was sheriff of Blue Earth County, fifty or sixty miles southwest of the Twin Cities. “Can you come down here?”

“Mankato?”

“Six miles south, out in the country,” Nordwall said. “We got a killing down here like to made me puke. We called in your crime scene crew—but we need you.”

“Whattaya got?”

“Somebody killed a kid and tortured his dad to death,” Nordwall said. “Tortured him and raped him, we think, and maybe cut his throat with a razor. I ain’t seen anything like it in fifty years.”

Sloan’s case popped into Lucas’s head: “You say it’s a guy?”

“Yeah, local guy. Adam Rice.”

“It’s not a gay thing? Or did he screw around with bikers or . . .”

“He was absolutely straight,” Nordwall said. “I’ve known him since he was a kid.”

“And he was raped?”

“Jesus Christ, you want a photograph?” Nordwall said, the anger flashing again. “He was fuckin’ raped, pardon my French.”

Lucas waited for a second, until Nordwall got himself back together. “Are you right there, Gene?”

“I’m out in the side yard, Lucas. Came runnin’ out of there, like to strangled myself to death on this old clothesline.”

“Was the guy’s body, you know, arranged? Or was he just left however he died?”

A pause, and then Nordwall asked, “How’d you know that? What they did with him?”

“I’ll be down there in an hour,” Lucas said. “Don’t let anybody touch anything. Get out of the house. We’re gonna work this inch by inch.”

“We’ll be standing in the yard, waitin’,” Nordwall said.

“Gimme your cell-phone number, and tell me how I get to this place . . .”

“WHAT’S GOING ON?” Hyde asked when Lucas punched off.

“Got a bad killing down by Mankato,” Lucas said. He finished his Diet Coke in a single gulp, dropped a twenty on the table. “Pay this for me, will you, guys? I gotta get my ass down there.”

“Too bad,” Hyde said. “I’ve got a closing on a shopping center at two o’clock. I thought you might want to see it.”

LUCAS GOT SLOAN on his cell phone as he went out the door: “Where you at?”

“Sitting at my desk reading a British Esquire,” Sloan said. “They got nudity now.”

“You might want to spend some time looking at the clothes . . . Listen, get a squad, lights, and sirens, get down to the top of the Twenty-fourth Avenue off-ramp to the Mall of America. I’ll be down there fast as I can make it: twelve minutes. You gotta run.”

“Where’re we going?”

“Mankato. It’s weird, but we might have something on your nut case.”

OFF THE PHONE, Lucas jogged down the street to the Marshall Field parking ramp. He’d taken the Porsche to work that morning, which was good. He had a new truck, but the truck was awkward at speed and he was in a hurry. He wanted to see the scene in the brightest possible daylight, and he wanted to see neighbors, rubberneckers, and visitors as they came by the murder scene.

Rubberneckers.

“Goddamnit,” he muttered to himself. He slapped his pockets as he jogged, found the slip of paper with Nordwall’s number on it, and called him back.

“Gene, this is Lucas again. I’m heading for my car. Listen, put a guy down by the road . . . How far is this house from the road?”

“Couple hundred feet, maybe. Old farmhouse.”

“Put a guy down by the road and have him take down the license number of every car that comes along. Don’t stop them from coming. Let them go by, let’em rubberneck, but I want all the numbers. Put your guy where he can’t be seen.”

“How about a photographer?”

“That’d be good, but don’t put somebody out there who’ll screw it up, so we get a bunch of out-of-focus pictures we can’t read. Better to write the numbers down.”

“We’ll do both,” Nordwall said.

THEN LUCAS WAS INTO THE RAMP, into the car, out on the street, slicing through traffic in the C4, to the I-35E ramp, down the ramp and south, running fifty miles an hour above the speed limit, across the Mississippi to I-494, west on 494 across the Minnesota River, and up the Twenty-fourth Avenue ramp.

The Minneapolis squad was sitting at the top of the ramp, lights flashing into the sunshine. Sloan got out of the squad, jogged around the back end of the truck, and said, “The all-time speed record from the airport to Mankato is an hour and one minute.”

“Must have been an old lady in a Packard,” Lucas said.

“Actually, it was myself in a fifteen-year-old bottle green Pontiac LeMans my old man gave