ON JULY 20, 1969, the day that Apollo 11 landed the first men on the moon, Johnstone said, Bill Judd Sr. had a party at his house on Buffalo Ridge, to watch the crescent moon come up. The state park had not yet gone in, and the road up to the house was nothing more than a long gravel driveway, coming over the back of the hill, to the back of the house.

The party was right in the heart of the Bill Judd tomcatting days, seven or eight women and four or five men, some of the women local, two or three of them "entertainers" from the Cities.

"I honest to God don't know what happened up there," Johnstone said. "All I know is what I heard through the back door. They supposedly had some cocaine, maybe, and plenty of liquor, of course, and were generally up there raising hell. They also had a cookout going.

"So late that night, one of the girls-but maybe not one of the girls, this is what's crazy, because you're not going to get a bunch of guys, you know, having sex relations with a woman who's nine months pregnant. I don't even know if she could…"

He looked at his wife who said, "It'd be uncomfortable."

Johnstone started to tap-dance. "You hear things, over the years…What I'm telling you, could be all wrong…"

"Just tell me, Gerald," Virgil said. "I'll sort it out."

"The story was, something happened between this woman and Judd. The other people were out in the yard with a telescope, seeing if they could see the men on the moon. There wasn't any chance, of course, but they had this telescope and they were way up on the ridge and they were drunk…"

"Gerald: the pregnant woman."

Johnstone nodded. "So late at night, they're out there, and they see a car that looks like it's come off the driveway. It's going down the hill, away from the party, sort of aimed down this crease in the hillside, and people are going crazy, yelling, they think the woman in it is drunk and lost, and they run down that way…

"And damned if she doesn't drive the car right off Buffalo Jump," he said.

"The bluff."

"Right below Judd's house. Supposedly, Indians used to stampede buffalo right off the cliff. So this car goes over the side and people are running around yelling and screaming. Judd comes running out of the house, and then he and a couple of guys jump in a car and they go tearing down the driveway and around to the bottom of the jump…

"And in the meantime, one of the other girls said, 'She's gotta be hurt bad,' so they called the fire department and the fire boys got a rescue truck headed out that way."

"She was killed," Virgil said.

"Yeah, but not right then. She was what we call brain-dead now-she had head injuries, and neck injuries, but her heart was still going when Judd and the other guys pulled her out of the car. Then the fire boys got there and they hauled her over to the hospital. She died in the emergency room, but the doctor…"

"Gleason," Virgil said.

Johnstone stared at his daughter for a long time-ten seconds, fifteen-and then he sighed and said, "Yeah. Russell Gleason. Russ delivered the baby. Tough delivery, but the baby lived. There was a story in the paper, called it the 'Miracle Baby.'"

"So why would somebody kill Gleason for delivering the baby?" Virgil asked. "If he was there at the emergency room, he couldn't have been at the party, he had nothing to do with the woman."

"That I can't tell you," Johnstone said. "I can tell you a rumor, and I can tell you a thought that passed through my mind."

Virgil flicked his fingers at Johnstone, a "gimme" gesture.

Johnstone said, "There was a rumor that the woman hadn't been there for the party. Hadn't been invited. That she came down on her own from the Cities, in her own car, and that she'd been there before the party, and had had a fight with Bill. Bill could be rough as a cob.

"Nobody knows what happened, but there were rumors that he wasn't right there with everybody else when they saw the car rolling down the hill. He came running out of the house a minute or so later. The question was…Where was he when the car came off the driveway? Once it came off the driveway, going down that seam in the hill, it was going to go over the bluff. Was the woman committing suicide? Why didn't she turn, or put on the brakes?"

"Or was she dead unconscious when she went in the car?" Virgil asked. "Did somebody else steer it off the driveway?"

Johnstone's head bobbed: "It could have been done. Could have rolled the car down to the seam, let it go, run back over the shoulder of the hill-this was at night, remember-then up and into the house, and then out the front…"

"Was there any suggestion of that at the time?" Virgil asked.

Johnstone shook his head. "No."

"Was there an investigation?"

Quick nod.

"Roman Schmidt," Virgil said.

"Yup."

"Jerry, you really messed this up," Virgil said, lying back in the rocker and letting it rock a few times. "God help you if anybody else gets killed in the next couple of days, before I can figure this out." He rocked a few more times, and then remembered: "You said a thought passed through your mind."

"Yeah." Johnstone reached up with both hands and scratched his head above his ears, and then said, "I didn't want to tell you all of this, because I really don't know anything. But. I remember when I saw that girl's body, on the dressing table, all bashed up in the accident, cut up in the hospital…How'd she get those bruises? Some of the bruises were fresh, but they weren't fifteen minutes old. They didn't develop between the time she died and the time she went off Buffalo Jump. They were hours old. But the doctor said she died in the accident, the sheriff…"

"What happened to the miracle baby?" Virgil asked.

"Adopted out," Johnstone said. "I don't know the details to that. But, the baby was adopted out. Baby boy."

VIRGIL LEFT THEM SCARED: "You stay here. You're at risk, but if it took Shrake and Jenkins a whole day to track you down, I don't think the killer will get you. If you decide you don't want to stay here, if it starts to feel hinky, get out to a motel. You don't have to go far, to be completely lost. If you do that, you let me know. I'll give you my cell phone…"

OUT IN HIS CAR, he went through the name file on his computer, called Dr. Joe Klein.

"It's that fuckin' Flowers," Klein said, when he came up. "What do you want?"

"You going out?"

"No. I'm reading Proust, fifty pages a night, all summer," Klein said. "I'm forty-two pages in, on tonight's quota."

"Sounds like a great read, you gotta have a quota," Virgil said. "That's how I read a chemistry book one time."

"Great chatting with you, Virgil," Klein said.

"Just being sociable," Virgil said. "How's the old lady?"

"What do you want?"

"I want to come over to your house and have you look at a photograph," Virgil said.

"Will this be billable?"

"Hell, I don't know. I doubt it."

KLEIN WAS the Hennepin County medical examiner. He gave Virgil directions to his home in Edina, north and west across town, from Apple Valley. Virgil was at his front door in twenty minutes.

Klein's wife, Kate, met him at the door. She was tall, thin, with a sharp nose and gold-rimmed glasses. "Gimme a hug, you big lug," she said.

He did; and she felt kinda good…

Klein said, "That's enough of that. What's the picture?"

They took it into his home office. Kate, a pediatrician, looked over their shoulders as Klein inspected it with a magnifying glass. Klein hemmed and hawed a bit, and finally his wife said, "My, God, Joseph, you're not in federal court. Spit it out."

Klein tapped the photo, the woman's rib cage. "Your undertaker is right. If she died in fifteen or twenty minutes, these bruises didn't come from the accident. Besides, I've seen bruises like this before-this is what you get when somebody dies after a bar fight. When somebody gets beat bad with a pool cue, you see this striping effect, if it has time to develop. Say, there's a bar fight, a guy gets beat bad, dies the next day. This is what you see. If he dies right at the scene, you don't see it."