We muttered some words of comfort and left the club.

The detectives’ room was empty. We continued to Milo’s office, and he kept the door open and stretched in his chair. It was nearly 2 A.M.

He said, “So what’re they doing in Minnesota? Milking the cows? Harvesting wild rice?” He shook his head. “Milk-fed.”

I said, “Too early to start calling locals?”

He rubbed his eyes. “Want coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

He pulled out the picture of Christi Marsh and stared at it. “Finally, a name.” Switching on his computer, he ran her name through NCIC, the local databases. No hits. Not even a driver’s license, and her Social Security number pulled up no record of employment.

“Phantom girl,” he said.

“If she was freelancing at a cash business,” I said. “There’d be no need for record-keeping?”

“A pro, like you suspected. So where’d she meet Angie?”

“Working at a club that doesn’t file paper. Or Angie was hooking, too. The Vice guys didn’t know Christi because she was new in town, hadn’t gotten caught.”

“Minnesota,” he said. “I’ll start calling there in a couple of hours. Got lots of calls to make. Sure you don’t want some coffee? I’m gonna have some.”

“No sleep for the weary?”

“I got out of the habit.” He pushed himself to his feet, slouched away, returned with a Styrofoam cup. Plopping down, he drank, rubbed his eyes some more.

“When’s the last time you did sleep?” I said.

“Can’t recall. What, you’re fading?”

“I’m good for a while longer.”

He put his cup down. “It’s like there are two parallel things going on, the Jerry Quick side and the Albin Larsen-Sonny Koppel side. I’m having trouble putting them together. Let’s start with Jerry: shady guy, sexually inappropriate, uses prepaid phones, travels a lot, allegedly to trade metals but doesn’t make much money at it. Doesn’t pay his rent on time, chases tail, and doesn’t bother to hide it from his wife. When he’s in town, he leaves his wife alone at night so he can enjoy his favorite stripper. Eventually, he hires her away to be his alleged secretary even though her nails are too damn long for typing. Savarin was probably right, Jerry kept Angie on the side, put her in the office as a way to make it look legit. That way, she’d be in proximity if he felt like a little desktop aerobics. Now he’s gone, and so is Angie.”

“The two of them hiding out together,” I said.

“The question is: hiding from what?”

“Things are falling apart, the scam’s gone bad. Jerry and Angie know why Gavin was murdered. Know they could be next.”

He considered that. “I still can’t see any role for Quick in the scam, but who knows what the hell he’s really about… okay, so maybe he even feels guilty about Gavin, but most of all he doesn’t want the truth to come out because that’ll point the finger at him as helping cause his kid’s death. He cleans out Gavin’s room, stashes Sheila at her sister’s, plans to go back home and finish the cleanup but gets scared and lams, taking Angie with him. She’s got to be freaked out, too- losing her friend, Christi. The girl she and Jerry hooked up with Gavin, to keep Gavin happy.”

“Angie didn’t seem freaked when we talked to her,” I said. “She blinked when you showed her the picture- but that’s still pretty cool.”

“True,” he said. “Cool girl. A pro.”

“In terms of Jerry’s role in the scam, maybe he worked for Sonny as a fixit guy, some kind of procurer. What if he hired Angie away from the club for more than sex on the side? A hooker/stripper might know some cons, and cons are raw meat for the scam.”

“Jerry’s a pimp… They’d have Bennett Hacker and Ray Degussa to supply cons.”

“For all we know,” I said, “it was Jerry who put Hacker and Degussa in contact with the others. Degussa is a bouncer, and a guy like Jerry who frequents strip clubs would meet bouncers. Through Degussa, Jerry met Hacker. He introduced the two of them to Sonny Koppel, who just happened to have an interest in some halfway houses.”

“Jerry’s being Sonny’s tenant was a front, and Sonny spun us that yarn about Jerry not paying his rent to snow us.”

“And to distance himself from Jerry. An enterprising fellow like Sonny would’ve seen the opportunity. He’s got the halfway houses and, because of Jerry Quick, the contacts. Toss in an ex-wife with an interest in prison reform and her partner, a guy with a twenty-year history of making money off misery, and it would’ve seemed perfect.”

“Meeting of the nasty little minds,” he said. “Perfect till it wasn’t.”

I said, “Gavin’s accident started the downward spiral. He underwent personality changes, turned into a stalker, got busted, and needed court-ordered therapy. Sonny could fix that, by sending Gavin to someone who could be counted upon to say the right things to the court. But that good deed came back to bite him, because Gavin started thinking of himself as a muckraker. He snooped and found some serious muck.”

Milo closed his eyes, and sat without moving. For a moment I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he sat up and stared at me, blankly, as if he’d been dreaming.

I said, “You still with me?”

Slow nod.

“Jerry lied to us about the referral, made up the story about Dr. Silver being his golf partner precisely because he wanted to hide his ties to the group. He suggested it was a sex crime. Another attempt to deflect you.”

“Dear old Dad,” he said. “Claims to be a metals dealer, but he’s really a pimp.”

“With Gavin’s stalking problem, Jerry probably figured he was being a great dad by setting him up with Christi. And Gavin seemed happy, bragged to Kayla about his sex life with his new girlfriend. The only trouble was his brain injury continued to skew his thinking. He took down license numbers, including his father’s. Someone found out, and that got him and poor Christi Marsh killed. Mary Lou figured it out, and it scared the hell out of her. Bilking the Department of Corrections is one thing, murder’s another. Maybe she pressured Sonny and Larsen to drop the whole thing. She knew Sonny carried a torch for her, thought she had him under control. But cornered, Sonny wasn’t harmless, at all. And neither was Albin Larsen.”

“If Bumaya can be believed about Larsen, we’re talking monster.”

“Monster with a Ph.D.,” I said. “Clever, calculating, dangerous. Mary Lou overvalued her own charisma.”

“What about Sheila? In the dark about all of it?”

“Sheila’s got serious emotional problems. She and Jerry have been unavailable to each other for years, but he’s stuck by her for appearances. Now one kid’s out of the house, and the other’s dead. Toss in some panic, and it would be the perfect time for him to split.”

“Appearances,” said Milo. “The house, the Benz, B.H. school district for the kids. Then Gavin gets his cranium shaken up, and it all falls apart. What about the impalement? The sexual angle? For simple executions, shooting would’ve been enough.”

“The impalement’s icing on the cake,” I said. “Someone who enjoys killing. Someone who’s done it before.”

“Ray Degussa,” he said. He got up, walked to the door, looked up and down the empty corridor, said, “It’s quiet,” and sat back down. “So Mary scammed but couldn’t handle murder?”

“She could’ve rationalized the scam, told herself they were doing good, just padding the bill a bit. Who was the victim anyway? A corrupt prison bureaucracy.”

“It’s exactly the line of bullshit an asshole like Larsen would’ve fed her.” He frowned. “Problem is, this whole house of cards is predicated upon a scam, and we don’t even know one exists.”

“I’ll check with Olivia in a few hours.”

“You really think Mary Lou would be foolish enough to threaten Larsen and the others? Would she be blind to the kind of people she was dealing with?”