at a gray-shingled house behind a waist-high chain-link fence. Lucas pulled over and McGuire slumped down in her seat and said, “I’ll wait here.”

Lucas said, with a grin, “If she’s here, she’s gonna know you ratted her out. Might as well face the music.” He popped the door to get out, and heard her door pop a second later. She followed him across the parking strip to the gate. There was a bare spot in the yard with a chain and a stake, and on the end of the chain, the same yellow-white dog he’d seen at the Barth’s.

“Jesse’s dog,” Lucas said.

“Naw, that’s Mike’s dog,” McGuire said. “Sometimes Jesse walks home with it. Dog likes her better than Mike.”

Again, they stepped carefully. The dog barked twice and snarled, but knew where the end of the chain was. And a good thing, Lucas thought. All he needed this afternoon was a pitbull-wannabe hanging on his ass.

Mike’s house had a low shaky porch, with soft floorboards going to rot. The aluminum storm door was canted a bit, and didn’t close completely. Lucas rang the doorbell, then knocked on the door. He heard a thump from inside, and a minute later, saw the curtain move in a window on the left side of the porch.

He felt the tension unwind a notch. He banged on the door, pissed off now. “Jesse. Goddamnit, Jesse, answer the door. Jesse…”

There was a moment’s silence, then Lucas said to McGuire, “If she comes to the door, yell for me.”

He stepped off the porch, circled the dog, and hurried around to the back of the house: five seconds later, Jesse Barth came sneaking out the back door, carrying a backpack.

“Goddamnit, Jesse,” he said.

Startled, she jerked around, saw him at the corner of the house. Gave up: “Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”

“Come on—I’ve got to call your mom,” Lucas said. “She’s freaked out, half the cops in St. Paul are out looking for you. People thought you were kidnapped.”

“I was just scared,” Jesse said as he led her through the ankle-deep grass back around the house. “What if I make a mistake?” Her lip trembled. “I don’t want to make a mistake and go to jail.”

“Did Conoway say she was going to put you in jail?” Lucas asked. “Who said they were gonna put you in jail?”

“Well, you did, for one.”

“That’s if you tried to sell your testimony,” Lucas said. “If you just go down and tell the truth, you’re fine. You’re the victim here.”

“But if I make a mistake…”

“There’s a difference between lying and making a mistake,” Lucas told her. “They’re not gonna put you in jail for making a mistake. You have to deliberately lie, and know you’re lying, and it’s gotta be an important lie. You talked to Conoway about what you’re going to say. Just say that, and you’re fine.”

They cleared the front of the house and found McGuire on the porch, talking to a tall, bespectacled kid wearing a Seal T-shirt and jeans: Mike. McGuire said: “Jesse, they were afraid you were kidnapped. I’m sorry, I was so worried, you know, you see on the news all the time…”

“That’s okay,” Jesse said. “I’m just fucked up.”

LUCAS CALLED KATHY BARTH: “I got her. She was hiding out with a friend. You’ve still got time to get down to Dakota County.”

“I’ve got to talk to Jesse,” Barth said.

“She’s willing to go. You’re holding up a lot of people here,” Lucas said.

“Oh, God.” Long silence, as though she were catching her breath. “Well, I’ve got to change…”

Lucas called Flowers, who was just crossing the Mississippi bridge into South St. Paul. He was ten minutes away: “Man, I thought she was gone,” Flowers said. “I was thinking all this shit about the Klines and finding her body under a bridge…”

“Can you pick her up? That’d be best: I’m here with the Porsche and I got a rider.”

“Fast as I can get there. If we turn right around, we’ll just about be on time.”

He told Flowers how to find the house, then called the St. Paul cops and canceled the alert: “Yeah, yeah, so I’ll go kill myself,” he told a cop who was inclined to pull his weenie.

THE THREE younger people sat on the porch, waiting for Flowers, and Lucas gave Jesse a psychological massage, telling her of various screw-ups with grand juries, and explained the difference between grand juries and trial juries. Jesse unsnapped the dog, whose name, it turned out, was Screw. She put it on a walking