"What else you got?" he asked when they were alone.

"Not a thing. I had… a feeling about the McGowan thing-"

"Bullshit, Lucas, you set her up and you know it and I know it, and God help me, if we could do it again I'd say go ahead. It should have worked. Motherfucker. Motherfucker." Daniel pounded the top of his desk. "We had him in the palm of our hand. We had the fucker."

"I blew it," Lucas said moodily. "That gunfight went up and I came across the fence and saw Werschel lying there and I knew he wasn't the maddog because the maddog was all dressed in black. And Sally was down and still pumping some blood and Sickles was there to help her, and the other guys, and I should have kept going. I should have gone over the back fence after the maddog and left Sally to the other guys. I thought that. I had this impulse to keep going, but Sally was pumping blood and nobody else was moving…"

"You did all right," Daniel said, stopping the litany. "Hey, a cop got blown up right in front of you. It's only human to stop."

"I fucked up," Lucas said. "And now I don't have a thing to go on."

"Nails," Daniel said.

"What?"

"I can hear the media getting out the nails. We're going to be crucified."

"It's pretty hard to give a shit anymore," Lucas said.

"Wait for a couple days. You'll start giving a shit." He hesitated. "You say Channel Eight got some film of you and Cochrane?"

"Yeah. God damn, I'm sorry about that. He's a rookie. I just lost it."

"From what I hear, it's going to be pretty hard to take back what you said. Most of the cops out there think you're right. And Sally had some years in. If Cochrane had just taken it easy, he'd have been right down that alley before the maddog knew you were coming. You'd have squeezed him between you and nobody would ever have gone into the yard with those fuckin' dogs."

"Doesn't make it better to know how close we came," Lucas said.

"Get some sleep and get back here in the afternoon," Daniel said. "This thing should start shaking out by then. We'll know what to expect from the media. And we can start figuring out what to do next."

"I can't tell you what to do," Lucas said. "I'm running on empty."

They didn't come for him.

Somewhere, in the back of his head, he couldn't believe it, that they didn't come for him.

He staggered through the connecting door from the garage into his apartment, took a step into the front room, realized that he was tracking sticky yellow clay onto the carpet, and stopped. He stood for a minute, breathing, reorganizing, then carefully stepped back onto the kitchen's tile floor and stripped. He took off everything, including his underwear, and left it in a pile on the floor.

His leg was bleeding and he sat on the edge of the bathtub and looked at it. The bites were not too deep, but they were ragged. In other circumstances, he would go to an emergency room and get stitches. He couldn't now. He washed the wounds carefully, with soap and hot water, ignoring the pain. When he had cleaned them as well as he could, he pulled the shower curtain around the tub and did the rest of his body. He washed carefully, his hands, his hair, his face. He paid special attention to his fingernails, where some of the clay might have lodged.

Halfway through the shower, he broke down and began to gag. He leaned against the wall, choking with adrenaline and fear. But he couldn't let himself go. He didn't have the luxury of it. Nor did he have the luxury of contemplating his situation. He must act.

The maddog fought to control himself. He finished washing, dried with a rough towel, and bandaged the leg wounds with gauze and adhesive tape. Then he went into the bedroom, dressed in clean clothes, and returned to the kitchen.

All of the clothing he'd worn that night was commonly available: Levi's, an ordinary turtleneck shirt, a black ski jacket purchased from an outdoor store. Jockey underwear. An unmarked synthetic watch cap. Running shoes. He emptied the pockets of the jacket. The Kotex pad, the gloves, the tape, the sock and potato, the pack of rubbers, all went into a pile on the floor. He'd lost the pry bar when he was running, but it should be clean; the cops wouldn't get anything from it. He carried the pile of clothing and shoes to the laundry room and dumped it in the washing machine.

With the clothes washing, he got a small vacuum cleaner, went out to the garage, and cleaned the car. Some of the clay was still damp and stuck tenaciously to the carpet. He went back in the house, got a bottle of dishwashing liquid and a pan, went back out, and carefully shampooed each area that showed a sign of the clay. If the cops sent the car to a crime laboratory, they might still find some particles of the stuff. He would have to think about it. And he would, for sure, vacuum it again after the damp carpet had dried.

When he was finished with the car, the maddog went back inside and checked the washing machine-the wash cycle was done-and transferred the clothing and shoes to the dryer. Then he found the box of surgeon's gloves he used in his attacks and pulled on a pair. From under the kitchen sink he got a roll of black plastic garbage bags, opened one, took the dust bag out of the vacuum, and threw it inside. Next he threw in the equipment he'd taken from his clothing, along with the box of remaining Kotex pads that he'd kept in a back closet.

Anything else? The potatoes. But that was ridiculous. Everyone had potatoes in the house. On the other hand, maybe there was some kind of genetic examination that could show they came from the same place. The potatoes went in the garbage bag.

The clothes were still in the dryer, and the maddog went back to the bedroom and pulled out the file of newspaper clippings. SERIAL KILLER STALKS TWIN CITIES WOMEN said the first. He slipped it out and read through it quickly, one last time, as he carried the file to the bathroom. Removing the clips one by one, he tore them into confetti and flushed them down the toilet.

The clothes, when they were dry, went in another bag. By eleven o'clock he had finished collecting all of his equipment and the clothing he'd worn to McGowan's. He phoned a car-rental agency at the airport and was told that it would be open for another hour. He reserved a car on his Visa card, called for a cab, rode out to the airport, signed for a car, and brought it back. It would be best, he thought, to keep his car off the streets for a while. There had been so much commotion back at McGowan's, the gunfire, the whole neighborhood must have waked up. If somebody had noticed his car leaving… And the cops just might be desperate enough to stop any Thunderbird they found on the highway, taking names and running checks.

Back at the apartment, he loaded the garbage bags of clothing and equipment into the rental car. A few minutes after midnight he drove onto Interstate 94, driving east, through St. Paul and into Wisconsin. He stopped at each rest area between St. Paul and Eau Claire, disposing of different pieces of equipment and clothing in separate trashcans.

He'd paid a hundred and sixty dollars for the ski jacket and hated to see it go. But it must go. It could have microscopic particles of the yellow clay inextricably impressed in the fabric. He couldn't throw it in a trashcan. It was too expensive. Somebody might wonder why it had been discarded, and publicity about the attempt on McGowan by a black-clad maddog would be intense. He finally left the jacket hanging on a hook in a rest room at an all-night truck stop, as though it had been forgotten. With any luck, it would wind up in Boise.

He had the same problem with the shoes. They were new Reeboks, a fashionable matte black. He liked them. He pitched them separately out the car window into the roadside ditch, a mile or so apart. He would have to buy a new pair, to replace his aging Nike Airs. He'd better stick with the Airs, he thought, just in case the cops found prints in that muddy ditch and matched them to Reeboks.