"Even if you're thirty-third on the list?"

"With a goat," Williamson said. "I'd sit here and show you how to use the computer, but you can figure it out in five minutes and I'm on deadline. Instructions are Scotch-taped on the desk on the left side. Have at it."

HE STEPPED AWAY, but lingered, like he had another question, so Virgil asked, "Another question?"

"How're you getting along with Jim Stryker?"

"Good. We've known each other for a while," Virgil said.

"Yeah…the baseball. But the word out of the sheriff's shop is that they really had to stuff you down his throat," Williamson said.

"Is that right?"

Williamson nodded: "Could just be office politics, but the word was, you could show off the sheriff's…inadequacies."

"I work on eight or ten murders a year," Virgil said. "You guys go decades without one. I'm a specialist. No harm in calling in a specialist."

Williamson chuckled. "That wasn't how they were skinning the cat at the courthouse."

WHEN WILLIAMSON was gone, Virgil wandered around, looking at yellowed labels on the drawers, figured out the system, names over here, subjects over there. The tall files were photos, mostly eight-by-ten originals, which stopped entirely in 2002; must have bought a digital camera, Virgil thought. The photos still smelled of developer and stop bath; the clips smelled of old cigarette smoke and pulp paper gone sour.

The Judd photo files showed Judd in every decade starting in the 1940s, as a young man in a pale suit, but even then with bleak, black eyes.

The pre-1999 Judd clipping files took up four drawers, hundreds of crumbling clippings entangled in small gray envelopes. Judd Jr. had several packets of his own, but they occupied only half a drawer. The measure of a couple of lives, Virgil thought.

The file envelopes had an average of eight to ten articles each, and the bulk of the Judd Sr. clips, amounting to several stories a week, came in the 1980s, during the Jerusalem artichoke controversy.

Judd was eventually accused of thirty-two counts of fraud by the Minnesota attorney general, based on evidence partly local and partly developed out of St. Paul. The assistant AG who prosecuted, and who apparently didn't understand his own evidence, was torn to pieces by Judd's defense attorneys in a trial in St. Paul. The local county attorney and the local sheriff were both defeated in the next election, by pissed-off voters.

After the trial, there was further wrangling over federal and state taxes. The fight dragged through the courts for years, and in 1995, the Record reported that attorneys for both sides had agreed to settle the case, the settlement being confidential as a matter of tax law.

The Judd envelopes not involving the Jerusalem artichoke controversy were generally business news: mortgages given and taken, buildings and land bought and sold, the house being built on Buffalo Ridge-for a rumored five hundred and fifty thousand dollars in 1960, with five baths-and lawsuits filed and settled. Except for the Jerusalem artichoke controversy, it might have been the life record of any greedy, grasping, sociopathic businessman.

Judd Jr. was more of the same, without the scandal, and in a minor key: he was portrayed as a greedy, grasping, and largely unsuccessful sociopath.

Virgil read about the suicide of Mark Stryker, which happened after a family picnic, a detail nobody had mentioned. The story did mention that Stryker had been involved in the Jerusalem artichoke scandal, and had sold 1,280 acres of the family farm to pay off associated debts.

ANNA GLEASON was the headliner in her family, as the result of sixteen years on the county commission, and with her own drawer of stories. Judd was mentioned in several of them, but most were routine appearances before the county commission to discuss zoning changes or drainage problems. Russell Gleason had a few envelopes, mostly from when he worked as a coroner in the seventies and eighties, before the medical examiner system was adopted; and in most of those clips, he was simply the voice that pronounced somebody dead.

He read the clips on both Jim Stryker and Joan Carson. Joan's divorce attracted three six-inch articles, which noted only that the marriage was irretrievably broken after five years, and that the judge approved the agreement worked out by the private attorneys. All the good stuff had been left out.

She was described as an "affluent farmer" with residences both in Bluestem and at the family farm. Virgil knew where her town home was, having stood on her front porch the night before, trying for a gentle, sensitive, yet promising good-night kiss, while simultaneously trying to cop a feel.

He looked and finally found the Laymons. Nothing about Margaret, but Jesse had been busted once in Worthington for possession of a minor amount of marijuana, and was cited as a witness in a fight in a Bluestem bar, in which a man had all of his teeth broken out. The man sued, but the suit never went to trial.

Finally, George Feur. He showed up only on the computer, but there were fifteen hits, including an article by Williamson that must have been five thousand words long.

He was, Virgil thought, reading through the computer files, a brass-plated asshole.

VIRGIL LEFT the newspaper office, rolling out of town, back on I-90, heading west. I-94, I-90, I-80, I-40, I-20, and I-10 stretched across the heart of the country like guitar strings, holding the East Coast to the West Coast, with the Rocky Mountains as the bridge. I-90 shared much of its length with other interstates, but was on its own from Tomah, Wisconsin, to Billings, Montana. Virgil had driven all of it, and more than once.

Some people found it deadly boring, but having been raised on the prairie, Virgil liked it, like sailors enjoy the ocean. The prairie rolled in waves, with small towns coming up and falling behind, and farmhouses and pickups and people riding horses, and buffalo and antelope and prairie dogs. And towns, like freshwater pearls, small, all different, and all the same.

NOT THAT he was going far; just an exit or two.

Feur lived a mile east of the South Dakota line, ten miles north of I-90, in a compound of four steel buildings and one old white clapboard four-square farmhouse, a Corn Belt cube, that tilted slightly to the southeast, and badly needed a coat of paint. The buildings were set in a grove of bur oaks, box elders, and cottonwoods, surrounded by rocky pasture.

The driveway crossed a ditch with a thread of water in the bottom, past a sign that said GOD'S FORTY ACRES, and beneath that, NO TRESPASSING. As he pulled into the dirt roundabout in front of the house, a young man came out on the front porch with a shotgun.

Virgil said, "Ah, man." He was still far enough away that he could do it without being obvious, and he reached down under the seat for his pistol, and put it on the seat next to him. As he stopped and parked, he picked up the weapon, as if picking up a pen or a book, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

When he climbed out of the truck, the man with the gun called, "Who're you?"

"Virgil Flowers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to see Reverend Feur."

"You got an appointment?" the man asked. He was maybe twenty-five, and had the foxy look of somebody who'd grown up hungry.

"Nope."

"Maybe you could come back some other time. He's pretty busy," the man said.

"I'd rather talk now," Virgil said. "If I've got to drag my ass all the way back to Bluestem, then when I come back, I'll come back with a search warrant and five deputies and we'll tear this place apart."

"You ain't got no cause." The shotgun was there, but the man hadn't twitched it in any direction: it was simply there.

"You think a Stark County judge would give a shit?" Virgil asked.