When he finished, he lay back on the bed, propped his head on a pillow, and looked at the wall charts. Nothing came. He got up, put up a fifth one, and wrote "Maddog" at the top of it. Under that he wrote:

Well-off: Wears Nike Airs. Clean clothes. Cologne.

Convinced real-estate saleswoman that he could afford expensive home. May be new to area: Has accent, wore T-shirt on August night.

May be from Southwest: Ruiz recognized accent. Office job: Soft hands amp; body, arms white. Not a fighter.

Fair skin: Arms very pale. Probably blond. Sex freak? Game player? Both? Neither? Intelligent. Leaves no clues. Wears gloves even when preparing notes, loading shells in pistol.

He thought a moment and added. "Knew Larry Rice?"

He peered at the list, and reached out and underlined "real-estate saleswoman" and "Knew Larry Rice?"

If he was new to the area, maybe he really was looking for a house, and met Lewis that way. It would be worth checking area real-estate offices.

And he might have known Larry Rice. But that worked against the proposition that he was new to the area-if Rice had been dying of cancer, that would presumably take some time, and he wouldn't be making many friends along the way.

A hospital? A doctor in a hospital? It was a possibility. It would account for the maddog's delicate touch with the knife. And a doctor would have the soft hands and body, and would be well-off. And doctors, especially new ones, were mobile. All of these women could have been to a doctor…

He walked back to the library and took down a volume on the history of crime and paged through it. Doctors as murderers had a whole section of their own.

Dr. William Palmer of England killed at least six and maybe a dozen people for their money in the mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Thomas Cream killed half a dozen women with botched abortions and poison in Canada, the U.S., and England; Dr. Bennett Hyde killed at least three in Kansas City; Dr. Marcel Petiot murdered at least sixty-three Jews whom he had promised to smuggle out of Nazi-occupied France; Dr. Robert Clements of England killed his four wives before he was caught. The "torture doctor" of Chicago, who had studied medicine but never quite became a doctor, killed as many as two hundred young women who had been attracted to the city by the 1893 World's Fair. The worst of the bunch, of course, were the Nazis. Medical men associated with the death camps had killed thousands.

The list of doctors who had killed only one or two was lengthy, including several celebrated cases in the United States since the 1950's.

Lucas shut the book, thought about it, and looked at his watch. Two-thirty. Far too late to call. He paced and looked at his watch again. Fuck it. He went into the workroom, got his briefcase with Carla Ruiz' phone number, and called. She answered on the seventh ring.

"Hello?" Half-asleep.

"Carla? Ruiz?"

"Yes?" Still sleepy, but suspicious now.

"This is Lucas… the detective. I'm sorry to wake you up, but I'm sitting here looking at some stuff and I need to ask you a question. Okay? Are you awake?"

"Uh, yes."

"When was the last time you saw a doctor and where was it?"

"Uh, gee…" There was a long silence. "A couple of years ago, I guess. A woman at the clinic over on the west side."

"You're sure that was the last? No visits to hospitals, nothing like that?"

"No."

"How about with a friend, just stopping by, visiting?"

"No. Nothing like that. I don't think I've been in a hospital since, well, my mother died, fifteen years ago."

"Know any doctors socially?"

"A few come to the gallery, I guess. I don't really know any personally. I mean, I've talked to some at openings and so on."

"Okay. Look, go on back to bed. I'll talk to you tomorrow. And thanks."

He dropped the phone back on the hook. "Shit," he said aloud. It was possible, but a long shot. He made a mental note to check the gallery for regular patrons who were doctors. But it didn't sound good.

He looked at the charts for a few more minutes, yawned, turned out the light, and headed for his bedroom. The guy was smart. Nuts, but smart. A player? Maybe.

Maybe a player.

Lucas edged into the briefing room, late again.

"Where the fuck you been?" Daniel asked angrily.

"Up late," Lucas said.

"Sit down." Daniel looked around the room. A half-dozen detectives peered into their working notebooks. "To sum up, what we got is about three hundred pages of reports that don't mean diddly-squat. Am I wrong? Somebody tell me I'm wrong."

Harmon Anderson shook his head. "I don't see anything. Not yet. It might be in there, but I don't see it."

"What about this stuff that you got, Lucas?" asked one of the detectives. "Is it reliable?"

Lucas shrugged. "Yeah, I think so. There're a lot of guesses in there, but I think they're pretty good."

"So what?" said Daniel. "So we're looking for a medium-sized white guy who works in an office. That cuts it down to a half-million guys, not including St. Paul."

"Who recently moved up here from the Southwest," said Lucas. "That cuts out another 499,000 guys."

"But that could be bullshit. Probably is," Daniel snorted.

"We might know a little more in a couple of hours," Lucas said. Daniel raised an eyebrow. "The gun guy called last night. I know where the gun went."

"Well, Jesus!" Daniel exploded.

Lucas shook his head. "Don't get your hopes up." He explained how the gun got to Larry Rice and that Rice was dead. "His wife told my man that she doesn't know where the pistol went. Probably sold. Could have been stolen, I suppose."

"Okay, but it's something," said Daniel. "He had the gun for what, six months? And he probably sold it to somebody he knew."

Daniel pointed at Anderson. "Your best man. Best interrogator. Put him on her. We squeeze every goddamned drop out of her. Everybody her old man saw in the last six months. She must know most of them. The killer should be on the list."

"I'm talking to her this afternoon," Lucas said, looking at Anderson. "One o'clock. Your man could meet me there, we'll go in together."

"So are we going to get the name of the guy who took the piece?" asked Daniel.

Lucas shook his head. "No. I swore. You could probably break it out of Rice, if you want, but you really don't want to know. He was doing a kindness. He's a pretty good guy."

Daniel looked at him for a minute and nodded. "Okay. But if it becomes relevant…"

"You might be able to break it out of Rice," Lucas repeated. "You won't get it from me."

There was a moment of silence; then Daniel let it go. "We've got another problem," he said. "Somebody fed a story to Jennifer Carey that we have an attack survivor. I'm going to talk to her in ten minutes and try to put her off. Anybody know anything about who tipped her off?"

Nobody answered.

"We can't have this," Daniel said.

One of the detectives cleared his throat. "I might, uh, have an idea about that."

"What?"

"She shot that documentary on St. Paul cops, the one that ran on PBS? She's got sources over there you wouldn't believe."

"Okay. Maybe that's it. So now, we don't talk to St. Paul cops any more than we have to. Be polite, but…" He groped for a word. "Reserved." He looked around. "Anything else?"

Lucas opened his notebook and looked at a short list on the back page.

"I'd like to find out about doctors. Did any of these women see the same guy? Ruiz' doctor is a woman, but there may be a few male docs going through her gallery. She could have been picked up there, and we ought to check."

"We can check that," said Anderson.