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How many calories could a cinnamon roll have, anyway?

    Chapter 3.
    The rain continued through the night--the better for the sexual favors, which were hottest in a flickering candlelight, with freshets of water pouring through the gutters and downspouts--but was beginning to ease by the time he'd finished breakfast. He drove into the office, made a series of morning calls, checking on his agents, then made the ten o'clock meeting at the planning center, where the BCA director, Rose Marie Roux, chaired the security committee for the Republican National Convention.
    Lucas had reported to Roux for years, first when she was the Minneapolis chief of police, later when she was named the director of the BCA, and he'd followed her over. She'd always been political--a street cop for a couple of years, then an office cop while she went to law school, then a state representative, a state senator, Minneapolis chief, and over to the BCA.
    She was smitten by the convention job. Lucas thought she was behaving like a starstruck teenager, hanging out with the guys in black suits and ear bugs, who spoke into their cuff links and cut their hair ranger-style.
    Smitten was bad.
    The security for the convention was going to be inadequate, because the Twin Cities area didn't have the police resources, and the feds weren't coming through with enough extra. None of the big shot s w ould get hurt, of course, because they'd be blanketed by gun-toting Secret Service thugs, but the town, in Lucas's opinion, was toast. Whoever'd had the bright idea of inviting the convention to St. Paul, he thought, should have had his head X-rayed until it smoked.
    He slipped out before the meeting was done and before he might be tempted to take out his gun and shoot someone. He went downstairs and called the governor's chief weasel, up on Capitol Hill, and got three minutes alone with the great man.
    The governor was at his desk, with a stack of outstate weekly newspapers by his left hand. The sun was shining through a crack in the clouds, in through the window behind the governor's head, and bathed him in holy nimbus. Then the cloud-cut closed, and the nimbus went away.
    "What?" the governor asked, when Lucas shut the door.
    "Got a favor to ask."
    The governor was a thin man, sleek, his hair lacquered in place, with delicate cheekbones and an aristocratic lip. He'd been reading the real estate ads in one of the weeklies, his stocking feet up on a mahogany file cabinet. The governor was the scion of one of Minnesota's bigger fortunes, originally considered to be the runt of the litter, and now pretty much running the state and the family. Some said he thought they were the same thing. . . .
    His socks, Lucas observed, were a pale lavender with the thinnest of scarlet clocks. The governor cocked an eye at him and asked, "Is this gonna cause me trouble? Whatever it is?"
    "Probably the least amount of trouble of anything you've done today," Lucas said, as he dropped into a leather armchair. "If you get assassinated this week, can I have those socks?"
    "No. We pass these down through the generations, to the oldest sons."
    "C'mon. Where'd you get them?"
    "Ferragamo." The governor folded the paper, dropped it in a waste - basket, and said, "The shit is about to hit the fan. The question is, will it hit before the next election?"
    "What shit?" Lucas asked. For one crazy moment, he thought the governor might be concerned about convention security.
    "The ethanol market is gonna drop dead," the governor said. "Capacity is outrunning demand, and the big energy companies are moving up to the trough. A whole bunch of farmers who mortgaged the farm to build all these small plants, they're gonna lose their shirts. Then they'll want to know what I'm going to do about it."
    Lucas shrugged. "That's your problem. And the farmers'. Though it's not your biggest problem."
    "What's my biggest problem?" The governor's eyebrows went up.
    "The convention," Lucas said. "The protesters are gonna