"I wanted to be civilized…"

"Civilized, kiss my ass," Mark Stryker said, his voice rising, shrill. "This is the last time you'll ever see the kids. I'm not letting some whore come around to the farm…"

He turned and went outside, shouted back at her, "I knew what you were doing, whore. I knew…"

Laura, the anger rising in her, with the fear, hadn't thought about the kids; Mark was outside, looking up at the screen over the sink, still there, shouting. The gun was there, in the kitchen drawer, behind the towels, the clip in the next drawer, took only a second to slam the clip into the butt, jack a round into the chamber…the gun right there in her hand, hot, Mark in the yard…

"I killed him…I'm freaking out here, I killed him in the yard."

"Jesus Christ, Laura…"

"You fix this." Not weeping, but out of control. "You tell them it's suicide. I'm not going to lose the kids…"

"Jesus Christ, Laura…"

"You call Russ Gleason…you tell him…I know about his little abortion mill. You tell him that Mark committed suicide…"

Virgil yawned and opened his eyes. Fiction. But a story was going there, beginning to feel like something-at least he was pulling the dead people together.

And then he thought, what if this wasn't about the men? What if it was about the wives? What if Gloria Schmidt and Anna Gleason had been in bed with Judd, and now somebody was killing them, and the shooting of their husbands, through the eyes, was symbolic of some kind of blindness, or a looking-away…

What if Laura Stryker wasn't the perpetrator, but was the next target?

HE SAT in the morgue for two hours, altogether, typing notes into his laptop, thinking. Every few minutes, the outer door would rattle, he'd hear change go into the coin box, and the door would close again. Once, there'd been no change, and he'd been tempted to peek and see who it was, stealing a newspaper; but he stayed with the clips.

When he was finished, he knew a lot more than when he'd started, but nothing that seemed to connect with the murders. Everybody in town may have known that Judd was sleeping with local women, and sometimes in a pile of them, but it never got into the newspaper.

He took ten minutes to get the clips back in their envelopes, close down his computer. He walked back through the newspaper office, picked up the note on the floor, taped it back on the window, and went to his truck.

Laura Stryker.

HE CALLED JOAN: "Did you hear about Roman Schmidt?"

"I did." Her voice was hushed. "Virgil, this is god-awful. Completely aside from the fact that Jim is going to lose his job-it's god-awful all on its own."

"Well, if we catch the guy, Jim could still pull out of it," Virgil said.

"Gotta be soon," she said. "Do you have any ideas?"

"We were talking about going to Sioux Falls with your mom. Think I could take her right now?"

"I'll call her. Do you want me to come?"

He hesitated, then: "If you want."

"I'll call her. I'll get back to you in two minutes."

LAURA WAS happy to go. Virgil drove to Joan's house, rang the doorbell, and she waved him inside: "I just got here, I was out at the farm," she said. "I have to change into something that doesn't smell like dirt. Maybe take a really fast shower. I told Mom we'd be there in twenty minutes."

"Happy to wash your back," Virgil said.

"I need that," she said. "There's always that one spot right in the middle, it's been dirty for eight years now."

"What happened eight years ago?"

"That was the year before I got married," she said.

SHE WENT OFF down the hall to the back bedroom, yelled, "There's Coke in the refrigerator, there's instant coffee, you could make it in the microwave." He stirred around in the kitchen, looking it over, checking the refrigerator. She wasn't a foodie, that was for sure. She had about three knives, and most of the stuff in the refrigerator looked like it had been there for weeks.

A door in back closed: the bathroom? He got a Coke, went into the living room. An open door led into what might have been a small dining room, or television room, now converted to an office, with a desk, computer, and file cabinets. He saw a wall of family photos, stepped into the room and looked at them: found the same thin man in plaid pants in two of them, thought it might be her father.

But she and Jim must take after Laura, because Mark Stryker really was a slight figure, except that he had the same white-blond hair of his son and daughter…

Slid open a drawer in a file cabinet, listening for her, for a footstep, looked at some tabs-business and taxes-and pushed it shut.

Just being snoopy now, he thought. No good could come of it. He eased back into the living room, heard a door open: "Hey. Are you going to wash my back, or what?"

He put the Coke down and headed back down the hall; saw her damp face and hair at the end of it, and then she pulled back inside the bathroom. And by the time he'd gotten to the bathroom, she was back inside the shower.

He opened the shower door, and there she was, her back to him, as well as the third-greatest-he gave her an instant promotion-ass in Minnesota, and maybe on the entire Great Plains. "Oh, my God," he said.

"Just the back."

"Just the back, my sweet…"

"Just the back," she said. "You offered, I'm accepting."

"If you…"

"Don't you get in this shower, Virgil Flowers," she said. "You'll get all wet and we have to be at my mom's in fifteen minutes and she'll know that we've been up here fooling around."

"Gimme the soap and back up," he said.

He washed her water-slick back, and the third-greatest ass, and then, squatting, her legs, one at a time, working upward, and by the time he was getting done, she was hanging on to the faucet handles, and when he was done, he snatched her out of the shower and turned her around and kissed her and said, "Fuck your mama."

"Not my mama," she said. "Not my mama."

THEY WERE twenty minutes late getting to Laura Stryker's, driving over with all the truck windows down. Joan wanted to get the smell of sex off them, she said.

"Not as late as I might have hoped," Joan said.

"You weren't complaining twelve minutes ago," Virgil said, "unless that was your way of screaming for help."

"Don't be too proud of yourself," she said. "I'd been waiting for a long time. Bill Judd Junior could have gotten to me after all that time."

Virgil leaned close to her: "The fact of the matter is, you've gotten hold of something far beyond your simple country experience."

That made her laugh, and she pushed him away and said, "Next time, though, we're going for the slow hand."

WHEN THEY GOT out of the truck, Joan said, "Stay here, but leave the doors open. Mom might smell something if we don't air it out a little more."

"Jesus, Joanie, you're an adult…"

"It's my mom."

So he left the doors open and the engine running, and stood out in the sunlight and worked up a little sweat while Joan collected Laura. In two or three minutes they were on the front porch, Laura carefully locking the door behind her.

Laura was a handsome woman for her age, slender as her daughter, with carefully cut and tinted hair. If you were checking out mothers to see what a daughter would look like in twenty-five years, you would have taken the daughter. She got into the backseat, said, "Pleased to meet you, Virgil," and Joan hopped into the front passenger seat and said, "That's the first time I ever saw you lock the front door."

"Everybody's locking doors now. If Janet came over after dark, and knocked, I might hide out and not answer, not until this killer's caught," she said.

Joan to Virgil: "Janet's her best friend," and to Laura: "I don't think you have to worry about Janet."