THEY CHATTED for another minute, then he closed the phone. All right: if they'd been in Sioux Falls at eight-thirty, Stryker picked her up at eight, and would have been available to do the shooting. Why? That was another question, but knowing who was available was a step in the right direction.

Though he really, really didn't think Stryker had anything to do with it.

Really.

HE STOPPED AT the courthouse, found Stryker leaning in the window at the assessor's, chatting with a clerk. He straightened when he saw Virgil, and Virgil asked, "You got a minute?"

"Yup." As they walked away from the assessor's desk, Stryker said, "Larry called me, said you got a letter this morning…"

They went into Stryker's office and closed the door, and Virgil sat in a visitor's chair and grinned and said, "I don't know how to exactly approach this particular report…"

"Spit it out."

"A friend of mine from here in town…"

"Joanie…"

"…and I decided to go for a swim last night, and she knew this famous local swimming hole…"

Stryker's eyebrows went up. "You went skinny-dipping up at the dell? With my baby sister?"

"Yeah."

"Do any good?"

"Somebody with a rifle ambushed us," Virgil said.

He was watching Stryker's face, and Stryker's smile died so naturally that it seemed impossible that he already knew. "What!"

"Two shots, from up on that hillside. Trying to hit me, not Joanie," Virgil said.

"Virgil…"

"I hit a nerve someplace," Virgil said.

"Holy shit, man." Stryker bucked up in his chair, the wheels skittering over the plastic floor-protecter. "You gotta stay away from Joanie until this is over. Jesus, he coulda killed both of you. Like shooting sitting ducks, down in there…"

"Yeah. I've been trying to figure out why he missed. Maybe just a bad shot," Virgil said.

They talked about it for a couple of minutes, then Virgil said, "They're not after Joanie, whoever it is. I think…I gotta run down the letter from this morning. Are you looking at prints?"

"Yeah, they're doing the glue thing right now…"

"All right." Virgil pushed out of his chair. "I got one more thing-I tell you because you're a friend. I was going through Roman Schmidt's e-mail this morning. Big Curly was trying to get Schmidt to support Little Curly in a run against you this fall. They were talking back and forth, going over the possibilities."

Stryker rubbed his chin with his forefinger: "Doesn't surprise me," he said. "What'd Roman have to say?"

"He suggested that they don't do anything until they get closer to the election, see which way the wind is blowing. Didn't say no."

VIRGIL WAS WALKING back to his car when a tall, older man in a white straw hat yelled at him. "Hey! Mr. Flowers…"

Virgil waited by his truck as the man cut across the street and came up to him. He was gray haired, weathered, wiry, in jeans and a golf shirt. "I'm Andy Clay, I live up by the Johnstones? And, you know, where the Gleasons used to live?"

"Yeah, how are you?"

"Fine. Well, maybe not," Clay said. "I want to tell you something, just between you and me, and maybe ask a question."

"No problem."

"I saw you at the Johnstones' yesterday. Everybody in town knows who you are, now," Clay said. "Anyway, later on, I was down at the gas station, getting gas for my mower, and Carol pulls up in their Lexus truck. She doesn't even say 'hi,' she just starts filling it up and washing the windshield and she looks like she's in a hurry. So I went on back up the hill, and I'm gassing up the mower and here comes Carol in the Lexus. She parks in the driveway instead of the garage, and then here comes Gerald out the front door with a big bag, and he throws it in the truck. Then they both go back inside and then they come out with a couple more bags-I'm mowing the lawn by this time-and then she locks the door, and they take off."

"Take off?" Virgil asked. "You mean, like getting out of town?"

"Unless they were donating a bunch of suitcases to the Goodwill," Clay said. "The thing is, they've got these timer lights, that turn the lights on and off when they're gone? Well, everybody up there knows about them, and they were going last night. One comes on here, another goes off there. Then the first one goes off, and the second one comes on. You know. It's almost like a signal: The Johnstones are gone."

"Huh," Virgil said. He thought about it for a moment, then said, "So what's the question?"

"We were talking about it last night, up on the hill," Clay said. "Should we all get out?"

THE FUCKIN' JOHNSTONES, Virgil thought as he went back to the motel.

Too late to get the highway patrol to drag them back. Gerald Johnstone knew something about the picture of the dead woman, and Virgil needed to know what it was.

Time for threats, now-if he could find them. Didn't they say something about visiting a daughter in Minneapolis?

He called Davenport. "I got a couple of people who may be running. Not the killers, but they know something. If Jenkins and Shrake are sitting on their asses…"

He explained and told Davenport that he didn't know the daughter's name. "We can probably find it in the vital records," Davenport said. "I'll get the guys on it. They've been restless."

"Well, Jesus, don't let them beat these people up," Virgil said. "These are old people."

"You mean, we should only beat up young people?" Davenport asked. "There are as many old assholes as there are young ones. Especially since the boomers got old."

"Yeah, well…I'd just as soon my witnesses didn't die of a heart attack. Tell them to take it easy. No kicking."

"I thought you wanted them scared," Davenport said.

"A little scared," Virgil said. "Not too scared."

AT THE MOTEL, the desk clerk had three cardboard boxes, sealed with tape, stashed behind the counter: "A guy brought them in a half hour ago. He said they were from St. Paul."

They felt like boxes of bricks. Virgil hauled them to his room and unloaded the stacks of paper. Too much stuff, but it had to be looked at. Some of it, anyway.

Before he started on it, he called Davenport again, got a name, called a guy at the secretary of state's office, and found that he could look at all current corporate records, online, including the confidential files, if he had a password. "I'll set you up with a temporary password: chuzzlewit," said the guy, whose name was Martin. He spelled the password. "That'll be good through next Wednesday. If you need another one, call me up again."

"What's a chuzzlewit?"

"It's a word unlikely to be figured out by some little hacker-geek between now and Wednesday," Martin said.

SO VIRGIL, reluctant to start on the pile of paper, pulled out his laptop, stared at it for a moment. A problem had been pecking at the back of his mind for a day or so, and he put in the disk that Stryker had given him on the first day, the one with the paperwork on the Gleason killing. Included with everything else were a couple of hundred jpg photographs of the crime scene. He combed over them for a half hour, then, satisfied, said, "Huh."

No Revelation, as far as he could see.

THEN HE WENT online with the secretary of state's office and searched for Florence Mills, Inc.

Florence Mills, according to the information in the original filing, had been created three years earlier to "build, buy, or lease facilities for the production of corn-based and switchgrass-based ethanol as a renewable fuel," a joint venture between Arno Partners, a limited liability company registered in Delaware, and St. John Ventures, of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Not much there. He had a feeling that the Delaware company would be hard to check. Delaware was an easy place to set up a corporation, requiring minimal information, and a stickler for legal procedures when you wanted to mine their corporate records.