The first machines on the site were the wreckers, like steel dinosaurs, plucking and pulling at the old 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?"

Nothing sells a Minnesota condo faster than an underground parking garage, because every Minnesotan knows, in his bones, that as warm and gorgeous as summer may be, winter is always on the way. An underground garage will keep your car happy, and make it possible to travel from your home to another enclosed garage without feeling the bite. This particular condo development was a half-mile west of the University of Minnesota, and would replace a block of shabby wood-frame homes that had, over the years, been converted to apartments. The apartments drifted toward the status of slums, and finally grounded-out as student housing.

Sherrill was the senior active Minneapolis cop on the scene, a solid, dark-haired woman in her late thirties, with a great slashing white smile and what older 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 older cops 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.

There was an instant, just before the fight, when Lucas Davenport's overweight partner said, "Watch it; he's coming," and he pulled his nightstick and Lucas had time to set his feet. Then Carlos O'Hearn came steaming down the bar, through the stink of spilled beer and hotdogs with relish and boiled eggs in over-sized jars, came knocking over bar stools like ten-pins, a beer bottle in his right hand, while the bartender leaned away and said, "Noooo..."

All of which explained why, when Lucas rolled out of bed and stretched, a lightning stroke of pain shot through his left side, from the cracked ribs he'd taken from those two quick Golden Gloves punches. He stretched again, more carefully, then looked down at the soft round ass of a blond-haired woman and said, "DeeDee. Rise and shine."

He stepped around a pile of hockey gear next to the bed, got out a fresh pair of shorts and a t-shirt. As he was pulling on a t-shirt, McAllister sat up and said, "One thing is, your body gets me hot."

Lucas had been a cop for three years. He'd graduated from the University of Minnesota after five years of study, and four years of hockey — he'd been a rare red-shirt the first year, to pick up weight and muscle — with a major in American studies, which, he quickly discovered, qualified him to go back to school. He considered law, but after talking to a few law students, decided that life might be too short.

Lucas went off to the police academy, scored at the top of his class — would have been at the top in any class anyone could remember — spent a few weeks on patrol, spent six months working dope, then went back on patrol.

Lucas was out sitting on the hood of his assigned squad when Fred Carter, his partner, finally showed up. Carter had missed the second-shift briefing, said he'd been caught in traffic, but he smelled of an Italian meatball sandwich.

Carter was a fleshy, bull-necked man who looked like a cab driver, with blunt features and fingers, and a growing gut. He wasn't stupid, but he was going nowhere in the police department. He knew it, and didn't care. He was in for twenty, and then out. He'd gotten fourteen, and now his main concern was to avoid injury, and to plot out his move to state government, for a second dip in the pension stream

Yeah, keep a little peace. But what did it mean if a guy went through life thinking about nothing but football — Carter was a big Vikes fan — and a pension? What kind of life was that?

On this afternoon and evening, they checked out their squad and started rolling around in south Minneapolis, taking in the sights; it was one of those late afternoons in the city when everything smelled like melting bubble gun, spilled soda pop, and tar. Then a drunk Ojibwa, down from Red Lake, climbed up on a fire hydrant, for reasons unknown, gave a speech, fell off, and gashed his head on the top nut. They thought for a moment that he'd been shot, until a witness explained. They called an ambulance and had him transported to Hennepin General, and rolled again.

"What the fuck is a chiffonier?" Lucas asked, as they rolled away.

At five o'clock, Lucas spotted a man named Justice Johnson, who'd beaten up his old lady once too often; a warrant had been issued. They corralled him in the recessed entry of a locksmith's shop. He'd been eating a raw onion, as though it were an apple, and it bounced away into the gutter as they cuffed him. He didn't bother to fight, and bitched and moaned about his woman, who, he said, did nothing but pick at him.

At twenty minutes after six o'clock, they took a call on two missing girls. It was still full daylight, and the dispatchers sent them down to the Mississippi, below the I-94 bridge. The two girls had been known to play along the river, although they'd been warned against it by their parents.

In the four years Lucas had been a cop, he'd seen most of what he'd ever see from a patrol car: murders, actual and attempted, the aftermath of robberies and burglaries, and even a couple of those in progress, as well as suicides, fights, mini-riots, car and foot chases, even an emergency pregnancy run, the woman screaming for help from the backseat. The baby arrived one minute after Lucas put the car at the emergency room door, delivered by a doc and a couple of nurses right on the gurney. The baby, rumor had it, had been named named Otto, after the car ride.

They parked the car and headed over to the slope down to the Mississippi. The river at that point was a few hundred yards across, a sullen dark green, with streaks of foam from the falls just up the river. The bank down to the water was steep and overgrown with brush, cut by slippery dirt paths down the slope worn by walkers, marked with thrown-away food wrappers, and here and there, a wad of toilet paper back in the bushes.

