The first machines on the site were the wreckers, like steel dinosaurs, plucking and pulling at the houses with jaws that ripped off chimneys, shingles, dormers and eaves, clapboard and brick and stone and masonry, beams and stairs and balconies and joists, headers and doorjambs. Old dreams, dead ambitions and lost lives, remembrance roses and spring lilacs, went in the dump trucks all together.

The day was hot, hardly a cloud in the sky, the July sun burning down; but the soil was cool and damp, and smelled of rotted roots and a bit of sewage, from the torn-up sewer lines leading out of the hole. Another woman, who'd walked into the pit in low heels and two-hundred-dollar black wool slacks that were now flecked with the tan earth, asked, "Can you tell what happened? Were they dead when they were sealed in?"

Sherrill was the senior active Minneapolis cop on the scene, a solid, raven-haired woman in her late thirties, with a great slashing white smile and what an older generation of cops called a "good figure." She'd had a reputation as a cop not afraid of a fist-fight, and still carried a lead-weighted sap on a key ring. Sherrill had come on the police force at a time when women were still suspect, when it came to doing street work. She'd erased that attitude quickly enough, and now was accepted as a cop-cop, rather than as a woman cop, or, as they were still occasionally called, a Dickless Tracy. She'd hardly mellowed as she moved up through the ranks and would someday, most people thought, either be the Minneapolis chief or go into politics.

There were five retired cops in the group around her, men who'd worked on the original investigation. As soon as the bodies had been discovered, the police had been called, and word of the find had begun leaking out. All over the metro area, aging cops and ex-cops got in their cars and headed downtown, to look for themselves, to see the girls, and to talk about those days: the hot summers, the cold winters, all the time on the sidewalks before high-tech came in, computers and cell phones and DNA.

Davenport came up, and the grey-hairs nodded at him — they all knew him, from his time in Minneapolis — and he shook hands with a couple of them, and a couple who didn't like him edged away, and Sherrill asked, "How'd you hear?"

Sherrill and Davenport drifted away from the group, and Sherrill asked, "Haven't seen you for a while. How've you been?"

A Channel Three TV truck slowed on the open street at the far end of the gash. One of the older cops called, "We got media."

Lucas said he would, looked a last time at the hole with the plastic-wrapped bodies: "Man, it seems like it was a month ago. That was the year of Madonna. Everybody listening to Madonna. And Prince was huge. Soul Asylum was coming up. I used to go to the Soul Asylum concerts every time they played Seventh Street Entry. And we'd ride around at night, look at the crack whores, listen to "Like a Virgin" and "Crazy for You" and "Little Red Corvette." Hot that summer. And I mean, Madonna was young, way back then."

Lucas went back to his office, in the BCA building on the north side of St. Paul. It was a solid, modern building, which felt more like a suburban office complex than a police headquarters. He climbed the stairs to his second-floor office, with a quick flash of a hand at a friend down a hallway. His secretary said, "Hi, I need to..." and he said, "Later," and went into his office and closed the door.