Laura looked at him through the rearview, but said nothing. At her house, she got out, closed the door, walked around to the front of the truck and made a rolling motion, so that Virgil rolled down the window. "What you want to know about, didn't happen," she said. "Absolutely did not."

"What are you talking about?" Joan asked her mother.

"Virgil knows," Laura said, and she turned away and headed up her front sidewalk.

"WHAT THE HECK was that about?" Joan demanded, as they rolled down toward her house.

"About eliminating Strykers, as suspects."

"What?"

Virgil sighed. "She was telling me that she didn't have an affair with old man Judd, and, as a corollary, that that's not why your father killed himself, and so there's no reason for any Stryker, and in particular, Jim, to have killed him. Or the others."

She stared, aghast. "My God, Virgil. What have you been up to?"

Virgil said, "I've been listening to talk. There's talk that your mother and Judd were involved back around the time of your father's death. She worked in an insurance office that Judd owned. If she says she was not involved, I believe her. I don't think she'd lie, when we've got all these killings on our hands, not if she thought it might make a difference."

"Of course she wouldn't," Joan said, angry now.

Virgil shook his head. "You can't tell what people will do, when their reputations are on the line. But: she didn't. I believe her."

"It's hard to believe that you suspected," Joan said.

"I didn't, really," Virgil said, again, without much contrition. "I'm just investigating."

JOAN DIDN'T INVITE him in, when they stopped at her house. Her attitude wasn't exactly frosty, he decided as he pulled away, but she was thinking about him, about her mother, about Jim, and about her father.

After he dropped her off, Virgil called Davenport in St. Paul, got the cell-phone number for Sandy, the researcher, and caught her as she was walking back to her apartment from class at the university.

"I need massive Xeroxes," he told her. "I need income tax returns for a whole bunch of people. Do you have a pencil? Okay: William Judd Sr., William Judd Jr., a whole family named Stryker"-he spelled it for her-"including Mark, Laura, James, and Joan, also a Roman and Gloria Schmidt, husband and wife, Russell and Anna Gleason, husband and wife, Margaret and Jesse Laymon, mother and daughter. They all live in Stark County, most of them in Bluestem, and the Laymons live in the town of Roche. R-O-C-H-E. Can you do that?"

"Yes. Want me to run them through the other agencies-department of public safety, corrections, all that?"

"Everything you can find on them. Put it in a FedEx and see if you can deliver it to the Holiday Inn in Bluestem, tomorrow."

"Never happen," she said. "How far is Bluestem from here?"

"Four hours."

"I'll get it there, one way or another. I'll talk to Lucas," she said.

While he was talking with Sandy, Virgil pulled into the courthouse parking lot. When he closed the phone, he went inside, found the district court judge, told him what he needed, then drove out to the Schmidt house.

The day was turning hot, the leaves on the trees turning over, giving them a silvery look in the breeze; and the corn popped and rustled in the fields along the way out.

Schmidt's body had been removed, but not until after a photographer from the Sioux Falls paper, with a lens two feet long, and a monopod, had skulked into the cornfield across the street, and had taken several shots before he was noticed, and the sight line blocked with a patrol car.

Big Curly wanted to seize the photographer at gunpoint, but Stryker contented himself with having a chat with the editor about good taste and the feelings of relatives, along with possible criminal-trespass charges and a future lack of cooperation if the photos got published.

"A trespass charge wouldn't hold up in Minnesota," he told Virgil. "We gotta hope his editors don't know that."

"Ah, newspapers don't print body shots too often," Virgil said. "I hope."

GLORIA SCHMIDT'S BODY was still in the bedroom, but it would be moved as soon as the people from the funeral home got back. Processing of the house was still under way: "Probably won't be done until tomorrow morning," Stryker said.

"I'm itchy to get in there and look at their paper," Virgil said.

"We gotta process. I'm trying to stay out of there myself," Stryker said.

"I know…all right. I'll go down to the bank and look at records. Did your guys see a bank safe-deposit key in there anywhere?"

"Not me-I can check," Stryker said. "C'mon around back."

Virgil followed Stryker around the side of the house and in the back door, into a mudroom. "Probably be in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, or a drawer in the home office," Virgil said.

Inside, it was cooler, but with the smell of blood and body gases in the air. Stryker stopped at the mudroom door and called, "Hey, Margo."

"Yeah?" A woman's voice from the front of the house.

"Have you seen anything that looked like a safe-deposit key?"

"Yeah. You want it?"

"Is it a problem?" Stryker called.

"No problem. Under his socks in the bureau. Doesn't look like anybody touched it."

"All right…"

Stryker said to Virgil, "We've got media. They're calling. I've set up a press conference for three o'clock in the main courtroom. You gotta be there."

"I will be."

A MOMENT LATER, the redheaded crime-scene tech came out, dressed in paper pants and shirt, and handed a blue cardboard envelope to Stryker, who handed it to Virgil, and said, "Let me know if there's anything."

"Absolutely," Virgil said.

BACK IN TOWN, he went to the courthouse, picked up the subpoenas, stopped at one of Bill Judd Jr.'s Subways and got a sandwich for lunch, then continued on to the bank. The manager first opened the Schmidt box, where Virgil found paper-insurance, deeds, wills, old photographs-and no money. He did find a ring made of solid gold, with a small diamond inset, and the name Vera Schmidt engraved inside. Roman Schmidt's mother?

There were two curiosities.

In a yellow legal envelope he found a photograph of a blond woman, nude, lying faceup on what appeared to be a medical examiner's table. Half of her face was torn and bloody, her mouth was slightly open, and one side of her body was covered with what appeared to be purple bruising. She was clearly dead. Nothing else: no name, no date.

The other was a mortgage, dated 5-11-70, for the house where the Schmidts had been murdered. The mortgage loan came from Bill Judd Sr., for fifteen years, at four percent interest. The mortgage had a retirement paper clipped to it, paid in full in 1985, right on time.

Virgil wasn't sure what the mortgage loan rates were in 1970, but four percent seemed low. The payments were listed as $547 a month, and that seemed high for the time. Maybe there was some land attached to the house, Virgil thought; he'd check.

Was the death of the woman somehow involved with the granting of the mortgage? Schmidt would have been in his first few years as sheriff…Had Judd been involved with the death of the woman?

Or Judd Jr.? Virgil didn't know exactly how old Judd Jr. was, but he appeared to be near sixty. If something related to the photograph happened at the time Judd gave Schmidt the mortgage, that would put Junior in his early twenties, prime woman-killing time. Had to think about it.

He went back to the photograph, and looked at it for a long time. The print had started to fade, but the original was carefully done-professionally done. Would a newspaper back then have the ability to shoot color? Might that provide a date? In the corner of the shot, he saw equipment that he thought might not be medical: it might be embalming equipment, but having never seen any mortuary gear, he wasn't sure…