"Got a few things to wind up," he muttered.

Andy and Judy left first, flipping up their hoods, stooping to look through the window for car lights before they went out into the parking lot. As Harper zipped his parka he said, "You better not be bullshitting us."

"I'm not." The Iceman stood with his heels together, fingertips in his pants pockets, the querulous, honest smile fixed on his face.

" 'Cause if you are, I'm going to get me a knife, and I'm gonna come over here and cut off your nuts, cook them up, and make you eat them," Harper said.

"C'mon, Russ…"

Doug was peering at him, and then turned to look at Harper. "I don't know if he did it or not. But I'll tell you one thing: Shelly Carr couldn't find his own asshole with both hands and a flashlight. No matter who did it, we'd be safe enough if Shelly is doing the investigation."

"So?"

"So if something happened to that cop from Minneapolis…"

Harper put the lizard look on him. "If something happened to him, it'd be too goddamned bad, but a man'd be a fool to talk about it to anyone else," he said. "Anyone else."

"Right," said Doug. "You're right."

When they were gone, the Iceman took a turn around the room, the beast rising in his throat. He ran a hand through his hair, kicked at a chair in frustration. "Stupid," he said. He shouted it: "STUPID!"

And caught himself. Controlled himself, closed his eyes, let himself flow, regulated his breathing, felt his heartbeat slow. He locked the door, turned off the lights, waited until the last vehicle had left the parking lot, then climbed the stairs again.

He could go to Harper's tonight, with the.44. Take him off. Harper had handled him like he was a piece of junk, a piece of garbage. Yes, said the beast, take him.

No. He'd already taken too many risks. Besides, Harper might be useful. Harper might be a fall guy.

Doug and Judy and Andy… so many problems. So many branching pathways to trouble. If anybody cracked…

Judy's face came to mind. She was a plain woman, her face lined by forty-five winters in the North Woods. She worked in a video rental store, and she looked like… anybody. If you saw her in a K Mart, you wouldn't notice her. But the Iceman had seen her having sex with the Harpers, father and son, simultaneously, one at each end, while her husband watched. Had watched her, watching the Iceman, as he taught her daughters to do proper blowjobs. She had seen her husband with their own daughters, had seen the Iceman with Rosie Harris and Mark Harris and Ginny Harris, the yellow-haired girl.

She'd seen all that, done all that, and yet she could lose herself in a K Mart.

He again approached the problem of what to do. Fight or run? This time, though, the problem seemed less like an endless snaky ball of possibilities and more like a single intricate but manageable organism.

He was far from cornered. There were many things he might do. The image of John Mueller came to mind: red spots on white, like the eight of hearts, the red in the snow around the boy.

John Mueller was an example.

Action eliminated problems.

It was time for action again.

Lucas stepped quietly into the house, pulled off his boots, and stopped to listen. The furnace had apparently just come on: the heating ducts were clicking and snapping as they filled with hot air and expanded. Weather had left a small light on over the sink. He tiptoed through the kitchen and living room, down the hall to the guest room, and turned on the light.

The room felt unused, lonely. The bureau had been dusted, but there was nothing on top of it and the drawers were empty. A lamp and a small travel alarm sat on a bedstand, with a paper pad and a pen; the pad appeared to be untouched. The room was ready for guests, Lucas thought, but no guests ever came.

He peeled off his parka, shirt, pants, and thermal underwear and tossed them on the bureau. He'd stopped at the motel and picked up his shaving kit and fresh underwear. He put them on the bedstand with his watch, took his.45 from its holster, jacked a shell into the chamber, and laid it next to the clock. After listening for another moment at the open bedroom door, he turned off the light and crawled into bed. The bed was too solid, too springy, as though it had never been slept in. The pillow pushed his head up. He'd never get to sleep.

The bed sagged.

Somebody there. Disoriented for a moment, he turned his head, opened his eyes. Saw a light in the hallway, remembered the weight. He half-sat, supporting himself with his elbows, and found Weather sitting on the end of the bed. She was dressed for work, carrying a cup of coffee, sipping from it.

"Jesus, what time is it?"

"A little after six. I'm outa here," she said. She was stone-cold awake. "Thanks for coming over."

"Let me get up."

"No, no. Shelly's sending a deputy over. I feel silly."

"Don't. There's nothing silly about it," he said sharply.

"And you should go somewhere else at night. Pick someplace at random. A motel in Park Falls. Tell us you're leaving, and we'll have somebody run interference for you out the highway to make sure you're not followed."

"I'll think about it," she said. She patted his foot. "You look like a bear in the morning," she said. "And your long underwear is cute. I like the color."

Lucas looked down at the long underwear; it was vaguely pink. "Washed it with a red shirt," he mumbled. "And this is not the goddamn morning. Morning starts when the mailman arrives."

"He doesn't get here until one o'clock," Weather said.

"Then morning starts at one o'clock," he said. He dropped back on the pillow. "John Mueller?"

"They never found him," she said. "When the deputy called, I asked."

"Ah, God."

"I'm afraid he's gone," she said. She glanced at her watch.

"And I've got to go. Make sure all the doors are locked, and go out through the garage when you leave. The garage door locks automatically."

"Sure. Would you…"

"What?"

"Have dinner with me tonight? Again?"

"God, you're rushing me," she said. "I like that in a man. Sure. But why don't we have it here? I'll cook."

"Terrific."

"Six o'clock," she said. She nodded at the bedstand as she went out the door. "That's a big gun."

He heard the door to the garage open and close, and after that the house was silent. Lucas drifted back to sleep, now comfortable in the strange bedroom. When he woke again, it was eight o'clock. He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, then staggered down the hall to the bathroom, shaved, half-fell into the shower, got a dose of icy water for his trouble, huddled outside the plastic curtain until the water turned hot, then stood under it, letting the stinging jets of water beat on his neck.

Harper. They had to put the screws on Harper. So far, he was the only person who might know something. He stepped out of the shower, looked in the medicine cabinet for shampoo. There wasn't any, but there were two packs of birth control pills. He picked them up, turned them over, looked at the prescription label. More than two years old. Huh. He'd hoped he'd find that they'd been taken out the day before. Vanity. He dropped them back where he'd found them. Of course, if she hadn't been on the pill for two years, she probably didn't have much going.

He looked under the sink, found a bottle of Pert, got back in the shower and washed his hair.

Harper wasn't the only problem. There was still the time discrepancy. Something happened there. Something was going on with the priest. He didn't seem to fit with the child-sex angle. There'd been a notorious string of cases in Minnesota of priests abusing parish children, but in those cases, the men had invariably acted alone. The standing of a priest in a small community would almost seem automatically to preclude any kind of ring.