what they were up to. Which was theft.”

“Very heavy,” Lucas said.

“Yes. By the way, one of the things that hung Duane Child is that he was driving an old Volkswagen van, yellow, or tan,” Sandy said. “The night that Toms was murdered, a man was out walking his dog, an Irish setter. Anyway, he saw a white van in the neighborhood, circling the block a couple of times. This man owns an appliance company, and he said the van was a full-sized Chevrolet, an Express, and he said he knew that because he owns five of them. The cops said that he just thought the van was white, because of the weird sodium lights around there, that the lights made the yellow van look whiter. But the man stuck with it, he said the van was a Chevy. A Chevy van doesn’t look anything like the Volkswagen that Child drove. I know because I looked them up on Google. I believe the van was the killers’ vehicle, and they needed the van to carry away the stuff they were stealing.”

“Was there a list of stolen stuff?”

“Yes, and it’s just like the list Carol showed me, of the stuff taken from Bucher’s house. All small junk and jewelry. Obvious stuff. And in Toms’s case, a coin collection which never showed up again. But I think—and Carol said you think this happened at Bucher’s—I think they took other stuff, too. Antiques and artworks, and they needed the van to move it.”

“Have you read the entire file?” Lucas asked.

She shook her head. “Most of it.”

“Finish it, and then go back through it. Get some of those sticky flag things from Carol, and every time you find another point in the argument, flag it for me,” Lucas said. “I’ve got to do some politics, but I’ll be back late in the afternoon. Can you have it done by then?”

“Maybe. There’s an ocean of stuff,” she said. “We Xeroxed off almost a thousand pages yesterday, Bill and I.”

“Do as much as you can. I’ll see you around four o’clock.”

BEFORE HE LEFT, he checked out with Rose Marie, and with Mitford, the governor’s aide. Mitford said, “I had an off-the-record with Cole. He doesn’t plan to do any investigation. He’s says it’ll rise or fall on the BCA presentation. They could possibly put it off for a couple of weeks, if you need to develop some elements, but his people are telling him they should go ahead and indict. That they’ve got enough, as long as the Barths testify.”

“Everybody wants to get rid of it; finish it, except maybe the Klines,” Lucas said.

VIRGIL FLOWERS was waiting in the parking lot of the Dakota County courthouse. Lucas circled around, picked him up, and they drove into the town of Hastings for lunch. Like Lucas, Flowers was in his grand-jury suit: “You look more like a lawyer than I do,” Lucas said.

“That’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not. My suit’s in extremely good taste. Your suit looks like a lawyer suit.”

“Thanks,” Flowers said. “I just wasted thirty bucks on it, and you’re putting it down.”

They went to a riverside café, sitting alone on a back patio with checkered-cloth-covered tables, looking toward the Mississippi; ordered hamburgers and Cokes. “Everything is arranged,” Lucas said, when the waitress had gone.

“Yes. The whole package is locked up in the courthouse. The jury starts meeting at one o’clock, Cole and Conoway will make the first presentation, then they’ll bring in Russell from Child Protection to talk about the original tip. Then you go on, testify about assigning the investigation to me, and you’ll also testify about chain-of-custody on the evidence that came in later, that everything is okay, bureaucratically. Then I go on and testify about the investigation, then we have the tech people coming up, then they get the Barths. After that, they go to dinner. They reconvene at six-thirty, Conoway summarizes, and then they decide whether they need more, or to vote an indictment.”

“Does Conoway think they’ll vote?”

“She says they’ll do what she tells them to do, and unless something weird happens, they’re gonna vote,” Flowers said.

“Okay. You’ve done a good job on this, Virgil.”

“Nice to work in the Cities again,” Flowers said, “but I gotta get back south. You know Larry White from Jackson County?”

“Yeah. You’re talking about that body?”

“Down the riverbank. Yeah. It was the girl. DNA confirms it, they got it back yesterday,” Flowers said. “The thing is, she went to school with Larry’s son and they were friendly. Not dating,