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crispy but still alive . . . died while we were waiting for the ambulance. And a little kid who drowned in a creek, she was my first one right after I went on patrol.”
    “I remember my first kid.”
    “Everybody does,” Del said. He did the cold-weather tap dance, and blew some steam. “I’m gonna remember this one for a while.”
    “T HEY’RE ON DISPLAY, ” Lucas said after a while. “You think it could be a biker thing? Bikers do this kind of shit, sometimes.”
    “I’ve never seen it,” Del said doubtfully. A gust of wind came through, and both of the bodies slowly rotated toward them.
    “Neither have I, but I’ve read about it,” Lucas said.
    “Read about it, or seen it in the movies?”
    “Maybe the movies,” Lucas admitted. “The thing is, the guy who did this wanted everybody to freak out. This isn’t just a murder. This is something else. The guy was making a point.”
    “No clothes around,” Del said. “Must’ve pulled the clothes off somewhere else, or took them with him.”
    “Somewhere else. This was all planned,” Lucas said. “The killer wasn’t struggling around in the dark, pullingtheir clothes off. He didn’t have to look for this place, off the top of his head. He knew what he was going to do. He worked it all out ahead of time.”
    T HEY WERE TALKING about the line the killer took through the trees, and the angle down to the kid’s house and the distance from the town, and more about the display of the bodies, when they heard people coming in. Anderson was pushing through the brush with Braun and Schnurr, followed by three more men in bulky uniform parkas and insulated pants. “Must be the guys from Bemidji,” Del said.
    They were. Dickerson, a tall man in a tan parka, with straw-colored hair and gold-rimmed glasses, introduced himself and the other two agents, Barin and Woods. All of them gawked at the bodies as they talked. “The crime scene and special operations guys are about five minutes behind us,” Dickerson said. “The ME’s out on the road right now. The special ops guys’ll get it on film and we’ll process the scene, then we’ll get those folks out of the trees.”
    “We need a careful sweep,” Lucas said. “I mean like, crazy careful.”
    “Pretty screwed up already,” Dickerson said. Then he second-thought himself, with the sheriff right there, and diplomatically added, “We’re getting set up now. We’re bringing in a propane heater, and after we get finished crawling the place, we’ll melt out the snow and make sure nothing was trampled down into it.”
    “Excellent.”
    “You and I ought to go off somewhere, and decide who’s going to do what.” Again, a bureaucratic wariness.
    “Del and I don’t have anything to do with crime scenestuff,” Lucas said. “That’s all yours—but make sure the ME takes a close look at the woman’s mouth. That blood on her face looks likes it might not be hers. We’ll want a DNA on it and we’ll want her mouth cleaned out.”
    “Sure.”
    “Otherwise, we can chat if you want, but basically, Del and I just go around and talk to people.” Lucas said. “Your guys should do the same thing—interview whoever you want. Duplicate us. No problem.”
    “So we’re not . . . one investigation.” Dickerson looked skeptical.
    “Nope.” Lucas shook his head. “Del and I have done this a lot, in Minneapolis. We find it’s handy, with the hard ones, to have two investigations running side by side, if you can do it without a lot of in-fighting. You get different ideas going.”
    Dickerson shrugged. “It’s all right with me. These two guys”—he turned a thumb to Barin and Woods—“will be doing all the work. I’m going to get us set up, hang around today and maybe tomorrow, and then I’ll be on call down in Bemidji. I understand the governor’s taken an interest.”
    Lucas said, “He has. He’s worried about the image. Two people hanged, naked, the man’s black.”
    “Got a pretty good