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but we’ve got a
clue
for you.”
    “I don’t like the way you said ‘clue,’” Lucas said.
    The other cop laughed. “Well, it might be an identifier.”
    “What is it?”
    “The kid said they smelled like horse shit. Horse shit, specifically. We asked him if he was sure it wasn’t cow shit or sheep shit, but he said, ‘No, sir, it’s horse shit.’ He grew up on a dairy farm, and they ran a couple of riding horses and a few other animals. Sheep, chickens,” Waites said. “He said anybody who grew up on that kind of a place could tell the difference between cow shit, horse shit, sheep shit, and chicken shit. He said they had all those animals, and the people who robbed him smelled like horse shit. Like they’d been shoveling out a stable.”
    “You know any meth addicts who run a riding stable?”
    “Not me personally, but there’re a lot of meth cookers out in the countryside,” Waites said. “If these people are far gone on meth, like your flyer says, I don’t think they could be running a commercial stable. That’s pretty heavy work andtakes some ability to concentrate…. If it really was horse shit on them, I’d have to believe that they’re farmhands somewhere.”
    “Huh. That’s interesting,” Lucas said. “It’s weird, but it narrows it down, and shoveling shit is about what I’d expect of those two. You know of any kind of organization that would have a list of stables?”
    “Somebody in the state would, probably—they got a list of everything else,” Waites said. “If I were you, I’d just call the county agents. They’d know all the farms in their county, and maybe who works on them.”
    “Thanks. If this works out, you’ll get the reward,” Lucas said.
    “Really? What is it?”
    “I go around and tell people that Chuck Waites is alert.”
    Waites laughed and said, “And America needs more lerts.”
    L UCAS SPENT the rest of the day at his office, making phone calls and scratching his left arm, under the cast, with the end of a coat hanger. He’d been told not to do that—scratch with a coat hanger—and he’d thought there was some good medical reason for the advice until Weather told him that it was to keep him from cutting himself and infecting the wounds.
    That, Lucas thought, was advice for children. He wasn’t going to cut himself with the coat hanger, and besides, he’d rather cut himself than itch to death.
    So he sat scratching and calling, making trips to the candy machine, interspersed with spasms of note-taking on yellow legal pads.
    M OST OF IT involved the tweekers. The horse shit, he told himself, was actually a pretty interesting clue. Most people—he thought, but didn’t know—would clean up immediately if they’d come in contact with horse shit. But people who were in contact with it all the time might not even know that they smelled. He believed the kid, and his identification of the odor. He himself could tell the difference between the odor of fish slime from a northern pike and fish slime from a crappie.
    A SMALLER percentage of his time was spent on the murders: he was not the primary investigator there, and the investigation seemed likely to turn into a long, slow grind. If you were intent on locating and knocking down leads, Shaffer could do that as well as anybody. Still, images of the murder scene kept popping up in his mind. He’d seen some bad ones in the past, but this was among the worst. Anything with children…
    He called the DEA and asked about unusual activity in the Minneapolis area. He was told they’d check. He called a dozen people in his private intelligence net, including six Latinos, and asked about anything unusual going on in the underground Latino community.
    He tried to work up another credible story, beyond Mexican dopers and the Charlie Manson scenario. Stories cost nothing but time.
    Not that the BCA would have a lot of time.
    W AYZATA , the town where the killings took place, was one of the richer places in the