cell phones making illegal turns.

MITFORD HAD a modest office down the hall from the governor’s, in what he said had been a janitor’s closet when the building was first put up. With just enough room for a desk, a TV, a computer, a thousand books, and a pile of paper the size of a cartoon doghouse, it might have been.

Mitford himself was short and burly, his dark hair thinning at the crown. He’d been trying to dress better lately, but in Lucas’s opinion, had failed. This morning he was wearing pleated khaki slacks with permanent ironed-in wrinkles, a striped short-sleeved dress shirt, featureless black brogans with dusty toes, a chromed watch large enough to be a cell phone, and two actual cell phones, which were clipped to his belt like cicadas on a tree trunk.

Altogether, five or six separate and simultaneous fashion faux pas, in Lucas’s view, depending on how you counted the cell phones.

“Lucas.” Mitford didn’t bother to smile. “How are we going to handle this?”

“That seems to be a problem,” Lucas said, settling in a crappy chair across the desk from Mitford. “Everybody’s doing a tap dance.”

“You know, Burt backed us on the school-aid bill,” Mitford said tentatively.

“Fuck a bunch of school-aid bill,” Lucas said. “School aid is gonna be a bad joke if the word gets out that he’d been banging a ninth-grader.”

Mitford winced. “Tenth-grader.”

“Yeah, now,” Lucas said. “But not when they started, if she’s telling the truth.”

“So…”

“I’ve got one possibility that nobody has suggested yet, and it’s thin,” Lucas said.

“Roll it out,” Mitford said.

“The girl says Kline once took her to the Burnsville Mall and bought her clothes—a couple of blouses, skirts, some white cotton underpants, and a couple of push-up bras. She said he liked to have a little underwear-and-push-up-bra parade at night. Anyway, he got so turned on that they did a little necking and groping in the parking lot. She said she, quote, cooled him off, unquote.”

“All right. So…the push-up bra?”

“She said he bought her gifts in return for the sex.”

Mitford digressed: “He really said, ‘Oh God, lick my balls, lick my balls’?”

“According to Virgil Flowers, Kline admits he might have said it, but he would’ve said it to Mom, not the daughter,” Lucas said.

“Ah, Jesus,” Mitford said. “This is dreadful.”

“Kline said his old lady never…”

“Hey, hey—forget it.” Mitford rubbed his face, and shuddered. “I know his old lady. Anyway, he took the kid to the Burnsville Mall and groped her and she cooled him off…Is that a big deal?”

“That’d be up to you,” Lucas said. “We can make an argument that he was buying the clothes in return for sex, because of the kid’s testimony. And then there was the touching in the car, what you call your basic manual stimulation. So one element of the crime happened at the mall.”

“So what?”

“The mall is in Burnsville,” Lucas said, “which happens to be in Dakota County. Dakota County, in its wisdom, elected itself a Republican as county attorney.”

Mitford instantly brightened. “Holy shit! I knew there was a reason we hired you.”

“That doesn’t mean…” Lucas began.

Mitford was on his feet, circling his desk, shaking a finger at Lucas. “Yes, it does. One way or the other, it does. If we can get a Republican to indict this cocksucker…”

“Actually, he wasn’t the…”

“…then we’re in the clear. Our hands are clean. There is no Democratic involvement in the process, no goddamn little intransigent Democratic cockroach publicity-seeking motherfucking horsefly Ramsey County attorney to drag us all down. It’s a Republican problem. Yes, it is.”

“Virgil is coming up here today to brief some people on the details,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. I’ll be going. I’ve been hearing some odd things about Flowers,” Mitford said. “Somebody said he once whistled at a guy in an interrogation cell until the guy cracked and confessed.”

“Well, yeah, you have to understand the circumstances, the guy belonged to a cult…”

Mitford didn’t care about Flowers and whistling. “Goddamn! Lucas! A Republican county attorney! You my daddy!”

LUCAS WAS FEELING okay when he took the hill down into the St. Paul loop. He zigzagged southeast until he got to a chunky red-brick building that had once been a warehouse, then a loft association, and was now a recently trendy condominium.

One of the good things about the Bucher and Kline cases was that the major crime sites were so close to his house—maybe ten minutes on residential streets; and they were even closer to his office. He knew all the top cops in both cases, and even most of