'What's she doing to that snake?' The tail of a snake was visible beneath the Virgin's sandals. The snake's body curled up one of her robed legs, its head poised to strike at knee level.

'Crushing it. That's the devil.'

'Huh. Looks like one of the investigators on my squad. The snake, I mean.'

Lucas had been to grade school with Elle Kruger. They'd tracked each other over the years, Lucas on the Minneapolis police force, Elle Kruger as a psychologist and a Sister of Mercy. Her office was on the third floor of Albertus Magnus Hall. Lucas led Lily down a long, cool hallway that echoed with their footsteps. At Elle's office, he knocked once, opened the door and stuck his head inside.

'About time,' Elle Kruger snapped. She was a traditionalist, and wore the black habit with a band of beads hanging down beside her hand.

'Traffic,' said Lucas in way of apology. He stepped inside, Lily close behind. 'Elle, this is Lieutenant Lily Ro- thenburg of the New York Police Department, out here investigating the death of John Andretti. Lily, this is my friend Sister Mary Joseph. She's the chief shrink around here.'

'Pleased to meet you, Lily,' Elle said, and reached out a bony hand.

Lily took it and smiled. 'Lucas tells me you've helped on some of his cases.'

'Where I can. But we mostly play games,' Elle said.

Lily looked at Lucas, and Lucas explained, 'We have a gaming group that meets once a week.'

'That's interesting,' Lily said, looking from one of them to the other. 'Like Dungeons and Dragons?'

'No, no role playing,' Elle said. 'Historical reconstruction. Get Lucas to tell you about his Gettysburg. We played it three times last year and it always comes out wildly different. Last time, Bobby Lee almost got himself into Philadelphia.'

'I've still got to do something about that damn Stuart,' Lucas said to the nun. 'When he gets loose too early, he fouls up all the calculations. I'm thinking of…'

'No game talk,' Elle said. 'Let's get some ice cream.'

'Ice cream?' Lily said. She put her fingers over her mouth to cover a tiny burp. 'Sounds good.'

As they walked down the hall, Lily turned to Elle and asked, 'What did you mean when you said, 'his Gettysburg'? Did Lucas make the game or something?'

Elle raised an eyebrow. 'Our boy is a famous games inventor. Didn't you know that?'

'No, I didn't,' Lily said, looking at Lucas.

'He surely is,' Elle said. 'That's how he got rich.'

'Are you rich?' Lily asked Lucas.

'No,' Lucas said. He shook his head.

'He is, take my word for it,' Elle said to Lily with a phony confidentiality. 'He bought me a gold chain last year that has scandalized my entire wing of the residence.'

'For a good German Catholic girl, I think the influence of the Irish is beginning to seep in,' Lucas said.

'The Irish?'

'The blarney.' Lucas turned to Lily and said in a stage whisper, 'I'd never use a word like 'bullshit' around a nun.'

They sat in a booth in the ice cream shop, Lucas and Lily side by side, Elle across the table. Elle ate a hot-fudge sun dae while Lily worked on a banana split. Lucas blew into a cup of coffee and thought about Lily's warm thigh next to his.

'So you're working on Andretti,' Elle prompted them.

'There's some kind of conspiracy,' Lily said.

'The Indian man who killed the people in Minneapolis, and the Indian man who killed Andretti?'

'Yeah,' said Lucas. 'Except we think that two different guys killed the people in Minneapolis. And now the judge in Oklahoma City…'

'I haven't heard…'

'Last night… I was wondering… what kind of group would we be dealing with? If there is a group.'

'Religious,' Elle said promptly.

'Religious?'

'There are few things in the world that can hold together a murder conspiracy. Hate by itself is not enough, because it's too unfocused and not intellectual enough. There has to be some positive energy, as it were. That usually comes from religion. It's difficult to be intellectual and murderous at the same time, without some complicated rationale.'

'How about these groups that develop in prison?' asked Lily. 'You know, a group of guys gets together and they start holding up armored cars…'

'… raising money for a cause. Which usually has some kind of quasi-religious doctrine behind it. Save the white race from mongrelization by blacks, Arabs, Jews, whatever. You see the same thing in the leftist radical groups and even the groups or pairs of psychotic killers you get from time to time. There's a religious aspect, there's a group feeling of oppression. Usually there's a messiah figure who tells the others that it's all right to kill. That it's necessary.'

'One of my people in the Indian community said that Bluebird-'

'That was the man killed in Minneapolis?' Elle interrupted.

'Yeah. He said Bluebird was a man looking for religion.'

'I'd say he found it,' Elle said. She had been saving the maraschino cherry for last, and finally she ate it, savoring the sweetness.

'You know how they make maraschino cherries?' Lucas asked, covering his eyes with his hand as it disappeared.

'I don't want to hear,' Elle said. She pointed her long spoon at Lucas' nose. 'If there's a group doing these killings, there probably aren't more than a dozen people in it and that would be an extreme. More likely it's five or six. At the most.'

'Six? Jesus,' Lily blurted. 'Excuse me, my language. But six?'

'What are the chances that it's three?' Lucas asked. 'Bluebird and this guy in New York and the guy in Oklahoma?'

Elle tipped her head back and peered at the ceiling, calculating. 'No. I don't think so, but then, who knows? But I have the sense… these men in New York and Oklahoma, they traveled some way to do the killings, if they came from here. If they know Bluebird. I have a sense that they were sent out… that they are on missions. Bluebird was apparently ready to die. That would be more typical of people who saw themselves as part of a process, rather than as a last chance to strike back.'

'So there'll be more?'

'Yes. But there is a limit on size. There really is no such thing as a grand criminal conspiracy. Or at least no such thing as a secret one. I suppose Adolf Hitler and his henchmen were a grand criminal conspiracy, but they needed the collaboration of a nation to pull it off.'

'So there'd probably be at least two or three more, and maybe six or eight,' Lucas said. 'Probably held together by some sort of religious mania.'

'That's right,' Elle said. 'If you want to stop it, look for the preacher.'

In the car going back to Lucas' office, Lily looked him over.

'I have the feeling I'm being looked over,' Lucas said.

'You have interesting friends,' Lily said.

He shrugged. 'I'm a cop.'

'You invent games and play them with nuns?'

'Hey, I'm a wild kind of guy.' He looked at her over the top of his sunglasses, winked and turned back to the traffic.

'Oooh, Mr. Cool,' she said. 'It makes my thighs hot.'

Lucas thought, Mine too. He glanced quickly at her and she turned away, a blush creeping up her neck. She knew what he was thinking, and she had been aware of him in the booth…

At home, Larry Hart wore cowboy boots, blue jeans and work shirts with string ties. The string ties always had a chunk of turquoise buried in a silver slide. He could have worn that outfit to work, with a jacket to complete it, but he never did. He wore brown suits, with neckties in shades of brown and gold, and brown wingtip shoes. In the

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