"I'll keep it in mind."
LUCAS MADE A half-gallon of coffee and poured it into a thermos, got his rain suit off the nail in the garage, and tossed it into the back of the Tahoe. With little hope, he cranked up his IBM and looked at his e-mail-and found a message from a DocJohn. He opened it and brought up a page of scanned X-ray images. He sent the images to his laser printer and two minutes later had eight life-size X-ray images.
THE WEATHER WAS better: still overcast, but dry. Del was waiting in front of his house. His wife waited with him, and when she saw the Tahoe coming, handed Del a cooler. Del said something to her, and when Lucas pulled into the drive, he sheepishly got into the truck. "No more meat loaf," Cheryl said to Lucas.
"I'll remember," Lucas said. "Don't let my meat loaf."
"Lucas…" A distinct threat hung in her voice.
"No meat loaf. I swear."
"Have Del tell you about his cholesterol."
Lucas looked at Del, who seemed to shrink down in his seat, then back to his wife. "We'll talk about it," Lucas promised.
On the way out of town, Lucas asked, "What's in the cooler?"
"Bunch of stuff. Mostly cut carrots. Fat-free water crackers."
"I like carrots."
"That's fuckin' great," Del said. "I'm happy for you."
"So are you gonna tell me about your cholesterol?"
Del shrugged. "It's been stuck at two fifty-five. The doc wants it down under two hundred, and if I can't do it by diet, he's gonna put me on Lapovorin."
"Uh-oh. Isn't that what…?"
"Yeah. The guy who comes backwards."
Long pause. Then Lucas said, "Better than a heart bypass. Or dropping dead of a heart attack."
Del said, "Yeah. It kinda scares me, to tell you the truth. The cholesterol does. My mom died of a heart attack when she was fifty-eight."
They rode along for a minute, then Lucas said, "So eat carrots."
Del cracked a grin. "I'm gonna love getting old."
AT THE GRAVEYARD site, there were now a half-dozen TV trucks, along with the line of county sheriff's cars, state cars, a car with federal government tags, Marshall's Jeep, Lake's Subaru, and a few more.
"A simple cop convention yesterday. Now it's a full-scale cluster-fuck," Del said.
"In which nobody knows exactly who's doing what to whom, or with what."
"Or even why."
Lake was waiting on the hillside while his assistant carried the radar along the yellow string. Lucas headed that way first. "Any more?"
"Just the one I told you about this morning, the seventh one. They've got some clothing coming up now."
Lucas looked around the hill. "Where's seven?"
Lake pointed. "Those guys." He pointed farther along the hill. "And those guys, I think, are working on a tree hole, but it's big enough and defined enough that we thought we better dig it out."
"How much longer?"
"This is the last sweep. We'll have some data in a half hour."
Lucas and Del walked up the hill to the command tent. McGrady was still at work, but he looked beat. He peered over his glasses at Lucas. "You're pretty chipper."
"Good night's sleep, pancakes for breakfast, nice conversation with a pretty woman," Lucas said.
"Better'n this, huh?"
Lucas nodded. "You've got seven."
"Yeah." McGrady stumbled backward a step and sank into a canvas field chair. "You know what? The first six didn't bother me that much. The seventh, finding the seventh… that kicked my ass."
"I got some X-ray printouts for you. We can get the actual films if we need them. This is for the woman from New Richmond. Nancy Vanderpost."
Lucas handed McGrady the printouts, and McGrady looked at them for a long moment, then said, "Four."
"What?"
"They could be number four."
He walked across the tent to six long cardboard boxes. Inside each box was a stack of clear plastic bags, with the contents of each bag carefully tagged. He rummaged around in the box numbered four and came up with a bag. Inside, Lucas saw several separate bones, including a lower jaw. McGrady looked at the jawbones for a minute, then at Lucas's printouts, then at the jawbone, then at the printout. After a minute, he looked up at Lucas and said softly, "Hello, Nancy."
"You're sure?" Del asked.
"Ninety-nine percent." He dropped the bag back into the box, pulled off his glasses, and said, "Goddamnit. I'm so fuckin' tired."
"You oughta crash for a couple hours," Lucas said.
"Maybe tonight."
LUCAS CALLED MARCY and told her about Vanderpost, then told her to start building a file with the cops from New Richmond. She said she would, and added, "Black was over at the archdiocese, and they're looking for a priest who studied art at UW… Stout in Menomonie, but this monsignor over there said they won't find one. He says he generally knows the background of all the priests in the area, and none of them went to Stout."
"That was thin, anyway," Lucas said.
"Yeah, but listen to this. After Black talked to the guy, he noticed that a bunch of these women listed 'going to Mass' as one of their social activities, and he started to add them up. Of the seventeen people who've gotten drawings so far, eleven are Catholic. That's way too many. Of the three dead women we know about, two were Catholic."
"Yeah?"
"Interesting, huh?"
"Push it."
"We are."
When he got off the phone, Lucas asked McGrady if he'd seen Marshall.
"He wanders around the hill," McGrady said. "He was right up on top the last time I saw him. Sitting on a log."
He was still sitting on the log when Lucas climbed to the top of the hill. He crossed the lip of the crest, and Marshall said, "More bad news." Not a question.
"McGrady says four is Nancy Vanderpost, from New Richmond."
"Ah, jeez."
"You did a hell of a job, man," Lucas said.
"I was nuts for all those years. That's the answer. I kept hoping she'd show up-you'd see those TV shows on amnesia. I knew it was all bullshit, that she was dead."
"You had the guy figured, and that's-"
"What the heck is this?" Marshall was looking past Lucas, down the hill. Del was climbing toward them at a dead run.
"What?" Lucas asked.
"Eight wasn't a tree hole," Del said, gasping for breath.
THEY WERE STANDING around hole eight, looking at a shoe with a dirty bone in it-with the combination of heavy soil and oak litter, the bones showed an irregular coffee color, with lines and pits of bone white. "We need to find a girl who wore red high-top Keds," said the cop in the hole.
"That fad faded a few years ago," Lucas said.
"Yeah, well, she's been here a few years."
Below, another federal car crept slowly past the cluster of cop cars on the road, parked, and three men climbed out. "Baily," Del said.
Lucas looked down the hill. Baily was the FBI's agent in charge at the Minneapolis office, a heavyset man who played a mean game of handball. "Better go get him, take him up to the command tent," Lucas told Del. "I'll round up Marshall and McGrady."
McGrady was at hole six. Lucas said, "The feds are here. Del's bringing Baily up to the command tent."
"Okay… You think they'll come in?"
"Does a chicken have lips?"
Marshall had left his spot at the top of the hill and was wandering past hole three, where the diggers were getting into virgin earth. Lucas caught him by the arm. "Come on and talk to the FBI," Lucas said.
McGrady and Baily were shaking hands when Lucas and Marshall got to the command tent. Baily shook hands with Lucas and said, "Eight."
"Coming out of the ground now," Lucas said. "This is Terry Marshall, a deputy sheriff from Dunn County over in Wisconsin. He broke it."
Lucas explained, and when he finished, Baily nodded at Marshall and said, "Nice piece of work. I'm sorry about your niece."
"I just hope we get the guy," Marshall said. "If he reads the newspapers, he might've taken off like a big-assed bird."
"Got nowhere to run," Baily said. "We've got enough bodies now that we should be able to pinpoint him with victim histories."