LUCAS HAD BEEN INVOLVED in any number of clusterfucks in his working life, but the one at Grant's house was notable. They all went to look at the window, which was, without a doubt, missing. Then they trooped around to the backyard, where they found three separate sheets of glass lying under an arborvitae.

Lucas said, "Why would-"

Taryn put a hand to her lips and said, "Could they get in the safe?"

"What safe?" Del asked.

They trooped back inside, and Taryn reached behind a side table and did something, and a bookcase rotated out from the wall. They all looked at the safe, which was closed. She said, "Would you turn away for a minute?" and they did, and turned back when she said, "Okay," and turned the heavy handle that worked the safe locks.

She pulled the door open and looked into a safe that was completely empty.

In the silence, she stumbled backward, staring at the empty steel hole in the wall, and screamed, "No! No! No!"

Lucas was looking at her face when she opened the safe, and in his estimation, there was no chance that she was faking the reaction. Not even if she was crazy; not even if she'd known the safe was empty, and had rehearsed.

No chance.

LUCAS MOVED EVERYBODY out to the living room, and sat them down, and called the BCA duty officer again, and told him what had happened. He said, "You've got people spread all over the metro area."

"Leave the Dannon and Carver apartments. Seal them up-we can get to them later. Right now, I need a crew here. Get them moving."

Grant was pacing the living room, hands to her face. Everybody else sat without talking. Green went into the kitchen to get something to drink, and Lucas followed her. She handed him a personal-sized bottle of orange juice, opened one for herself, and asked, "Is there any possible way to keep me out of this? As an informant? I need the work."

"If you don't have a problem with the possibility of a little perjury," Lucas said.

"I don't, because I never told you anything meaningful," she said.

"I keep thinking, the one person who may have had access to that phone, and who might have been aware of the whole Dannon-Carver situation, and who might have been willing to warn me ... was you."

"But I didn't. And when we give our statements, you'll find that I was right on the door when Taryn went back to the bedroom with Doug. I was monitoring the door, and the comings and goings, every minute. I couldn't have made that phone call: and I didn't."

"So you're out, if that's what the statements show," Lucas said. "I'm leaving my ass in your hands. I won't mention you, and you don't mention me, except when we spoke in public."

"Thank you."

They carried the bottles of juice back into the living room, where Grant looked at them, and muttered, almost to herself, "Almost four million."

Lucas: "What?"

"That's what they got-whoever it was. Four million. Cash, gold coins, and mostly a lot of jewelry. Diamonds, gold. The Star of Kandiyohi, which is a diamond as big as a robin's egg, a Patek Philippe watch that I got from my grandfather, worth a quarter million dollars all by itself... ."

Schiffer looked at her and said, "Okay. Agent Davenport has his crime scene. But you are a United States Senator-elect, and we have important issues to deal with. We need legal advice. Now."

Schiffer looked around: "Not another word, anybody. Not another word to Agent Davenport or other police officers, not until the lawyers get here."

CHAPTER 28

Weather usually slept hard from ten o'clock at night until six in the morning. Lucas came to bed at all kinds of times, usually between midnight and three, so when he didn't come to bed on election night, she didn't miss him until she woke up at six. Then she got on the phone, a cold clutch in the stomach, and when he answered, she said, "You're not shot."

"No," he said. "But there was some shooting."

He spent five minutes telling her about it, in detail, and at the end of it, she said, "I'm revising a rhino in two hours and I'm shaking like a leaf." Translated: She was fixing a nose job that some other surgeon had messed up.

"Stop shaking," Lucas said. "I'm fine, Jenkins and Shrake are fine, Bradley and Stack are a little screwed up, but they'll be okay, and Del is good, except that he looks like a bug."

Then he had to explain that.

THE LAWYERS ARRIVED, and officially informed Lucas that there would be no further statements from the principals, until there had been extensive consultations. They said it in a long-winded way, and Lucas had to take a break from it, when a crime-scene supervisor called.

"We've been out here walking the area and we've found what looks a lot like another grave. It's about a hundred and fifty feet from the grave Dannon was digging, on the same track, on the same side of the road. We'll document it and open it."

"Do that," Lucas said. "It's Tubbs."

THE CRIME-SCENE CREW ARRIVED in force, and started by processing the window in Taryn's bathroom and the ground outside. They would get to the safe, but the supervisor complained to Lucas, "Why'd you let her open the safe? There might have been prints on the keypad."

"Given the look of the rest of it, do you really think so?" Lucas asked.

"Well, no. But ..."

"No buts. If this was a real robbery, it was a pro. Like, a top pro," Lucas said.

"You think it wasn't real?"

"I'm not sure of anything," Lucas said. He looked at his watch: "Gotta make a call. I'll talk to you again before I leave."

THE SUN WAS UP, somewhere behind the clouds, but exactly where was hard to tell. In any case, it was light outside when Lucas wandered down to the end of the driveway and called the governor.

The governor's phone rang four times, then Henderson said, "This time of the morning, it can't be good."

"About your party's senator-elect: her top security guy murdered another one of her security people and tried to bury him by the Mississippi halfway to St. Cloud. We interrupted that and there was a shoot-out and he was killed. The crime scene has found another dug-up area nearby. I think they'll be pulling Tubbs out of there, in the next couple of hours."

After a moment, the governor laughed and said, "You are a piece of work, Lucas. You and that fuckin' Flowers, both of you. I really get my entertainment dollar's worth."

"The last person who said I was a piece of work, offered to take me to bed," Lucas said.