VIRGIL CALLED JOHNSTONE: "Gerald, did you ever go up to Judd's house?"

"Oh, yeah. Several times. I wasn't real popular with him, because I was the mortician and he was sort of superstitious. But I did go a few times."

"Did he have a pool table?"

"Oh, sure. He had everything. Swimming pool, pool room, hot tub…he had all that stuff. The joke was, his decorator was Playboy magazine."

KATE KLEIN SAID, "Pool room?"

"Yup."

"God, you lead such a neat life," she said. "If only you were a rich doctor, I might have married you."

"You woulda had to get in line," Klein said. "This boy's been married so often he's got rice burns on his face."

16

Saturday night, nowhere to go.

He thought about calling Davenport, but he'd been leaning on Davenport too hard, and decided to let it go. Instead, he checked into the St. Paul Hotel, put on a fresh pair of jeans, a Flaming Lips T-shirt, buffed up his boots, and headed over to the Minnesota Music Cafe for a couple of beers.

Bumped into Shrake, who was there with a big-haired secretary from the Department of Agriculture; she said she dated him because he had a big gun. Then Shrake wanted to know what happened with the Johnstones, and a couple of St. Paul cops came over, and Virgil danced with a woman who had a butterfly tattoo around her navel. He'd gone back for a third beer when a woman's hand slipped into his back jeans pocket and a familiar voice said, "I'd know that little butt anywhere."

He turned and said, "Goddamn, Jeanie. How've you been?"

She said, "Okay," and to a girlfriend, she said, "This is my first ex-husband, Virgil Flowers. I'm either his second or third ex-wife, I forget which."

"Be nice," Virgil said. He looked her over and she did look okay: prosperous, even. "Still in real estate?"

She rolled her eyes: "Yes. Shouldn't admit it, the way it's fallen out of bed, but…nothing like selling a house. Makes me feel good."

So they chatted awhile, and he started remembering some of the better times they'd had, and then she patted him on the chest and said, "Guess what? I might get married again."

"Hey…great, man," Virgil said. "Anybody I know?"

"No, no. He's at Wells Fargo, a vice president in the mortgage department. Known him for years."

"And he's available because…"

She shrugged. "His marriage broke up. Same old stuff. Everybody works, nobody talks."

"He got kids?" Virgil asked.

"Two; but he'd like a couple more."

"Does he dance?"

She laughed: "Not like you, Virgil. He does, but like a banker."

"Ouch."

Pretty good time, all in all, and he danced with the girlfriend a couple of times, and at one o'clock in the morning, a little drunk, rolled into bed at the hotel, all alone.

Thought about God for a while.

Sunday NOT EXACTLY HUNGOVER, but a little lonely. He got cleaned up, got breakfast, checked out of the hotel, and drove over to the Historical Society. The library was closed. He called around, and the duty officer, which was not her title, but what she did, led him to the microfilm machines, and got him the missing roll of microfilm.

He spooled through it, found the paper that came out on July 24, the first one after the man-on-the-moon party, and there it was.

A "miracle baby" was delivered to a twenty-nine-year-old Minneapolis woman moments before she died at the Bluestem Memorial Hospital emergency room Sunday night after an automobile accident on Buffalo Ridge.

Margaret (Maggie) Lane of 604 Washington Avenue, Minneapolis, apparently lost control of her car as she was leaving a "man on the moon" party at the home of William Judd Sr. Witnesses say the car plunged over the Buffalo Jump bluff after leaving the driveway fifty yards below the Judd house.

An autopsy revealed.07 percent blood alcohol, below the legal limit, and Judd said that "Maggie had only a glass of wine or two during the party."

"This is an awful tragedy," Judd said. "She was a warm, interesting woman and nobody ever had a thing bad to say about her."

Stark County sheriff Roman Schmidt said that deputies interviewed all the partygoers, and were satisfied that Lane's death was accidental. "She'd only been to the Judd house a couple of times. She wasn't legally drunk, but she may have had enough that she became confused as she was leaving, and turned the wrong way as she came over the shoulder of the hill," Schmidt said.

A witness called the volunteer fire department, and a rescue squad reached the car within ten minutes. Lane was taken to the emergency room, where Dr. Russell Gleason delivered a healthy 7-pound, 4-ounce full-term baby even as the boy's mother was dying of extensive and what Gleason called "surely fatal" brain injuries.

The baby will be remanded to the care of Minnesota child-protective services…

There was one bad photograph of the wrecked car sitting at the base of the bluff. The picture had been taken with a flash of some kind-were flashbulbs still used by news photographers in 1969? There were a few white faces in the background, unrecognizable, and three cops close to the car. One of them was a young Big Curly.

THE NEXT PAPER came out on July 31, and oddly, Virgil thought, there was no mention of the Miracle Baby. Not a single word. In his hometown, he thought, there would have been recurring stories for a month.

He went to the dailies at Worthington and Sioux Falls, and found stories similar to that from the Bluestem Record. But the dailies were farther away, and the death happened the same day of the first manned landing on the moon, and so was tucked away in the back of the papers.

He thought about it for a while, then called Stryker, and told him about the story. "You know, I've never heard that," Stryker said. "You would have thought I'd have heard it. I mean, it'd be something that people talked about."

"Got drowned out by the noise from the moon landing," Virgil said. "So go over to the hospital, and find out what happened to the kid. I mean, kick somebody's ass off the golf course, and find out where he went."

"I'll do that."

VIRGIL HUNG OUT at the Historical Society for a while, looking at an exhibit on early photography, all those Civil War guys with white eyes and stolid faces. Stryker called back: "Nothing there. I mean, there's something there, but it's nothing. The child was turned over to protective services on August second. That's it. You'll have to work it from that end."

"And it's Sunday."

Stryker: "Wonder what's happening with the DEA?"

"That's what I'm wondering. If I stay up here, and it goes down tomorrow, I could miss it."

"Well…get the research chick to work it," Stryker suggested. "Get back here. I've been thinking about it, and it's all Feur. No mystery, no weirdness. Just Feur."

"Give me the logic," Virgil said.

"We've got a series of huge crimes, murders," Stryker said. "Then we find out there's a professional criminal, right in our backyard, selling dope all over the country, and he's been doing it for years. Back at the beginning, he needed seed money to get started, and he needed a way to hide the operation. That's about the time all these little farmer-sponsored ethanol plants were popping up. This crime we know about, with Feur, involves some of the same people involved in the others: the Judds. I don't know how you tie the Gleasons in, but I could see a reason for Roman Schmidt: Schmidt was monitoring the cops through the Curlys. The Curlys might not even have known about the rest of it. You say Schmidt was willing to cover up a murder, take money for it. When you've done it once, you'll do it again. In fact, the Judds might even have pulled him into it."