"Well, hell."

"Yeah."

THEY SAT for a minute, thinking it over, then Virgil said, "Maybe it's because your dick is the size of Roche."

Stryker had been taking another sip of Coke, and he choked, sputtering, laughed, said, "Come to speak of it, what were you and Joanie doing on her front porch last night about ten o'clock?"

Virgil laughed, but not hard, touched by a finger of guilt. So much apparent friendship, and he was sitting here smiling, and thinking that the Strykers would be suspects in the Judd killing, on any rational list…

VIRGIL SAID, "I'm gonna go talk to Todd Williamson, see if he'll let me look in his files, if he's got any. Then I'm heading out to see George Feur."

Stryker's eyebrows went up. "You got something?"

"Not exactly. I want to talk to him, look him over, push him a little," Virgil said.

"When you say, 'Not exactly'…"

"Feur's a Bible beater and he's an asshole and he was working on Judd," Virgil said. "Bible beaters don't beat anything harder than the book of Revelation. I noticed when I was up at the Gleasons' yesterday, that Anna Gleason had a book of Revelation right under her hand when she was shot. A pretty new one, it looked like."

"She did?" Stryker frowned and leaned forward. "Why didn't I know that?"

Virgil shrugged. "Maybe nobody noticed. This was before Judd was killed, and Feur's name didn't really come up until the fire."

"Hell of a thing not to notice, though," Stryker said. "I'll have to talk to Larry and Margo about this. They should have seen it. At least had it in the back of their minds."

Virgil didn't disagree. "Maybe they should have," he said. "Especially for a guy with Feur's history."

"You know about him and me, right?" Stryker asked. "I busted him for robbery, when I was a deputy? He went to Stillwater. Claims I railroaded him."

"Nothing to that, though," Virgil offered.

"No. He was caught on a liquor store camera," Stryker said. "He had a hat pulled down low, but I knew him the minute I saw the tape. Went and dug him out of his hole, got his gun, too. The gun did it as much as anything-it was an old piece with a nine-inch barrel, and that, you see perfectly, on the tape."

"So it was a good bust."

"Yup. It was, and still is."

VIRGIL SAID, "Another thing-if this all somehow involves Judd's money, then your friend Jesse might be in trouble, could be a target for somebody."

"You think?"

"Maybe. Or maybe not." Virgil scratched his ear. "If she's got one of those ramblin' gamblin' guys around, who figured she might become a millionairess, under the right circumstances…"

"Man, that hadn't occurred to me," Stryker said. He sat back in his chair, rocking.

"Could Jesse or Margaret set something up?" Virgil asked.

Stryker rubbed his chin. "Not Margaret. Don't see that. Jesse wouldn't do it on purpose. I could see her sitting around, suckin' a little smoke, bullshitting with somebody, dreaming about all the money…and she wakes up in a world of hurt, when her pal goes off and does something about it."

"A concept to consider," Virgil said.

"I will," Stryker said.

"And if she doesn't have anything to do with it, hell, maybe she'll need her body guarded."

Stryker stood up. "I'm heading out there. You want to look at her, or go see Feur?"

"I'll go after Feur," Virgil said. Stryker had been looking for an excuse to go out. "You can tell me what you get from Jesse and maybe I'll talk to her later in the day."

"Good enough," Stryker said. "You take care."

THE DAY LOOKED like the day before, sunny, a touch of wind, about as nice a July day that you could hope for; four kids, two boys and two girls, were dancing along the sidewalk ahead of him, boys in dropped-crotch pants, the girls with pierced ears and noses, but there was a small-town innocence about it; testing their chops, and sometimes, forgetting, they'd hold hands. They all looked back at him a couple of times, knowing him for a cop.

Nice a day as it was, there was too much humidity hanging around, and thunderstorms would be popping by late afternoon. If it got hot enough, some of them could be bad. Nothing to do about it.

Virgil walked down to the Record, stopping at the drugstore for a sleeve of popcorn, and at the newspaper, found Williamson putting the last bit of the next day's newspaper together.

Williamson lit up as soon as Virgil walked through the front door. "I was hoping I'd see you this morning. I called down to the motel and they said you were gone already."

Virgil nodded. "I was hoping to poke through your library, if you've got one. Clippings, and such."

"We can do that. But it'd be pretty damn ungrateful of you, if you didn't answer a couple of questions."

"You can ask," Virgil said.

"You took a different attitude yesterday…"

"Well, I was in public. I'll talk to you, but the deal is this: I talk off-the-record, and you write it like it came from God," he said. "I might not tell you everything, but I won't lie to you."

"Deal," Williamson said. He punched a couple of keys on his computer, switched out of his compositing program into a word processor, and asked, "Do you think the.357 used in the murders was one of the guns issued to the sheriff's office years ago?"

"I have no idea," Virgil said. Williamson opened his mouth to object, but Virgil held up a hand. "I'm not avoiding the question. I really don't have any idea. They're not a commonly bought weapon anymore. Most people go for automatics, because they're on TV, and if you're looking for hunting power in a revolver, you might go for a.44 mag or a.454 Casul. The.357s were a cop's gun, at one time, and that's the only reason anybody ever talked about the idea. There were a bunch of them in the sheriff's office, and they all went away, and maybe…who knows?"

"All right," Williamson said. "Second question: Do you think the killer is local?"

"Yes," Virgil said.

"You want to expand on that?" Williamson asked.

"No."

"Any suspects?"

"Not at the moment."

Williamson said, "I'm not getting much for my clips."

Virgil: "What time do you have to finish putting the paper together? It's out tomorrow morning, right?"

"Can't push it past three o'clock. I download it to the printing plant-it's over in Sioux Falls-and pick it up at eleven," he said. "If I push it one minute past three, they won't give it to me until midnight or one o'clock, just to fuck with me."

"All right. At two o'clock, you call me on my cell phone," Virgil said. "You might have the story by then, but maybe not. But it would be…your lead story."

Williamson's eyebrows went up. "The Judd fire is the lead story."

"Two days old. Everybody knows it," Virgil said. "This other story is known by damn few, and you'd sure as hell wake up the town tomorrow morning, if you printed it. But if you give me up as the source, you'll never get a word from me for the rest of the investigation."

"Another story from God, huh?" Williamson's tongue touched his lower lip: he wanted the story. "Let me show you the morgue. We still call it that, here."

THE MORGUE was the size of a suburban bedroom, painted a color that was a combination of dirt green and dirt brown. The walls were lined with oak library chests, with hundreds of six-inch-high, six-inch-wide, two-foot-deep drawers, surrounding a desk with an aging Dell computer. Williamson knocked on one of the cabinets. "We file by name and subject. Before 1999, if the subject is something with a hundred names in it, we file the five most important names to the story, and cross-reference to the subject. So if you're showing a goat at FFA, and you're thirty-third on the list, somebody would have to look under FFA to find your name, because we didn't put it in the name file. After 1999, we stopped clipping, and put everything on CDs, cross-referenced by a reference service. You'll find all names and subjects after 1999."