. But programming bored him, so he hired a kid to do it. He laid down the stories with the myriad jumps and branches, and the kid wrote the code.

The kid programmer had no obvious computer-freak personality flaws. He wore a letter jacket with a letter and told Lucas simply that he'd gotten it in wrestling. He could do chin-ups with his index fingers and sometimes brought a girlfriend along to help him.

Lucas, tongue in cheek, thought to ask him, Help you do what?, but he didn't. Both kids came from Catholic colleges in the neighborhood and needed a cheap, private space. Lucas tried to leave them alone.

And maybe she was helping him. The work got done.

Lucas wrote games. Historical simulations played on boards, to begin with. Then, for the money, he began writing role-playing quest games of the Dungeons amp; Dragons genre.

One of his simulations, a Gettysburg, had become so complicated that he'd bought an IBM personal computer to figure times, points and military effects. The flexibility of the computer had impressed him-he could create effects not possible with a board, such as hidden troop movements and faulty military intelligence. With help from the kid, he'd moved the entire game to an IBM 386 clone. A computer database company in Missouri had gotten wind of the game, leased it from him, altered it and put it on line. On any given night, several dozen Civil War enthusiasts would be playing Gettysburg via modem, paying eight dollars an hour for the privilege. Lucas got two of the dollars.

Druid's Pursuit was something else, a role-playing game with a computer serving as game master. The game was becoming complex…

Lucas stopped to change discs in the CD player, switching Tom Waits' Big Time for David Fanshawe's African Sanctus, then settled back into his chair. After a moment, he put the programming template down and stared at the wall behind the desk. He kept it blank on purpose, for staring at.

Bekker was interesting. Lucas had felt the interest growing, watching it like a gardener watching a new plant, almost afraid to hope. He'd seen depression in other cops, but he'd always been skeptical. No more. The depression-an unfit word for what had happened to him-was so tangible that he imagined it as a dark beast, stalking him, off in the dark.