Lucas sat in the night, staring at his patch of wall, and the sickly smell of Stephanie's funeral flowers came back, the quiet dampness of the private chapel, the drone of the minister,… all who loved this woman Stephanie…

"Dammit." He was supposed to be concentrating on the game, but he couldn't. He stood and took a turn around the room, the Sanctus chants banging around in his head. A manila folder caught his eye. The case file, copied by Sloan and left on his desk. He picked it up, flipped through it. Endless detail. Nobody knew what might or might not be useful, so they got it all. He read through it and was about to dump it back on the desk, when a line of the lab narrative caught his eye.

"Drain appeared to have been physically cleaned…"

The bedroom and the adjoining bath had been wiped, apparently by Loverboy, to eliminate fingerprints. That demonstrated an unusual coolness. But the drain? That was something else again. Lucas looked for returns on Stephanie Bekker's bed but found nothing in the report. The lab report was signed by Robert Kjellstrom.

Lucas dug in his desk and found the internal police directory, looked up Kjellstrom's phone number and called. Kjellstrom had to get out of bed to take the call.

"There's nothing in the report on hair in the bed…"

"That's 'cause there wasn't any," Kjellstrom said.

"None?"

"Nope. The sheets were clean. They looked like they'd just been washed."

"The report said Stephanie Bekker had just had intercourse…"

"Not on those sheets," Kjellstrom said. • • • Lucas finished with the file and looked at his watch: ten o'clock. He walked back to the bedroom, changed from tennis shirt, slacks and loafers to a flannel shirt, jeans and boots, pulled on a shoulder rig with his new Smith amp; Wesson double-action.45, and covered it with a fleece-lined Patagonia jacket.

The day had been good, but the nights were still nasty, cutting with the last claws of winter. Even the bad people stayed inside. He rolled the Porsche out of the garage, waited in the driveway until the garage door was firmly down, then headed north on Mississippi River Boulevard. At Summit Avenue he considered his options and finally drove out to Cretin Avenue, north to I-94 and then east, past downtown St. Paul to the eastern rim of the city. Three St. Paul cop cars were parked outside a supermarket that had a restaurant in the back. Lucas locked the Porsche and went inside.

"Jesus, look what the fuckin' cat drug in," said the oldest cop. He was in his late forties, burly, with a brush mustache going gray and gold-rimmed glasses. He sat in a booth with three other cops. Two more huddled over coffee cups in the next booth down.

"I thought you guys could use some guidance, so I drove right over," Lucas said. A circular bar sat at the center of the restaurant floor, surrounded by swivel stools, with booths along the wall. Lucas took one of the stools and turned it to face the cops in the booth.

"We appreciate your concern," said the cop with the mustache. Three of the four men in the booth were middle-aged and burly; the fourth was in his twenties, slender, and had tight blue eyes with prominent pink corners. The three older cops were drinking coffee. The younger one was eating French toast with sausage.

"This guy a cop?" the youngest one asked, a fork poised halfway to his mouth with a chunk of sausage. He was staring at Lucas' jacket. "He's carrying…"

"Thank you, Sherlock," an older cop said. He tipped his head at Lucas and said, "Lucas Davenport, he's a detective lieutenant with Minneapolis."

"He drives a Porsche about sixty miles an hour down Cretin Avenue at rush hour," said another of the cops, grinning at Lucas over his coffee cup.

"Bullshit. I observe all St. Paul traffic ordinances," Lucas said.

"Pardon me while I fart in disgust," said the speed-trap cop. "It must've been somebody else's Porsche I got a picture of on my radar about five-thirty Friday."

Lucas grinned. "You must've startled me."

"Right… You workin' or what?"

"I'm looking for Poppy White," Lucas said.

"Poppy?" The three older cops looked at each other, and one of them said, "I saw his car outside of Broobeck's last night and a couple of nights last week. Red Olds, last year's. If he's not there, Broobeck might know where he is."

Lucas stayed to talk for a few minutes, then hopped off the stool. "Thanks for the word on Poppy," he said.

"Hey, Davenport, if you're gonna shoot the sonofabitch, could you wait until after the shift change…?"

A red Olds was parked under the neon bowling pin at Broobeck's. Lucas stepped inside, looked down toward the lanes. Only two were being used, by a group of young couples. Three people sat at the bar, but none of them was Poppy. The bartender wore a paper hat and chewed a toothpick. He nodded when Lucas walked up.

"I'm looking for Poppy."

"He's here somewhere, maybe back in the can."

Lucas went to the men's restroom, stuck his head inside. He could see a pair of Wellington boots under one of the stall doors and called, "Poppy?"

"Yeah?"

"Lucas Davenport. I'll wait at the bar."

"Get a booth."

Lucas got a booth and a beer, and a minute later Poppy appeared, holding wet hands away from his chest.

"You need some towels back there," he complained to the bartender. The man pushed him a stack of napkins. Poppy dried his hands, got a beer and came over to Lucas. He was too heavy, in his middle fifties, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt under a leather jacket. His iron-gray hair was cut in a Korean War flattop. A good man with a saw and a torch, he could chop a stolen Porsche into spare parts in an hour.

"What's going on?" he asked, as he slid into the booth.

"You need a starter motor?"

"No. I'm looking for somebody with new money. Somebody who might of hit a woman over in Minneapolis the other day."

Poppy shook his head. "I know what you're talkin' about and I ain't heard even a tinkle. The dopers are sweatin' it, because the papers are saying a doper done it and they figure somebody's got to fall."

"But not a thing?"

"Not a thing, man. If somebody got paid, it wasn't over on this side of town. You sure it was a white guy? I don't know about the coloreds anymore."

He was looking for a white guy. That's the way it went: whites hired whites, blacks hired blacks. Equal-opportunity bigotry, even in murder. There were other reasons, too. In that neighborhood, a black guy would be noticed.

He left Poppy at the bowling alley and headed west to Minneapolis, touched a gay bar on Hennepin Avenue, two more joints on Lake Street and finally, having learned nothing, woke up a fence who lived in the quiet suburban town of Wayzata.

"I don't know, Davenport, maybe just a freak. He wastes the woman, splits for Utah, spends the money buyin' a ranch," the fence said. They sat on a glassed-in porch overlooking a pond with cattails. The lights from another house reflected off the surface of the water, and Lucas could make out the dark shapes of a raft of ducks as they bobbed shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the pond. The fence was uncomfortable on a couch, in his pajamas, smoking an unfiltered cigarette, his wife sitting beside him in a bathrobe. She had pink plastic curlers in her hair and looked worried. She'd offered Lucas a lime mineral water, cold, and he rolled the bottle between his hands as they talked. "If I were you," the fence said, "I'd check with Orville Proud."

"Orville? I thought he was in the joint, down in Arizona or someplace," Lucas said.

"Got out." The fence picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue and flicked it away. "Anyway, he's been around for a week or so."

"Is he setting up again?" He should have known. Proud had been in town for a week-he should have known.

"Yeah, I think so. Same old deal. He's hurtin' for cash. And you know the kind of contacts he's got. Fuckin' biker gangs and the muscle guys, the Nazis, everybody. So I says, 'The word's out that it might have been a hit, the husband brought somebody in.' And he says, 'That ain't a good thing to be talking about, Frank.' So I stopped talking about it."