"I can't not do that," Lucas insisted.

The governor threw up his hands. "All right. When you tell her, you tell her to call me. I'll need ... Wait. Hell no. I'll call her right now. You get going on this. I'd like to get something pretty definitive in, say, mmm, three days. Two would be better."

"Man ..."

"Go." Henderson waved him away.

ROSE MARIE ROUX HAD been a cop, then a lawyer and prosecutor, then a state senator, then the Minneapolis chief of police, and finally, the commissioner of public safety under Henderson. She had jurisdiction over a number of law enforcement agencies, including the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. She viewed Lucas as both a friend and an effective tool for achieving her policy goals, not all of them involving crime-fighting. She'd gotten him his job at the BCA.

Rose Marie's husband was ten years older than she was, and when he'd retired, he talked her into dumping the suburban Minneapolis house in favor of a sprawling co-op apartment in downtown St. Paul. Lucas gave the governor a few minutes to talk to her, and then, as he walked back to his car, called her himself.

"You at home?"

"Yeah, come on down. I'll buzz you into the garage."

LUCAS HAD BEEN TO the apartment often enough that he knew the routine; buzzed into the garage, he parked in one of the visitors' slots and took the elevator to the top floor. Rose Marie's husband opened the door; he was holding the Times in one hand and a piece of jelly toast in the other. "She's out on the deck," he said.

"You raked the leaves off the deck yet?"

"Thank God for the penthouse-not a leaf to be seen," he said.

Rose Marie, wrapped in a wool shawl, was sitting on a lounge chair, smoking a cigarette; nicotine gum, she said, was for pussies. She was a short woman, going to weight, with an ever-changing hair color. Lucas liked her a lot.

When Lucas stepped out on the deck, she said, "I appreciate what you did, bringing me into it. This will be interesting, all the way around. Although it has a downside, of course."

She crushed the cigarette out on a ceramic saucer by the side of the chair. As Lucas sat down facing her, she asked, "How much do you like your job?"

"It's okay. Been doing it for a while," Lucas said.

"If this kind of thing happens too often, you'll get pushed out," Rose Marie said. "It's inevitable."

Lucas shrugged. "I do it because it's interesting. This assignment's interesting. If I wasn't doing this, I'd be chasing chicken thieves in Black Duck."

Rose Marie said, "I keep thinking about what I'm going to do when this job is over. If Elmer makes vice president, he'll take care of both of us. If he doesn't, then I'm unemployed, and you probably will be, too."

"That's a cheerful thought," Lucas said.

"Gotta face facts," Rose Marie said. "We've both had a good run. But I don't feel like retiring, and you're way too young to retire. We're both financially fine, but what the fuck do we do? Become consultants? I don't feel like running for anything."

"I haven't spent a lot of time worrying about it," Lucas said.

"You should," Rose Marie said. "Even if Elmer makes vice president, I'm not sure you'd want what he could get you. I'd be fine, because I'm basically a politician, I could work in D.C., or for his office here. But you ... I don't know what you'd do. I don't think you'd want to wind up as some FBI functionary. Or Elmer's valet."

"No."

"Well. Sooner or later, your name will be connected to this job," Rose Marie said. "Whether or not it pans out. If the attorney general doesn't jump you for the prosecution, Porter Smalls will come after you for the defense. A lot of people in the Department of Public Safety and over at the BCA don't like this kind of thing, the political stuff. And you've been doing a lot of it. When I'm not here to protect you, when Elmer's not here ..."

"Ah, it's all right, Rose Marie," Lucas said. "I've been fired before. Stop worrying about it."

"Yeah." She peered at him for a moment, then asked, "What are you going to do? About Smalls?"

"Try to keep it quiet, as long as I can," Lucas said.

"How are you going to do that?" she asked.

"Haven't worked it out yet. I've got a few ideas, but you wouldn't want to hear them."

"No. Actually, I wouldn't."

"So. Moving right along ..." Lucas stood up.

Rose Marie said, "I'll talk to Henry. Make sure he has a feel for the situation." Henry Sands was director of the BCA and had been appointed by Henderson. If he knew Henderson was behind Lucas's investigation, he'd keep his mouth shut. Unless, of course, he could see some profit in slipping a word to a reporter. He didn't much like Lucas, which was okay, because Lucas didn't much like him back.

"Good," Lucas said. "And hey-relax. Gonna be all right."

"No, it won't," she said. "I can almost guarantee that whatever it is, it won't be all right."

LUCAS STARTED BACK DOWN to the car, still thinking it over. Rose Marie was probably right about the political stuff. Even if you were on the side of the Lord, the politics could taint you. Which created a specific problem: there was at least one man at the BCA who'd be invaluable to Lucas's investigation-Del Capslock. Del had contacts everywhere, on both sides of the law, and knew the local porn industry inside out.

The problem was, Del depended on his BCA salary, and all the benefits, for his livelihood. He had a wife and kid, and was probably fifteen years from retirement. Everybody in the BCA knew that he and Lucas had a special relationship, but that was okay ... as long as Lucas didn't drag him down.

Lucas didn't particularly worry about himself. Back in the nineties, he'd been kicked out of the Minneapolis Police Department and had gone looking for something to do. He'd long had a mildly profitable sideline as a designer of pen-and-paper role-playing games, which had gone back to his days at the university. After he left the MPD, he'd gotten together with a computer guy from the university's Institute of Technology. Together they created a piece of software that could be plugged into 911 computer systems, to run simulations of high-stress law-enforcement problems.

Davenport Simulations-the company still existed, though he no longer had a part of it-had done very well through the nineties, and even better after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Instead of one simulation aimed at police departments, they now produced dozens of simulations for everything from bodyguard training to aircraft gunfight situations. When the management bought Lucas out, he walked away with enough money to last several lifetimes.

He was rich. Porter Smalls was rich. The governor was really rich, and for that matter, so was Porter Smalls's opponent; even the volunteer who'd started the trouble was rich, or would be. Rich people all over the place; gunfight at the one-percent corral.

Anyway, he was good, whatever happened. If the Porter Smalls assignment turned into a political quagmire, he could always ... putter in the garden.

Del couldn't.

Lucas popped the doors on the 911 and stood beside the open door for a minute, working through it.

Del was out of it. So were his other friends with the BCA.

Which left the question, who was in, and where would he get the intelligence he would need? He had to smile at the governor's presumption: get it done, he'd said, in a day or two, and keep it absolutely private. He didn't care how, or who, or what. He just expected it to be done, and probably wouldn't even think about it again until Lucas called him.

CHAPTER 3