"I don't think she had a will," Davies said. "She was pretty sure she'd live forever."

"She had a will somewhere," Harcourt said. "She was too… not calculating, but rational… not to have a will."

"Oh, for Christ's sakes, Lawrence, the woman was calculating," Mann snapped. To Virgil: "They called her the SST at the office. Stainless Steel Twat."

Virgil asked Mann, with a smile, "So… were you on the list? To be fired?"

"Oh, fuck no," Mann said. "She went out of her way to let me know that."

"Barney runs our major accounts and they're pretty happy with him. If he were to leave, he might take some of them with him," Harcourt said. He added, "I had reason to believe that Erica was planning to offer him a partnership. Or a share."

Mann cocked his head. "Really? Well, that's a shot in the ass."

Virgil threw his hands up. "So? What happens now? With the agency?"

Mann and Harcourt looked at each other, then Mann turned back and said, "I don't know."

Harcourt said to Mann, "We need to make arrangements here and get back to the Cities. We need a board meeting. Immediately. We have to have a new management in place by Monday, before the clients start calling."

"What's going to happen to me?" Davies asked. "What's going to happen?"

Again, Harcourt and Mann looked at each other. Neither one said, "I don't know," but Virgil could see it in their faces; and so could Davies.

VIRGIL GOT OUT his notebook and jotted down a few thoughts, then talked to Harcourt, Mann, and Davies individually. Harcourt and Mann both said that they'd been in the Cities the day before, and gave Virgil a list of people they'd seen during the day. Unless one of them was telling a desperate lie, the alibis would eliminate them as the killer, because the Cities were simply too far away to get back and forth easily.

Davies, on the other hand, had no alibi. She'd been sick the morning before, she said, and when she finally got out of bed, it was almost noon. She went grocery shopping at a chain supermarket where they'd be unlikely to remember having seen her. Still feeling logy-"I think I ate something bad"-she'd spent the day cleaning, watching a movie on DVD, and then had gone to bed early, with a book. Neither a DVD nor a book would leave an electronic trace.

She picked up on the direction of the questioning and protested, "I wouldn't ever do anything to hurt Erica-I love Erica. She was the love of my life. We've been together for six years… I don't know anything about guns. I've never been here. I didn't even know exactly where it was…"

"Did you or Erica have outside relationships? Was your relationship, uh, an open relationship?"

"No. No, it wasn't open," she said. "I mean, back at the beginning, we both were dating other people simultaneously, if you see what I mean…"

"I know what you mean," Virgil said.

"… but once I moved in, we were committed."

Virgil nodded. "Okay. I believe you when you say you wouldn't want to hurt Erica, but I had to ask-you know, if there had been another person, if there was a sexual tension, if she'd started pulling away from the other person, to stay with you."

"Why wouldn't the other person have shot me?" Davies said. "Why would you shoot the one you want?"

"Because you shoot the one who rejects you," Virgil said. "Hell hath no fury…"

Davies slumped. "Oh, God. You know, there might have been one fling. She might have had one relationship, but she broke it off a year ago."

"With who?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I was afraid to ask. I was afraid if I asked, it would precipitate something. Instead, I just went out of my way to… attach myself more firmly."

"You must at least suspect a person, a name…"

She said, "Look. I only suspect a relationship. I'm not even sure there was one. It could have been a bad time at work. We didn't talk about her work. She didn't want to. Our relationship was her way of getting away from work. So it's possible that what I thought was a distracting relationship was actually something else. So, no. I don't have a name. Or a suspect."

SHE LOOKED SO TIRED and beat-up that Virgil let her go. Mann and Harcourt had gone with Margery Stanhope to call the funeral home, to see if the body had already been shipped to the medical examiner at Ramsey County, or if further arrangements had to be made. Virgil lingered down the hall from Stanhope's office until he saw Mann emerge, turn away, and head toward the front of the lodge. He caught him just as Mann stepped into the bar.

"Mr. Mann…"

Mann looked back over his shoulder, then nodded to the bar. "I need a drink."

At the bar, the bartender looked at him and said, "Sir, this bar is basically ladies only-"

"Just give me a goddamn drink, honey," Mann said.

"Sir-" Still apologetic.

Mann cut her off: "I came up here to take care of Erica McDill. If you don't give me a drink, I'll sue you for discrimination in so many different directions that you'll be an old woman before you get out of court. A martini, a double, two olives, and I want to see you make it and I don't want to see you spit in it, because then I'd have to throw you out the fuckin' window."

"Relax," Virgil said. The bartender, anger on her face, stepped away, picked up a shaker, and scooped up some ice.

"Relax, my ass. As soon as I get a couple drinks under my belt, I'm gonna go rent a car, and me and Harcourt are headed back to the Cities," Mann said. "What a waste of time. What are we doing up here? We need to be down there."

"You'll take Miss Davies with you?"

"Yeah, I guess, if she wants to go," Mann said. He watched as the bartender finished making the drink. "But she's sort of a prune."

The bartender pushed the martini across the bar and said, "Choke on it, motherfucker."

Mann grinned at her, then at Virgil, said, "They got a tough brand of bartender up here." He sipped the drink. "Make a pretty good martini, though." He'd put a ten on the bar, and the bartender slapped five dollars back in change. He pushed it into the bar gutter as a tip.

The bartender, a bottle-redhead with dark-penciled eyebrows, with a name tag that said Kara, looked at the money, then at Virgil, and said, "You're the police officer. People said it was the surfer-looking guy."

"Yes," Virgil said.

Mann looked him over and said, "You are sort of surfer-looking."

"Cute, for a cop," the bartender said, softening a bit on Mann.

"He is cute," Mann said. "I'd fuck him myself, if I were gay."

"Guys," Virgil said. "Shut up."

The bartender looked at him for a beat, then another, then made a tiny dip of her head toward the back of the bar, and wandered away. Mann had been concentrating on his drink, said, "What a day."

"When you're on the way back, and I expect either Miss Davies or Mr. Harcourt will be driving, because you'll have done this drinking…"

Mann grinned again and said, "You're an optimist, son."

"… so when you're on the way back, make up a list of the people who would have been fired. Especially the ones who'd be most bitter, and the women."

"You really think a woman did it?"

"At this point, it's the best bet," Virgil said. "Though I take you seriously about those people down at the agency. I've been thinking about it, and looking at Google Earth, and the maps, and the fact that people down at the agency knew where Erica was going, and when, and she probably talked about what she did up here. I've recalculated. It might be fifty-fifty on whether the killer was from up here or down there."

"You think?" Mann sucked the life out of an olive, then popped it into his mouth.

"Which brings me to ask, who did McDill have that affair with, last year? Ended about a year ago. Somebody at the agency?"

There was about one long suck of alcohol left in the martini glass, and Mann paused with the rim of the glass an inch from his lip, stared straight ahead for a minute, thinking, then turned to Virgil and said, "So… Ruth knew about it, huh?"