"Was there a contract, or an offer…?"

"Nothing official. Connie had an ear for all kinds of music, and if she said this woman was good, then I'd listen," Windrow said. "Also, the woman and her band would probably be cheap. What I do is, I have a house band that plays four nights a week for a month, which are the slow nights. Then the headliner plays on Friday and Saturday, with the house band playing as the opener on those nights. We're closed on Sundays, of course. I would have brought this Wendy in for a one-month gig as a house band. If they were good enough."

"But only if she was cheap," Virgil said.

Windrow wagged a finger at him: "The money would pay for their keep, and a little more. The main thing is, they'd be heard by big-time music people. If a new band does good at the Spodee-Odee, people hear about it. I mean, people who run country music. That's worth more than any money I could afford to pay them."

"But you never… nothing ever happened," Virgil said.

"Nope. That was two years ago, almost. Connie's been gone almost two years," Windrow said.

Bauer jumped in. "When I heard why you were coming down here, I looked on the Internet and found the story on this other murder. You know my sister was a lesbian?"

Virgil nodded. "Yes."

"There has been some speculation about this Miss McDill," she said.

"She was a lesbian, or bisexual, businesswoman who stayed at the Eagle Nest, like your sister," Virgil said.

Bauer leaned back in her chair: "Then that's the connection. I prayed to the Lord for two years to give us something. Anything. Connie's murder couldn't have been a random act. The Lord wouldn't allow it."

"That argument might not hold up in court," Sedlacek said.

She waved him off. "I don't care about that. I want to know why some animal took Connie's life. If I can find out why, I'll find some peace. The way it is now, I think about it all the time. I have no peace."

Virgil went back to Windrow and pressed him on Wendy, but Windrow insisted that he knew nothing at all about her. "So tell me," he said, "you got that music shirt on, and you've heard her… what do you think?"

Virgil thought about it for a moment, then said, "Have you seen the Rolling Stones film Shine a Light?"

" ' Bout twenty times," Windrow said.

Virgil said, "Think Christina Aguilera. But country."

Windrow tipped back in his chair, raised his eyebrows, and said, "Really."

"Really," Virgil said.

"That's pretty damn interesting," Windrow said. "I'm hunting for a September band. The guy who was coming in hurt himself bad and had to cancel."

"She's good," Virgil said. "Her band's got a couple of soft spots."

"We can fix that," Windrow said. He tipped forward and wrote a note on his calendar, and added, "Backup people are like lamp plugs-plug them in, pull them out. A good one can play anything."

Bauer said, "I believe this will have more to do with sex than with music."

Virgil nodded at her and said, "Well, Miz Bauer, Wendy Ashbach is a little bit gay. She's living with a gay drummer, and spent the night with Miss McDill, the night before McDill was shot to death-so you may be right."

HE TOLD THEM ABOUT the investigation so far, and about the fistfight between Berni and Wendy, and when he did, Windrow made another note on his calendar, then said, "I'm going to run up there and take a look at her."

"You like the idea that she fights?" Virgil asked.

"Yeah, I do," he said. "People like that have an authenticity that these crystalline chicks can't fake. The fans can feel it; they're starved for it."

"Take it easy when you get up there," Virgil said. "We got enough dead people."

AS THEY WERE LEAVING, Bauer said to Virgil, "We saved all of my sister's papers; I thought there might be something in them for an investigator, but nobody saw anything. If you want, I could make them available to you."

Virgil looked at his watch. "I'd like to get out of here before dark-how far are the papers from the Cedar Rapids airport?"

"Five or six minutes," she said. "Swanson is a little way south of the airport."

"Good deal," Virgil said. "I'll follow you up there."

"And I'll probably see you up in Grand Rapids," Windrow said. "How far is it?"

"Nine hours by car, probably. You can fly in, commercial, but there aren't many flights. Bar is called the Wild Goose."

"I fly a little Cessna. Love to do it, don't do it enough," Windrow said. "If the weather's good, I'll head up there in the morning, maybe."

OUT IN THE PARKING LOT, Sedlacek and Virgil shook hands, and Sedlacek said, "Prudence is okay. A little dry, but she's smart, like her sister."

"Seems okay," Virgil said.

"I was worried that she might seem a little crazy, going on about the Lord this and the Lord that, that he wouldn't allow Constance to be murdered at random."

"Who can tell about that," Virgil said, looking over at the woman as she got into a Ford Taurus. "She might even be right."

11

JANELLE WASHINGTON WENT TO WORK in a candy store to pick up extra cash when her husband, a greenskeeper, hopped down off a tractor and tore his ACL. He was out of work for weeks, and they were living on worker's comp payments, and something had to be done.

The candy store barely paid minimum wage, but that was fine. The work wasn't onerous, and they were only bridging the gap between worker's comp and what they needed, so they didn't need a lot. Then, after he got back on the tractor, she decided she liked the contact with other people during the day, and she stayed on with the candy store.

There was a problem, though. Janelle couldn't stay out of the chocolate. She'd always prided herself on her figure, which wasn't perfect, but her husband, James, seemed to like it a lot, and when she gained two pounds in the first week, and another in the second week, then two more… something had to be done.

First, she resolved to eat only two pieces of fudge a day: five hundred calories. Then, during the summer, at least, she'd ride her bike from her house, out in the countryside, all the way into town, eight miles each way, which took her about forty-five minutes each way, and burned, according to an Internet calculator, about five hundred calories. Also, she learned, she'd be building muscles, and more muscles also meant more calories burned.

Now the question was, should she use the extra calories for another piece of fudge? Or really turn herself into a raging piece of super-fit muscle? Staying at two pieces a day was hard, with the owner in the back cooking up all that chocolate…

On this day, she'd finished up, cleaning off the counters, had said good-bye to Dan, the owner, and took off. The first few blocks were stop-and-go, getting out of town, watching the traffic; but once she was on the other side of the river, the traffic disappeared and she started to pump; started to sweat.

She'd never been an athlete, but the bicycle had turned something on, and she was getting addicted to the flow of the thing…

McDILL'S KILLER SAT in a copse of trees that grew on a natural mound at the intersection of the county road and a trail that led back to a canoe-landing on the Mississippi. From a nest at the top of the mound, both the landing and the road were visible. No canoeists had come along in an hour, and none were visible in a half-mile stretch of the river above the landing.

Washington should be coming around the corner at any minute. Shooting her would do two good things. First, it'd confuse the issue. The killer would carefully leave behind a shell, so they'd know that McDill's killer also shot Washington. But since Washington had no connection to lesbians or Wendy's band or the Eagle Nest, maybe they'd go for the idea that the killings were random. Maybe; but if not, it'd at least be confusing.