Roux, peering at the woman from across the table, said, "You're either precocious or older than you look."

"I'm thirty-two," the woman said, in a sweet young soprano.

"And Danny McGreff-" Dumbo nodded at a man with a large square face and two-day beard-"will get there a half-hour before Dunn is scheduled to, will get Dunn's phone and stay on it until he sees Dunn come in the door. Then he'll say good-bye, and drop it on the hook and leave. We don't think anyone should be waiting-there's never been a time when all four of them have been tied up, in the time we've been monitoring them."

"So you'll have one agent in the place and at least one outside…"

"We'll have three in the place," Dumbo said. "There's a storage room, lockable, and we'll put two men in there a couple of hours ahead of time. They simply won't come out, and there won't be any way to check inside without a key."

As the meeting was breaking up, Dumbo said, "Let's try to keep the radio communications clean, huh? Washington has asked us to allow a cameraman to ride with us tonight, for a documentary being made, uh, anyway for a documentary. I've agreed."

On the way out the door, an FBI technician muttered at Lucas,

"Keep your box on Fox."

Sloan said, "We could be in a world of hurt."

"How?" Roux asked. They pushed through the brass revolving doors onto the street.

"They've got everything figured out," Sloan said. He started peeling a Dentine pack. "Everything's on a schedule. But this can't be as easy as it looks-there's a joker in the deck somewhere."

Lucas looked up and down the street, and saw a one-time pimp named Robert Lika, whom the local wits called Leica because of his fondness for flashing preteen girls. Lika was peeing into a doorway, one hand braced on the door jamb as though the doorway were an ordinary urinal. "Will you look at this?"

"Rather not," said Roux, and her face colored.

"You're a little pink," Lucas said.

"You know, you didn't see much of that until the last two or three years," Roux said, looking down at Lika. "Now you see it all the time. It's such a weird… turn."

The federal operation was already moving, but Lucas and Sloan wouldn't be involved until Dunn started toward the rest stop. The feds were monitoring him: after making a morning round of the banks, he'd gone to his office and was still there.

Sloan's wife had had a bunion removed, and her foot was still tender, and Sloan snuck off to do some grocery shopping on city time. Lucas, restless, caught lunch at a cop bar, put twenty dollars on the Vikes over Chicago, eating the eight-point spread-the Bears sucked-walked the skyways for a while, looking at women and clothes, and played with the ring in his pocket.

He was gonna do it, he decided. Something simple-no juvenile tricks, no sophomoric misdirection or declarations. He'd just ask. What could she say, other than no? But she wouldn't say no. She had to know what he was thinking-she could read his mind, she'd proved that. Hell, she was probably getting impatient; maybe she saw all this delay as some land of insult. But the main thing was, she wouldn't say no. Well, technically, you know, she could say no. What if she started: out to be really nice about it… Fuckin' women.

Wonder what Dunn's doing?

At four-thirty, he went back to the office, got the files out, and started reading through again. The file on the dead kid, where was he? Let's see, subject reported to have jumped from the Lake Street Bridge, reporting officers called boat…

The PR woman stuck her head in the door. "Lucas, they're talking about you on TV, on the promos, so you'll be up in the next couple of minutes if you want to watch."

"Yeah, I want…" Lucas had just turned the page on the report and looked up at the PR lady, but an after-image stuck in his eye and the after-image was Gloria. He looked back down at the page, trying to find it.

"Lucas?"

"Yeah, I'll be along…" Where was it? He found it at the bottom of the page:

"… witness Gloria Crosby said he'd been depressed since getting out of the state hospital and had stopped taking his prescription medication. Crosby said he may have been taking street drugs and had been acting irrational and that on 8/9 she had him admitted to Hennepin General for apparent drug overdose. Crosby said subject called her and asked to meet him at the Stanley Grill on Lake Street and that when she got there he was already walking toward the bridge. She walked after him, but when she got to the bridge the subject was standing on the railing and stepped off before she could approach him. Crosby said she ran back to Stanley Grill to call for assistance…"

Damnit. Gloria Crosby. Crouched over the desk, he thumbed through the rest of the papers, trying to figure out what had happened. The phone rang and he snatched it off the desk:

"What?"

"Lucas, you're on…"

"Yeah, yeah." He banged down the receiver, went back to the papers, and then picked up the phone again, punched in Anderson's number.

"This is Lucas…"

"Lucas, you're on…"

"Yeah, yeah, fuck that, listen, you gotta get everything you can find on a guy named John Mail, DOB 7/7/68. Did time in the state hospital. We need the most recent photo we can find. Check the DMV and find his parents… wait, wait, I've got this…" Lucas shuffled through the papers. "His folks lived at 28 Sharf Lane in Wayzata. Goddamnit, that's where McPherson said he was from."

"Who?"

"Just get that shit, man. This is something."

Off the phone again, he went through the file on Mail and found the reference to the dental records. Damnit. He got his book, looked up the Medical Examiner's number.

"Sharon, this is Lucas Davenport… yeah, fine, it's all healed up, yeah, listen, I need you to pull something for me. You should have some records on a guy named John Mail went off the Lake Street Bridge a few years back, I can get you the date if you need it. John Mail. Yeah, I'll wait."

Ten seconds later, she was back. Mail was on the computer. "Just hold it there," Lucas said. "I'm gonna run over right now."

Lucas was out the door and down the street, a fast five-minute walk to the Medical Examiner's. An ME's investigator named Brunswick was peering at a computer.

"Something hot?" he asked.

"You say a guy is dead," Lucas said. "I think he might still be alive."

"Well, the guy we saw was dead," Brunswick said. "I've been looking at the pictures." He passed a group of eight-by-ten color photographs to Lucas. The remains of the body. Still partly wrapped in the remains of a pair of Levi blue jeans, was spread on a stainless steel table. Most of it was bone, although the torso looked like a gray ball of string or grass. The face was gone, but the dark hair was still there. Both hands were missing, as was one lee.

"Bad shape. Were the hands-is that natural? Is there any possibility they were taken off?"

Brunswick shook his head. "No way to tell. The body was falling apart. The one unusual thing is that there was evidence of a ligature around the torso-wire, or something. God knows, in that part of the Mississippi, it could have been anything."

"Could somebody have anchored the body somewhere? Until it was ready to be found?"

"You've got a nasty turn of mind, Davenport."

"But you already thought of that," Lucas said.

"Yeah. And it's possible. Whatever it was tied him down, had him for a while. Nearly cut the body through, in the end. There was no sign of any ligature when the body was found, though."

"What about the dental records?"

"It's the right guy, by the records. Here are the X rays on the body, and you can see the dental X rays."

Lucas bent over them and looked: they were patently identical. In the corner of the dental records was a response phone number at the state hospital. Lucas picked up Brunswick's phone and punched the number in.