be ‘up by Estherville,’ if you were correctly oriented. Yeah, I do know about it. Ugly. Ugly case, Virgil. October eleventh. Fourteen months ago. Our sex kitten. We got nothing.”

“You got sex kitten,” Virgil said.

“We do. Are you at your office? I’ll send you the file.”

“Actually, I’m in Homestead. . . .” He filled in Wood on the three murders, beginning with Flood. Wood listened, then said, “I heard about the jail hanging, but I didn’t know it was murder.”

“Just found it out today,” Virgil said. “This morning. Listen, that file on Baker, shoot it down to me. Up to me.”

“Sure. You want e-mail?”

“I don’t know if they’re running wireless,” Virgil said. “Hang on, let me walk down the hall and find my guy.”

Kraus said they did not have a wireless hookup. He got on the line with Wood, agreed that they could take and print a color PDF document, gave Wood the address, and handed the phone back to Virgil.

“It’s on the way,” Wood said. “It’s big, three hundred pages, in color. Let me look at this, for a minute, I’m looking at the computer. You probably want to read the whole thing, to see who we interviewed, and what they said, but right off, go to page thirty-four. That’s the beginning of the autopsy report.”

“That’s a big deal?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah. That’s the big deal, so far,” Wood said. “Virgil, if you can nail the guys who did this, man, I’ll get you tracks in the Iowa Guard. That’s the same as a Minnesota general.”

“I’ve had tracks,” Virgil said; he’d gotten out of the army as a captain. “When you say ‘guys,’ plural . . .”

“Read the report,” Wood said.

“You got DNA on these guys?”

“Read the report. And listen, keep me informed.”

VIRGIL DECIDED that he wanted to read about the murders in the order that they happened, and so went down and got a cup of coffee, then waited, watching, as the file came out of Kraus’s laser printer.

The autopsy report, including findings and conclusions, was fifteen pages long. When the last of it came out, Virgil said to Kraus, “Holler when it’s done. I’m going to start with this.”

The first few pages of the report laid out the reasons for Iowa DCI involvement: the department was asked in by Emmet County authorities after Baker’s body was found in the Lutheran cemetery north of Estherville. The body was nude, and half-hidden behind a tombstone in an older section of the cemetery, where it was found by chance by an elderly woman who’d come out to put the year’s last blooming wildflowers on her husband’s grave.

The Emmet County sheriff’s office had put out inquiries, and had been informed by the Warren County sheriff’s office that Leonard Baker, of Blakely, Minnesota, had reported that his daughter had not come home the night before, after an afternoon’s visit with an aunt, uncle, and cousins on a farm near Estherville.

The description fit, and the parents had later identified the body as Kelly Baker, seventeen. Her mother’s car, a 2004 Toyota Corolla, was found in downtown Estherville. Witnesses said it had been there overnight, and after nailing down the times, by interviewing owners of local businesses, and Baker’s uncle, DCI investigators determined that Baker must have left it there shortly after leaving her aunt and uncle’s farm.

That made it an Iowa murder, and explained why Virgil hadn’t heard more about it.

As Wood had suggested, the autopsy made interesting reading. The autopsy had been done in Des Moines, and the pathologist reported that Baker had died from strangulation, her windpipe crimped by some kind of collar with a sharp edge, either metal or stiff leather. The collar had been pulled straight back, as if it had been attached to a rope or chain, like a heavy leather collar on a pit bull.

Exact time of death was uncertain, because nighttime temperatures had gone down into the upper twenties, and the body had been heavily cooled. The contents of her stomach had been fully digested, and her uncle said the last thing she’d eaten was an ice cream sundae at about two o’clock in the afternoon. She’d left shortly before supper.

Baker’s buttocks and breasts were lightly striped, as though she’d been beaten with a narrow leather or flexible wood whip, or switch. There were indentations on her wrists, consistent with metal handcuffs. She had been sexually used, according to the pathologist, orally, vaginally, and anally, almost certainly by more than one man, and perhaps as many as