"I don't know," Virgil said. "If somebody had to kill the Gleasons, they could have done it in a quiet way. Kill them, but don't pose them. Try to make it look like a murder-suicide. Something…But the way it was done, was nuts."

"Got your head up your ass, Virgil. It's Feur."

Virgil scratched his nose, made the call: "I'm coming back."

HE WAS BACK by five o'clock, having stopped in Mankato to check his mail, pay bills, and run a load of laundry through the washer and dryer. Before he left home, he went into his closet and took out his third-most-favorite deer rifle, a Browning Lightweight Stalker semiauto in.30-06, an extra magazine, and a box of cartridges. The rifle wasn't as accurate as his best bolt action, but it was as accurate as he was, and could put some heavy metal on a target in a big hurry.

Heading west, into the sun, he could feel some kind of climax just over the horizon: too many things going on, not to have something shake loose.

THAT NIGHT, they went out to Barnet's Supper Club in Sioux Falls, five of them-Stryker and Jesse Laymon, Virgil and Joan, and Laura Stryker. There was one tough moment on the way over, when Laura told Jesse that she should get Stryker to take her up swimming at the dell some hot night.

Jesse giggled and admitted that they'd already been. Then Joan and Virgil had to spontaneously join in teasing Stryker, and they pulled it off. And then the three women began working on Virgil and Stryker. Something was up with the case, they knew, but Virgil and Stryker weren't talking.

Later that evening, Virgil was looking at the jukebox when Laura Stryker came by, on the way back to their table from the women's room, and she stopped and asked, "Are you and Joanie going to get serious? You look like it."

"Not that serious," Virgil said. "She gave me a little talk. I'm not husband material. I'm her transition guy."

"Damn it. I need a grandchild," Laura said. "I want to be around long enough that my grandchild can remember his grandmother."

"You've got a few years," Virgil said.

"I've got enough years to be a great-grandmother," Laura said. "But one side of the family stops when Joan's clock runs out. I think Jim and Jesse…I think I've got something going there."

They both turned and looked at Joan, who was leaning across their table, making a point to Stryker and Jesse. "She'll be okay," Virgil said. "I'm her transition guy, but I wouldn't be surprised if she has somebody picked out, on the other side of the transition zone."

"I hope so," Laura said, "or I'd suggest that you go ahead and knock her up."

Before they left, Virgil went out in the parking lot and called Sandy, Davenport's researcher, who'd just gotten back from a weekend trip. "Goddamnit, honey, you picked a bad time to go away. I need you to get some stuff for me tomorrow morning, and I need you to rain fire and brimstone on anybody who stands in your way. A woman named Margaret Lane, also known as Maggie, was killed in an auto accident on July 20, 1969…"

He gave her the rest of the details and said, "Find that kid."

Monday VIRGIL WOKE UP in Joan's bed. She was lying flat on her back, her head cocked off to one side, and a less charitable man might have said that she was snoring, if only softly. She was wearing a T-shirt as a nightgown and had pushed down the sheet. He pulled it up to her chin, then slipped out of his side of the bed, yawned, stretched, did some sit-ups and push-ups, as quietly as he could, then got his clothes and walked naked down the hall to the bathroom. He used her toothpaste, which was a cinnamon-flavored gel, and scrubbed his teeth with his index finger. When he came back down the hall, pulling yesterday's shirt over his head, she cracked her eyes and said, "I'm not getting up yet."

"That's okay." He looked at his watch. "Seven forty-five. I'm heading back to the motel. Call you later?"

"Call me later," she said, and closed her eyes and snuggled into the bed. He pulled on his boots, lifted the sheet, looked at her ass, said, "Masterpiece," and went on out the door. A neighbor was fooling with his sprinkler system, and when Virgil came off her porch, he raised a hand and called, "How're ya doin' Virgil?"

"Doin' good," Virgil said.

"I bet you are," the neighbor said, with cheerful, barefaced envy.

AT THE MOTEL he cleaned up, chose a Decemberists T-shirt, which he saved for days that he felt might be decisive, and called Sandy.

"Jeez, Virgil, I hardly got started. The baby was processed through the Good Hope adoption service, which seems like it might not exist anymore. I'm trying to find out what happened to their records. I'm also working it the other way, through child-protective services."

"Call me the minute you get anything: I want to know every step of the way."

She called back in ten minutes, as Virgil was sitting in the restaurant, eating pancakes and link sausage. "I've got something, but it's not specific yet."

"What is it?"

"It's the list of child-protective-service adoption actions through the district court. I can't get the files themselves, without jumping through my butt-which I'm willing to do, but there are dozens of them, and I've only got one butt."

Virgil was shocked: "Sandy, you don't talk that way."

"I'm a little cranky this morning," she said. "Anyway, what I can get, without permission, is the file headers, which I can pull up on my computer. These are the names of the adoptive parents. They're organized by year, and there are…let me see…about a hundred and seventy files for 1969. If the adoptions are randomly distributed through the year, and I don't see why they wouldn't be, the adoption of Baby Boy Lane would have taken place in the last half of the year, and probably the last four or five months. I can read the names of the eighty-five adoptive couples and see if anything rings a bell."

"Can you get the file afterward?" Virgil asked.

"We might need to do some legal stuff, but I can get Lucas to do that," she said.

"Read the names…"

She started, "Gregory, Nelson, Snyder…" He stopped her when she said, "Williamson…"

"Williamson?"

"Williamson, David and Louise."

"You gotta be kidding me," Virgil said.

"Yank the file?"

"Yank the file. Call me as soon as you get it."

VIRGIL BLEW PAST Stryker's sullen secretary into his office, shut the door, and leaned across Stryker's desk, Stryker's mouth open, and asked, "What do you know about Todd Williamson?"

Stryker said, "Todd? Came here three years ago, pisses me off, sometimes…What're we talking about?"

"He's the Miracle Baby. And after thinking about it, thinking about what Judd's sister-in-law said, about looking at him in the middle of his face…I think he might be Judd's natural son. From his eyebrows to his lips, he looks like a Judd."

"Oh…" Stryker held his hands up in the air, what next? "Jeez."

"Something else occurred to me. He's the dog that didn't bark," Virgil said.

"What?"

"He's at every crime scene-he knows everything. But I didn't see him at the Judd fire. Where the hell was he? The fire trucks went out there with their sirens screaming, where was Williamson?"

Stryker said, "I don't know. Maybe…running away from it?"

Virgil nodded: "He's the guy. Bet you a dollar."

THEY WERE TALKING to the judge about a search warrant when Sandy called again: "Lucas screamed at a man at CPS and they won't cough the file without a court order, but the guy confirmed off the record that the kid was Baby Boy Lane."

"I will kiss you on the lips next time I'm up there," Virgil said.

"I'll look forward to it," she said, primly.

THE JUDGE SUGGESTED that there was little evidence to support a search warrant.

Stryker said, "Randy, goddamnit, don't dog us around with some pissant evidence bullshit. It's about fifty percent that Todd is the killer and he's gonna do it again. I want to get all over him before he has a chance."