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about doing something in construction? Building custom houses or something?”
    They walked along for a few seconds, and then Lucas said, “No, I never thought about it.”
    “You’d be good at it. And I think you’d be interested in it. You’d be . . . building something. Think about driving around town in your old age, looking at the neat houses you’d built.”
    They walked along a bit more and Lucas finally sighed and said, “Something to think about.”
    Weather said, “That’s encouraging.”
    “What?”
    “Ever since you’ve gotten into this mood, you’ve pushed away everything I’ve suggested. This is the first time you said anything remotely positive.”
    “Houses.”
    “Think about it.”
     
    B Y S UNDAY EVENING , Lucas was ready to go. As the evening news ended, the FBI’s special agent in charge called. “Got back from Kenora an hour ago, I just picked up my messages,” he said. “You’re heading up to Duluth?”
    “Yeah. Whattaya got going up there?”
    “That’s what I want to talk to you about. Could you come by in an hour or so?”
    “I’m leaving tonight . . .”
    “Just need a few minutes. We’ve got a guy in from Washington who wants to hook up with you.”
    “It can’t wait?”
    “Not really.”
    “See you in an hour,” Lucas said.
     
    L UCAS HAD ALWAYS had an ambiguous relationship with the FBI. They were supposed to be the elite—and they did do some good work—and they acted that way. Even their offices reminded Lucas of their superior status. The offices were like spaceship interiors seen in the movies; sealed airlocks with only the initiated allowed inside.
    The FBI’s attitudes, their separateness, their secrecy, their military ethic, had filtered down to state and local cops, and eventually were taken for granted. Police stations, once relatively open, had become fortresses, places that people feared and that they hurried past.
    But local cops weren’t the FBI, and they didn’t do what the FBI did. FBI agents worked in offices and did intricate investigations; they weren’t on the street. But as cops began to develop FBI-like attitudes, and to build FBI-like fortresses, as they sealed themselves away in patrol cars, as they fended off contact with the public, they began to resemble a paramilitary force, rather than peace officers.
    When Lucas was a kid, cops were part of his neighborhood, with jobs just like the mailman and the teacher. By the time Lucas had joined the Minneapolis cops, that old workaday attitude was disappearing—cops were creating their own bars, holding their own cop parties, picking up privileges that weren’t available to outsiders.
    That all began, Lucas thought, with the spreading influence of the feds, and he didn’t like it. It was bad for the country and bad for cops, he thought. And he thought it again as he checked through the airlock and was buzzed into the FBI offices in Minneapolis.
     
    C HARLES P EYTON WAS a small man, thin, blue eyed, windburned with chapped lips. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved outdoorsy blue shirt, with the sleeves rolled up over the elbows, the rolls held in place by a little buttoned tab on each sleeve; nobody ever called him Charley.
    His feet, in expensive-looking leather ankle boots, were up on one corner of his desk. He stood up when Lucas was ushered into the office, said, “Lucas, how’re you doing?” and reached across his desk to shake hands. Another man, heavier, lazy eyed, red faced, and blond, sat off to the right on a leather chair, and said, “Barney Howard,” and lifted a hand.
    Peyton pointed at a visitor’s chair and asked, “Can I get you a coffee or a Coke?”
    Lucas settled down in the chair and said, “No, thanks . . . What’s going on?”
    “Have you read the file? We sent a Xerox over to Rose Marie.”
    “Yeah,” Lucas said. “Mostly forensics.”
    “We did what we could, on the technical end, but there wasn’t much,” Peyton said. “Nothing