. . .” A chill ran up her spine. They were already here. “I’ve got to get back to work,” she said. “I’m due back in ten minutes.”

“I could talk to your boss. I’m sure he’d be cooperative. . . .”

She looked at him for another two seconds, then said, “Let me get the chain.” She took the chain off, opened the door, and said, “Come in. I really haven’t seen Jim in a long time. I heard about it, him being killed, but I just . . . I mean, I felt a little sad, I guess, we were married for five years, but that’s all back then.”

And Virgil thought, Interesting. She’s lying already.

Virgil stepped inside, looked around. Compact kitchen off to the left, with the smell of pasta still in the air; a small living room straight ahead, down a hall, with another door to the left, presumably to a bedroom. Neat, not expensive. “Okay, well, if we could sit down for five minutes . . .”

They sat in the living room, Virgil taking the couch as it faced the television, and started with a thirty-second summary of what he thought: that Tripp had killed Flood for reasons unknown, that Crocker had killed Tripp to hide something that Tripp had known—something linked to the killing—and that both killings were somehow linked to the murder of Kelly Baker.

“Do you know if Jim knew any of those people? The Floods, the Bakers, the Tripp family . . . any of those?”

“He and Jake Flood were old friends since they were kids,” she said. “We all came from the same place. And we knew the Bakers, ’cause we were all from the same part of the county, and the same business. Went to church services together.”

“You’re from the same area? Over around Battenberg?”

“Oh, yeah—my folks have a farm a mile down the road from the Floods. They all go back like to the nineteen hundreds, the families. Came from Germany. So we all know each other.” As she was talking, she was trying in her mind to stay out front of the conversation: what he could find out easily, she’d tell him, so she couldn’t be caught in a lie.

“When Iowa investigated, I guess they talked to all the folks in the church to see if anybody knew or heard anything?” Virgil asked.

She shook her head: “I don’t think the church ever came into it. It’s not really a church, you know. There’s no church. We’d have services at different people’s houses, usually in the barn, unless it’s too cold. Sometimes, there’ll be a couple different services going on, so we don’t all go to the same one. We talk about the Bible, and all of that.”

“Huh. Okay.” Virgil scratched his head. “I thought Iowa had been all over everything—that they’d have talked to all of the Bakers’ friends and neighbors. Anyway, when Kelly Baker was killed, did you have any feeling of what she might have been involved in? Who she might have been hanging with? Was she still going to the religious services, or had she dropped away?”

“I really couldn’t tell you. I mean, she was there, but the Bakers are down at the far south end of the county, so we didn’t see them every day,” Spooner said. “I really don’t know. I mean, I guess . . . they say, the word is, she was sexually active. I was surprised, but I wasn’t really close enough to her to have any . . . instinct . . . about that. Maybe she was working in town, maybe she got loose somehow. I don’t know.”

“Were you homeschooled?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Reading, writing, arithmetic, German. Every year, for thirteen years, five days a week.”

“Is that part of the, uh, religion?”

“That’s one of the main parts—to keep the kids away from the influences in schools,” she said. She glanced at her watch. “I’ve really got to go.”

Virgil asked, “Jim—was he violent with you?”

She shook her head: “No. Jim was boring. That’s why I left. He’d get up, eat eggs, go to work, come home, eat dinner, sit on the couch and drink beer, go to bed. Every day. I couldn’t see living my whole life like that. This idea that he could have killed the Tripp boy . . . I mean, that’s very strange. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Do you know if he was dating anyone?”

“I don’t know. Really. I haven’t seen him in years. . . . All I