He touched at the corner of his mouth and rubbed the balls of his fingers with his thumb. He straightened his cuffs on his wrists and glanced through the glass window in the door at a guard in the corridor. "What's in it for me?" he asked.

"The feds have Hinkel under investigation. You could be a big help to them. They can turn keys on state locks."

His eyes seemed to focus inward on thoughts that in all probability no else could ever guess at.

"We're finished here," he said.

"Fair enough," I said, rising from my chair. "I'll tell you what happened, though. You met Carl Hinkel through the Internet. Then you showed up at his house for a meet and got busted. He came off looking great and you're down on a short-eyes. How's it feel? By the way, I'll tell Carl we had a chat."

Dobbs got to his feet and banged on the steel door.

"What's the problem?" the guard asked.

"I want lockup," Dobbs replied.

After we got back to Missoula I dropped Temple off at her motel and drove down to Stevensville, then headed east toward the Sapphires and Nicki Molinari's ranch. I saw the next-door neighbor, the elderly preacher, raking out dead grass from the rain ditch in front of his church. I pulled my truck to the roadside and waved to him.

He wore bib overalls without a shirt and a coned-up straw hat. The choleric blazes in his neck and face looked like small tongues of fire on his skin. He leaned down to my window and I saw a raw knot the size of a duck's egg on his forehead.

"How are you doing today, sir?" I said.

"Cleaning up for our baptism services tomorrow evening. Back yonder in the creek. We do it the old-time way," he said.

"It's the only way to fly," I said.

"You're welcome to come," he said.

"I was baptized in a stream in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma."

"I knowed it," he said.

"How's that?"

"River-baptized people got a mark. They look a person in the eye. Why you hanging around that greaser?"

"My work takes me into strange associations, Preacher."

"You carry a gun?"

"Sometimes."

"Stay away from that fellow, son. He's the devil's own."

The old man tapped my window with the flat of his hand and returned to his work.

I parked on the white gravel by the side of Molinari's house and started toward the front door. From the back I heard the spring of a diving board and a loud splash and the sound of women laughing. When I came around the corner of the house I smelled meat dripping into a hibachi and the drowsy, thick fragrance of a crack pipe and I saw Molinari swimming toward the shallow end of his pool while three suntanned women in bikinis and shades watched him from reclining chairs.

He walked up the tile steps of the pool, dripping water, his sex etched against his bright yellow trunks. He rubbed his head and face with a fluffy towel, and a woman handed him a glass of iced tea with a sprig of mint in it. He pushed his feet into his flip-flops while he drank and took my measure over his upended glass.

"Where you come from, people don't call first before they drop by other people's houses?" he said.

"Has Wyatt Dixon been around?" I asked.

"No. He better not, either."

"I interviewed a pedophile in Deer Lodge this morning. He was busted in Carl Hinkel's front yard."

Molinari wiped water off his brow and pitched his towel over the back of a chair.

"Take a walk with me," he said, glancing back at the women by poolside. He put his hand on my arm. "Tell me in like three sentences."

"This guy was nailed in Hinkel's yard. I think Hinkel is behind the kidnapping and sale of children to child molesters."

"So I'm glad to know this. But I'm a little tied up right now. A little two-on-one going, get my drift? If you see Cleo or Holly, don't be mentioning what you saw here. Anyway, come back tomorrow when I have more time."

"Fuck you."

"I can't believe there's a person like you standing on my property. You want me to remodel this guy, but you tell me in my face to get fucked? You know what I do to people who use that kind of language to me?"

"Tell it to your biographer."

"I'm glad you raised that subject. Xavier Girard just got the shit kicked out of him. Why is that, you ask. Because he shot off his mouth on a certain TV talk show."

"What happened to the old man next door?"

"I put a knot on his head."

"You did what?"

"He was firing a nail gun into his church till six this morning. Bam, bam, bam, all night long. I was in a bad mood. He picked the wrong time to wise off."

"I made a mistake coming here," I said.

When I turned to go he grabbed my forearm again. I felt his nails scrape on the skin.

"Come here," he said.

"Your kind are always the same, Molinari. On the surface you seem to have a certain degree of elan, but under it all you're a real bum. Go back to your whores."

His mouth twitched slightly and the skin under one eye puckered as though my words had cut across a nerve ending in his face.

I drove back to Missoula and parked downtown and walked under the shade of the maple trees into the courthouse. I met the sheriff on his way out.

"I need to talk," I said.

"Why don't you rent an office down the hall from me? Cut down on your gas costs," he said.

"At what time did Xavier Girard call 911 the night Lamar Ellison was killed?"

"I don't remember."

"Let's find out," I said.

He sucked his teeth.

"Come inside," he said.

A minute later, he tossed his hat onto a rack in his office and sat down heavily in his swivel chair and fixed his eyes on me. They were as blue and intense as the flame on a butane burner.

"Get to it, Mr. Holland," he said.

"Lamar Ellison vandalized Xavier Girard's vehicle just before he died. Girard and Ellison fought on the side of the road and Holly Girard pointed a gun at Ellison to keep him from stomping her husband into jelly. Then Holly and Xavier went inside a friend's house and dialed 911. The question is when did they make the call."

"What are you driving at?" the sheriff said.

"Sue Lynn Big Medicine claims she saw somebody outside Ellison's place when she fled, someone who could have saved his life."

"Wait here," the sheriff said.

He went out into the hall and returned five minutes later and sat down in his chair and studied two computer printouts in his hands. He laid them down on his desk blotter and balled and unballed his fist on top of them.

"Holly Girard made the call. At ten-o-nine P.M.," he said.

"What time was the fire at Ellison's reported?" I asked…

"Nine forty-one."

"So they waited at least a half hour to report their vehicle being vandalized?" I said.

"That's what it looks like. You're saying the guy Sue Lynn saw was Xavier?"

"Ellison had smashed out the windows in Xavier's Cherokee and sliced the seats and cut his tires and humiliated him in front of his wife and friends. Maybe he took his wife's gun and decided to square things with Ellison, but Sue Lynn beat him to it."

"Maybe the guy Sue Lynn saw was the same fellow who reported the fire. You think of that?"

"The 911 on the fire was called in by a trucker on his CB," I said.

The sheriff rubbed his forehead and widened his eyes.

"I'll question Xavier Girard. But there's no evidence to put him at the crime scene, so I don't think this is going anywhere," he said. "By the way, I had the sheriff in Flathead County check out that resort on Swan Lake where Sue Lynn was hiding. Her cousin says Sue Lynn has bagged out for parts unknown."

I didn't wait for the sheriff to pick up Xavier Girard or ask him to come in. I drove directly to the Girards' house out on the bluff above the Clark Fork. A moving van was backed into the driveway and a half dozen men were trundling furniture up the loading ramp. I walked through the open front door of the house, into a bare living room with a cathedral ceiling that echoed with the sounds of the movers' work shoes. The sanded and lacquered pinewood interior of the room glowed with light, and Holly Girard stood in the middle of it all, dressed in oversize khakis and tennis shoes and a paint-splotched pink T-shirt, a baseball cap on her head, swearing, scolding the movers, but never quite crossing the line into direct insult.