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here, but I’m not seeing anything. They’re all confused as hell. The confusion feels real.”
    “I wish they were making more money,” Lucas said. “I’m not seeing how they could be running a laundry. Maybe the accountants will have something.”
    “Maybe,” Chang said. There was doubt in his voice. “You want to talk to anyone else?”
    “Should I?”
    Chang shrugged. “Well … no. If there’s some kind of secret deal going on, I don’t think they’re all in on it. Probably onlyone of them … and he’ll lie about it. Just talking to them won’t help much.”
    L UCAS HEADED back to his office, a nice quiet space where he could brood. In a complicated investigation, he found it useful to take whatever pieces he had and concoct a story around them. Even if the story was far-fetched, it gave him a starting place, and angles to work.
    On the drive from Wayzata to downtown Minneapolis, his lead story had been “Money Laundry”: that the Brookses had been killed by a drug gang, after doing something fancy with the gang’s money. Chipping off an extra piece.
    Other kinds of organized crime, where you might see the same level of violence, didn’t need the same level of money laundering, because they didn’t operate with huge numbers of small bills. Their violence was usually aimed at eliminating competition.
    Sunnie would have been perfect for a drug gang, with small payments coming in from all over Latin America, consolidated, and moved to a bank. Except, if Phillips and the books were telling the truth, the money wasn’t large enough.
    That one little fact was hard to get around. If it was a laundry, where was the money?
    The other problem, and it could probably be checked, was that the business had been shaky at the start. If it had been set up as a laundry, it shouldn’t have been. Perhaps, he thought, it had been set up as a legitimate business, and had only later been spotted by the gang as a potential laundry.
    H IS OTHER STORY —but it was far back, number ten on his list of two—was Del’s suggestion, that the murders had been the result of a home invasion by a couple of crazy killers, who’d picked a random house in a rich neighborhood. A couple of stupid, crazy guys who looked at the house and thought that there must be big money inside, not being all that familiar with checking accounts and American Express. When they got inside and found that there wasn’t much in the way of money, they amused themselves with rape, torture, and murder. That happened, a few times a year, most often in California or on the East Coast; not in Minnesota, though.
    Another problem with that scenario was that the crime-scene people in Wayzata were positing at least three killers, and maybe four. House invasions of the crazy, murderous kind usually involved one or two people: three or four crazy people would be unusual.
    Of course, there was always Charlie Manson to worry about….
    Yet he didn’t like the Manson scenario, even with the bloody “were coming” written on the wall. The murders didn’t seem crazy enough for crazy people. They’d taken too long, there was that apparent progression, and there wasn’t the level of frenzy that you’d expect.
    H E WAS HALFWAY back to the office when a phone call came in. The identifying tag said “City of Northfield.” He answered and a man asked, “Is this Lucas Davenport?”
    “It is.”
    “This is Chuck Waites at Northfield PD. I’m calling about your flyer. You said you’d be interested in ATM robberies, man and a woman, knocking down the victim.”
    “Yeah, I sure am,” Lucas said. “You bust them?”
    “No, no. They picked out one of our college kids taking cash out of a street ATM, robbed him with a gun, knocked him down, and ran off. This happened last night. Kid’s got a broken arm and he’s out eighty bucks.”
    “Man and a woman?”
    “Yeah, it’s like that flyer said: skinny guy, big woman,” Waites said. “Have no idea who they are,