He passed Lucas his cell phone, and Lucas said, "If you'll all excuse me ... I gotta run."

As he headed for the door, Quintana called, "You believe me, right?"

Lucas paused at the door, then said, "No, not the whole story. Not even very much of it. But I believe the phone number."

THEN HE HAD a lot to do. From his car, as he headed back across town to the BCA, he called Jenkins and told him to find Shrake: "I know it's Sunday, but I need you to babysit some people for me. Only until tonight. I need to know where they are, all the time."

"How complicated is this going to be?"

"Not complicated. You have to tag a campaign caravan." He told Jenkins to find out where Taryn Grant was going to be, described Dannon and Carver. "It's those two guys you've got to stay with. I want you to go separately so if they split up, you can follow both of them. But they should stick pretty close to Grant for as long as I need you to watch them."

"Good enough," Jenkins said.

LUCAS HAD TO MAKE some calls, first to the director, and then the deputy director, and between them they found a technician who was willing to come in and set up the phone monitoring system. When he got there, the tech came up to Lucas's office and said, "We don't usually need a subpoena for Verizon, if we just want a location, but I'll check with them first. That's not usually a problem, though."

"Then get it going," Lucas said.

He was a little cranked: if this worked out, there'd be somebody in the bag by midnight. He called Jenkins: "Where are you guys?"

"Grant's up in Anoka. We're on the way. Then she's going to St. Cloud for an eight-o'clock appearance and then back home. Probably back in the Cities between ten and midnight."

"Keep me up to date," Lucas said.

Lucas called Quintana: "It'll be late-I'll probably come get you around nine or ten o'clock."

Lucas needed something to eat. He called Weather to find out what the food situation was, and was told that the housekeeper was making her patented mac & cheese & pepperoni. "I'll be there," he said.

He was pulling his jacket on when Virgil Flowers called: "I was talking to Barney and he didn't know what you were up to, but he said you might use my help. I'm down in Shakopee. I can either go home, or head your way."

"My house," Lucas said. "Helen's making her mac and cheese and pepperoni."

"What happened to that vegetarian thing you guys were doing?"

"Ah, that only lasted a month or two. Besides, pepperoni isn't meat-it's cheese made by pigs," Lucas said. "Anyway, we'll be going out later. I'll tell you about it when you get there."

He called Weather and told her that Flowers was coming to dinner, and she said, "We got plenty."

Which was true: the mac and cheese and pepperoni usually went on for the best part of a week.

LUCAS GOT HOME, changed into jeans, a wool vest over a white dress shirt, and an Italian cotton sport coat, blue-black in color that would be excellent, he thought, for nighttime shoot-outs. It hadn't yet been tested for that. When he got back downstairs, Flowers had come in, wearing a barn coat, jeans, and carrying a felt cowboy hat. His high-heeled cowboy boots made him an inch taller than Lucas.

"There better not be a fuckin' horse in my driveway," Lucas said.

A bit later, Lucas took a call from the BCA tech, who said they were set with Verizon, and they could give him a real-time location as soon as Lucas called the other phone, which, as it happened, also used Verizon. There'd been no calls on the phone for two days; the last call had been to Quintana's number.

They all ate together at a long oblong dinner table, Flowers and Letty happily gabbing away-Flowers, a part-time writer with a developing reputation, had done a biographical piece about Letty that had been published in Vanity Fair, with photographs by Annie Leibovitz. They were all now dear friends, Annie and Letty and Virgie.

Leibovitz had taken a bunch of pictures of Lucas, too, but the magazine had used only one. Lucas thought it made him look like a midwestern prairie preacher from the nineteenth century. As for the friendship, he thought Letty and Virgie were getting a little too dear. The issue came up before dinner, and Weather told him he was losing it if he thought Flowers had untoward ideas about Letty.

"When it comes to being around women, I wouldn't trust that guy further than I could spit a Norwegian rat," Lucas had grumbled.

"Why? Because he reminds you so much of your younger self?" she'd asked.

"Maybe," Lucas had said. "But not that much younger."

"He's not interested in Letty," Weather had declared.

"Okay," Lucas said. "How about in you?"

"Don't be absurd," she'd said, ostentatiously checking her hair in the mirror.

AFTER DINNER, Lucas and Virgil went to Lucas's study, with Letty perching on a side chair, and Lucas briefed him about the situation. "Basically," Flowers summed up, "we've got nothing, but if their phone's GPS says that they're in a certain spot, you think that's good enough for a search and seizure."

"I know it is, because there's been another case just like it," Lucas said. "It was in LA, but the federal court refused to order the evidence set aside."

"And so this could prove that these two highly trained killers were involved with the porn, and we know for sure that they've got guns."

"Uh-huh."

Virgil thought about that and said, "Okay."

They'd sat down to eat at seven, had finished with the food and talk at eight, and at eight-thirty, sitting in the den, Lucas took a call from Jenkins. "This is going to wind up sooner than I thought," Jenkins said. "She finished talking, the TV is pulling out, now she's going around mixing with the kids, but that's not going to last long, once the TV is gone. I think we'll be out of here in fifteen minutes, and then it's an hour back to her place."

He said to Flowers, "Let's go. Excuse me-I meant, 'Saddle up.'"

"Yeah," Virgil said, getting his hat.

"Don't let him push you around," Letty told Virgil. "That hat looks good on you. Not everybody could pull it off, but you can."

"Thank you, sweetheart," Flowers said, and he and Lucas were out the door.

They took Flowers's truck, and as they backed out of the driveway, Lucas noticed that Flowers was smiling.

"What's the shit-eating grin about?" Lucas asked.

"Ah, I love pimping you about Letty. And Weather, for that matter."

"I don't mind, as long as you keep your hands off Helen and that mac and cheese and pepperoni," Lucas said.