“Gary,” the voice said. “Is there something new?”

“Um, sorry, Sheriff,” I said; I nearly hung up when I heard his voice. “It’s not Loushine. It’s Holland Taylor.”

“Goddammit, Taylor,” Orman muttered.

“I’m sorry, Sheriff,” I told him quickly. “I just wanted to find out how … Michael is doing”

“She’s still in a coma,” Orman told me.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated.

A moment of silence passed between us before the sheriff asked, “You really care about her, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I surprised myself by answering. I’d spent weeks examining every aspect of her life, so of course I cared about her—at least that’s how I justified my feelings to myself. “I only met her that one time, but it feels like I’ve known her all my life,” I added.

“I feel the same way,” the sheriff admitted. Then he said, “I don’t want you calling here again.”

I promised I wouldn’t and hung up.

My next call was to Hunter Truman, whose reaction was surprisingly subdued as I told him that the Kreel County Sheriff’s Department was giving me carte blanche in finding out who had shot Alison and why. I guess he had been looking forward to the lawsuit.

He asked how Alison was. I told him she was in a coma. His reaction surprised me again. Instead of being concerned for her well-being, he wanted to know if Duluth General Hospital—and the rest of the world—knew that she was, in fact, Mrs. Alison Donnerbauer Emerton and not Michael Bettich.

“I think they’re catching on,” I told him.

“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter,” he told me.

The Forks was located northwest of Kreel County at the intersection of two blacktops and three snowmobile trails. It was a flat, sprawling, ornate complex wholly out of place in the Northland; it had started small but had expanded every which way, until it could now boast 23 blackjack tables, 262 slot machines, and 36 bingo tables. It was simple enough to find. I just followed the bright glow in the sky—the casino had twin searchlights mounted in its parking lot, scanning the heavens for gamblers. I wondered if the Three Wise Men had felt the same way when they followed their celestial beacon to the King of Kings. Probably not.

Along with gambling paraphernalia, The Forks housed a restaurant where you could get a drink but only if you also ordered food. The waitress, who was white, told me it was “a tribal thing.” The Ojibwa had suffered enough alcohol abuse in their history without promoting it themselves. I passed on the buffet. Buffets are for old people who need to see the food they’re ordering—my grandfather told me so. Instead, I asked the waitress what was good and went with her recommendation of prime rib. That’s when I discovered that The Forks served no Minnesota beers: no Pig’s Eye, no Landmark, no Summit Ale. I brought the obvious prejudice to her attention, and she reminded me with only a hint of impatience that I could drive to the Minnesota border in an hour if I kicked it. I settled for a Beck’s.

The restaurant was elevated about eight feet and looked out over a handsomely carved railing to the gambling area. Like the protesters at the church in Deer Lake, I can’t bring myself to call it “gaming.” Watch the intense, humorless faces of the people sitting at the tables or perched in front of the slots, and then tell me it’s a game.

Still, I’m fairly ambivalent about casino gambling. It’s not something I like to do. For one thing the odds are appalling; you’re six times more likely to catch malaria than you are to win the big jackpot on a typical three-wheel slot machine. For another, I believe we have only so much luck in our lives, and I’m loathe to squander it playing twenty-one. But, then, I’m a fully insured, independent contractor who likes his job and has a couple of hundred thousand dollars tucked away in various IRAs. Most people aren’t as fortunate. When they buy a lottery ticket or pump a quarter into a slot, they’re buying something that their lives don’t already give them: hope. Hope that lightning will strike, and they’ll become independently wealthy and won’t have to work that demeaning job anymore or put up with that terrible boss or go another year without a decent home or car or whatever. They’re buying a tiny chance on a kind of Reader’s Digest sweepstakes dream that they’ll gain complete control of their lives and live happily ever after. And who am I to ridicule their fantasy and the short-term pleasure that pursuing it brings them?

Certainly there was at least one believer on the casino floor. I heard her shriek, “Five thousand dollars!” while I was waiting for my meal. The words cut through the crowd like a gunshot. Several hundred people became suddenly quiet; then a ripple of applause brought the volume back up as the woman danced around a dollar slot machine, hugging complete strangers who had encircled her to share her good fortune.

“Double or nothing! Double or nothing!” a woman in the restaurant shouted. I turned to look at her. She was seated six tables away, and I could see her profile.

“Hundred bucks says she blows it before the night is out,” she bet her companion and laughed again. It was a joyless laugh, high-pitched and forced. I think the laugh was more recognizable to me than the face. Both belonged to Eleanor Koehn, King’s wife, the “slush” Gretchen Rovick had pointed out during my first visit to Deer Lake.

Her companion scanned the eyes of the restaurant patrons as they turned toward Eleanor, and he pulled in his head like a turtle.

“What are you afraid of?” Eleanor demanded scornfully.

Her date didn’t reply, and Eleanor slapped him hard. I could feel it even where I was sitting. He stared glassy-eyed at her for a moment, then swiveled his head around fearfully, looking for something, seeing nothing. She spoke softly to him, and he replied with a wide grin. She laughed again, took his face in her hands, and kissed him. While she was kissing him, she straddled his lap, her skirt hiked up to there. When she was finished, she laughed some more and called him, “My little doughboy.”

“Enjoying the floor show?” the waitress asked, placing a platter in front of me.

“Better than the afternoon soaps,” I told her, and she grunted. She must have alerted the management because a moment later a tall Native-American gentleman meticulously dressed in matching jacket and tie approached the table. He said something quietly, and Eleanor removed herself from her date’s lap. She smiled seductively and brushed the manager’s cheek with her fingertips as she returned to her chair.

“Champagne!” she called, slapping the table, rattling the remains of their dinner. “A big bottle.”

Her date bowed his head and said nothing.

A bottle was brought to the table in a bucket of ice and opened expertly by the waitress, much to Eleanor’s obvious disappointment. She no doubt had wanted to try shooting out one of the overhead lights with the cork. Still, whatever the manager had said must have registered because although Eleanor poured liberally from the bottle, she remained comparatively quiet.

I grew bored with the show by the time I had finished the prime rib and signaled for the tab, paying by credit card. That’s when a man entered the restaurant and approached Eleanor and her date like he had been expected all along. He was a big, soft-bellied man with gray hair that may or may not have been his own. It was King Koehn. I knew it without knowing him.

After taking my receipt, I ordered another beer, deciding to wait for the second act. The waitress sniffed at me and turned away. Near as I could tell, she had no sense of humor. Perhaps she had never been unhappy enough to develop one. Either that or she simply didn’t appreciate the entertainment value of a good public brawl between husband and wife.

King Koehn spoke with the clear, booming voice of a practiced politician. I could understand every word he said from fifty feet.