"Okay."

"What kind of gun do you have?" Virgil asked.

"I don't have a gun. I've got a baseball bat. Also, I've got one of those Wave radios and a CD of a Doberman barking," she said. "But I forgot about the bat and the CD last night. I'm such a twit."

"Get the locks. Go to your sister's. I'm coming back up this afternoon. I'll call you when I get there," Virgil said.

HE CALLED MAPES, with the crime-scene crew, and had them send a guy to Zoe's. Called Zoe back and told him the guy was coming. Next he checked with the medical examiner: "We got all the usual stuff, Virgil, and I can tell you she wasn't drunk or doped up, to any significant extent. There's a messy entry wound in her forehead, which I guess you saw…"

"Yeah…"

"I'm calling that a.223. Won't know for sure unless you find a slug, but we can see the rim of the impact hole, and judging from the damage it did, it sure looks like a high-powered.22 of some kind-.223 would be the best bet, could be an old.222. I don't think it's one of the small hyperspeed ones… I'm going with.223."

"Thank you."

Independent confirmation. The.223 was one of the more popular shooter's guns in the state, the same caliber used in current military assault rifles, low recoil, relatively cheap ammo, very accurate in the right gun. All he had to do was find the gun; preferably with attached fingerprints and a map of the murder scene.

And he thought: If the killer had broken into Zoe's house, then the killer was local, from Grand Rapids; she would have to have been hooked into a local gossip network to know that Zoe had been talking to Virgil.

ERICA MCDILL HAD LIVED in an area of million-dollar homes with quiet suburban streets, big yards, tall trees, and swimming pool fences in the backyards, where the backyards were visible. McDill's home was a low, flat-roofed midcentury place, showing steel beams and glass, ugly, but probably architecturally significant, Virgil thought. The driveway wound around back and ended at a four-car garage. A guy named Lane, from the crime-scene crew, let him in: the house had been professionally decorated, from the carpets to the ceiling paint.

Ruth Davies was there with McDill's father, sitting on the floor in the living room, surrounded by twenty square feet of paper.

He took Davies first, and got nothing. She simply dithered, until it began to drive him crazy, and eventually she went into the kitchen and began baking something with peanut butter.

McDill's father, Oren McDill, looking down at all the paper that summed his daughter's life, was distraught, depressed, shaken. He was a tall, thin man with a gray buzz cut, simple gold-rimmed glasses, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He said that McDill did have a will, and that he was the executor. "I'll get you a copy as soon as I can get to my safe-deposit box," he said. He gestured at all the paper. "It wasn't supposed to end like this. She was supposed to do this for me."

McDill's mother lived in Arizona with a second husband, and she and her daughter were not close, McDill said. "It goes back to the divorce. We got divorced when Erica was in high school, and she couldn't believe that her mother would dump both of us. Mae wanted her freedom. Didn't want a husband-at the time, anyway-didn't want a kid. She told us that. Erica never got over it."

"I don't want to…" Virgil looked around; they were sitting in a four-seasons porch, alone, but he could hear Davies babbling on somewhere. "Look, I don't want to be an asshole, is what I don't want to be. But I have to ask: If you've looked at the will… would Erica's mother be in line to inherit anything?"

McDill shook his head. "Not a penny."

"Huh. How about Ruth?"

"Ruth will get a hundred thousand," McDill said.

"That's not bad… she thought she'd get nothing," Virgil said.

McDill frowned at that: "I think she knew. I think she knew the terms. Did you ask her?"

"I did, but maybe I wasn't clear," Virgil said.

"It's been in the will for three years," McDill said. "Erica had a new will made when she took over as CEO, and got a kick in salary. Hard to believe that they didn't talk about it at all."

THE CRIME-SCENE CREW, led by Stacy Lowe, had almost finished processing the house-looking at phone records, calendars, computers, and anything unexpected that might point to a killer.

Virgil took Lowe aside and asked, "Have you finished with Ruth Davies's room?" He'd learned that the two women had separate bedrooms.

"Yes. Looking for something in particular?"

"I'd like to look at her shoes…"

Lowe cornered Davies, to confer, and while they were doing that, Virgil slipped into Davies's room and checked the closet. Davies had a shoe rack, with nine different pairs of shoes mounted on it. He looked through the shoes and found no Mephistos. Went into McDill's room, found perhaps twenty pairs of shoes, including a pair of Mephistos. He found Lowe. "Process the shoes. The guys up north say the killer might have been wearing Mephistos. Look for dirt. Swamp muck."

"Okay. Cool." She bent close to them, then said, "They look clean."

"Do your best." He checked sizes: eight and a half. Back in Davies's room, he checked sizes: eight. Davies could have worn a pair of McDill's Mephistos. Even if those in the closet had never been in the swamp, he knew that McDill owned Mephistos…

Lowe told him, "There were no guns of any kind. No rifles."

Virgil held up a finger, to quiet her, as he tried to catch a thought: Ah. Yes. McDill wore Mephistos. Wendy was in McDill's room the night before the killing, where she might have had access to McDill's shoes…

Something to check.

"What?" Lowe asked.

"No guns, huh? Interesting."

DAVIES HAD NO ALIBI-she'd been sick, she said-had a monetary and maybe even an emotional reason to kill McDill, had access to Mephisto shoes. May have lied about McDill's will. She might well have an idea of what McDill did at the resort; might have heard about the solitary visit to the eagle's nest, might even have had it pointed out on a chart or on Google…

On the other hand, her behavior was simply too… unparsed. Davies hadn't thought of answers in advance. She hadn't calculated her behavior. Everything about her was raw and unrehearsed.

Unless, he thought, she was crazy.

He had, in the past, encountered a crazy serial burglar who seemed the soul of innocence because after the burglaries, he somehow forgot that he'd done them. Virgil didn't think that he was lying-because of his peculiar psychological problem, he really forgot. Of course, that hadn't prevented him from selling the stolen stuff on eBay, America's fence.

WHEN HE WAS DONE with the talk, Virgil cruised one last time through the house, had a thought-the walls weren't bare, but they didn't seem quite right, either. He walked through again, trying to be casual about it, and saw a couple of empty nail holes at picture-hanger height. He asked Lowe, "Did you find anything in her paper about art that she owned?"

"There's a file of receipts somewhere. I could find it," Lowe said.

"Do that, and check it off against the paintings here." He gestured around the room. Each wall was hung with either an oil painting or a print, and they didn't look like they came from a decorator's back room-they looked like stuff he'd seen in galleries: col orful, idiosyncratic, even harsh. "See if there's anything missing. I don't know how much it's worth, but… that's what I want to know. What it's worth, and where it is. If it's missing, I want to know what it could be sold for."

When Virgil left, Davies and Oren McDill were stacking Erica McDill's clothing in the hallway, preparatory to packing it; a dismal task, Virgil thought, and both of them stopped occasionally to cry. He left them like that, in a house of misery, and headed downtown to the agency board meeting.