They were talking to a bum who'd appeared from under the I-94 bridge when a thin, freckled, red-haired man came jogging down the bank and called, "You find them? Anybody see them?"

George Jones, the girls' father, belonged to a lefty ex-military organization, and he'd put out a call for help. Members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War began showing up at seven o'clock, still not dark; a miscellaneous collection of haunted-looking men wearing pieces of military uniform, mixed with anti-war buttons and patches. A few dozen strong, they began working their way through alleys and backyards, within a half-mile of Jones' house, staying in touch by calling back and forth.

Sloan worked the group, taking notes, and a couple more plainclothes guys showed up, then Quentin Daniel, the homicide lieutenant, and Carter muttered to Lucas "It's her shirt. They know it. They're gone."

He was back at his apartment in six minutes, and took another thoughtful six minutes to get into a pair of light khaki slacks, a short-sleeve white shirt, and a navy blue linen sport coat with a wine-colored tie. He hesitated over the short-sleeve shirt, because Esquire magazine despised them; but then, Esquire editors probably didn't have to walk through slum neighborhoods in ninety-degree heat.

Lucas worked with Sloan late into the night, slogging up and down the dark, declining residential streets, pounding on doors. Ordinarily, there might have been enough bad people around — crack cocaine had arrived that spring, and was spiraling out of control — to inject some extra stress into the work. On this night, there were so many cops on the street that the bad people moved over.

They pushed through the gate on a chain-link fence, toward a clapboard house with a narrow front porch with a broken down couch sitting on it, and a light in one window. Sloan pointed his flashlight into the side yard, at a circle of dirt around an iron stake, and said, "Bad dog."

He had a handset with him, and walked back down the sidewalk while Lucas talked to the man, and especially past him, to the woman. He asked, "What do you know about John? We really need to find him. If he knows anything... I mean, these two girls might not have much time..."

They didn't have much else. A moment later, Sloan came back up the walk. "Cherry and McGuire are coming over," he said.

Cherry and McGuire showed up, two fortyish veterans, and took over. Lucas and Sloan moved on down the block, and got nowhere, Lucas fuming about being knocked off the only positive hint they'd gotten.

They worked for two more hours, and Sloan finally quit at the end of his shift and went home to his wife. "I don't even know what we're doing," he said. "We think the kidnapper'll come to the door and confess?"

The night was still warm, for August, with a hint of rain in the still air. They drove back to Lucas' place in Sloan's Dodge, arms out the side windows, Lucas thinking how quiet the city was, and for all they knew, somewhere in its quiet heart, two little girls were being tortured by a monster.

Daniel ignored him: "How come you're still running around?" he asked Lucas.

In the hall, he said, quietly, but showing some teeth, "You're not fuckin' with us, are you? Withholding information so you can get a shot at it? With these two girls, this wouldn't be the time to make points."

Paul's Therapeutic Massage occupied the end store in a five-business strip that included a movie rental place, a coin laundry, a dog-groomer and a medical-oxygen service. Lucas parked in front of the massage parlor. A light shone from one window, but a red neon 'Open" sign had been turned off.

Bottom line, Lucas thought, on his way downtown: He didn't know how to get an address for a credit card. He needed to fix that. He chewed through the gumball in two minutes, threw the wad of gum out the window and drove faster.

The post office worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The front end was closed, but Lucas found his way in through the loading dock in the back and showed his ID to a couple of guys throwing canvas mail bags off a truck. One of them went inside and came back with a bureaucrat.

The bureaucrat came back a minute later, and said, "I got the superintendent of mails on the phone."

Lucas left the post office ten minutes later with the paper in his hand: John Fell at an address on 6th Street SE, Minneapolis. Five minutes away, the sun coming up over St. Paul.

He'd learn about disappointment, too, he found out a few minutes later.

She did that, and opened the door three minutes later, a woman in her early twenties with bad sleep hair. "It is you. You played hockey with a friend of mine. Jared Michael? I'd see you on the ice."

In addition to a bowl of Rice Krispies, he advanced another inch in his education. The woman's name was Katie Barin, and she suggested that a student house would be the perfect place to set up a fake credit card, or a mail drop.

The Lees looked like twins, same height, same haircuts, same dress; except that one of them had breasts. The one with breasts remembered Fell. "He was not supposed to take mail. He didn't live here. I ask him once, why do you take mail? He say, the post office still brings it by mistake. But after I ask him, I don't see him again."

He went back to City Hall, to the licensing department, prepared to wait until somebody showed up. But when he got there, and looked through the glass panel on the door, he saw a light coming out of an office. He banged on the door for a moment, until a man in a flannel shirt came out of the office and shook his head and waved him off. Lucas held up his badge, and the guy came over. Through the glass, he asked, "What?"

A thought popped in: the post office. There's probably a guy who systematically walks around the neighborhood every day...