know is history.” She looked at her watch again and said, “Now I’ve got two minutes to walk two blocks.”

“Come on,” Virgil said, “I’ll give you a ride. Where do you work?”

“At the CVS. I’m the assistant manager, I take care of the non-pharmacy items.”

On the way down the hall, zipping their parkas, he said, “I’m interested in the relationship between Jacob Flood and the Bakers. Flood and Baker both being murdered. Were they close?”

“Everybody in the church is fairly close—that’s mostly eighty or a hundred families, I guess. But I don’t know that the Floods were any closer to the Bakers than anybody else—they’re at the other end of the county from each other.”

Virgil said, “I chatted with Emmett Einstadt about Jacob Flood, and their relationships with the Bakers, Kelly Baker. He seemed to have about the same feeling as you did—close, but not every day. He was pretty upset about Kelly, you know, in a German way. If you know what I mean. . . . My mother is pure German.”

She smiled. “I do know,” she said. “Emmett never shows much, but because there aren’t so many church members, compared to the big churches, when somebody dies, you feel it. He gave a nice talk at her funeral.”

Virgil nodded and said, “That’s good. That’s good.” They were outside, and he pointed her at the truck, and they climbed inside.

“How long has the church been around? Is this a longtime thing, or did you all get converted?”

“Been around since the families came over from the Old Country,” Spooner said. “My great-grandfather was in it.”

“Most people marry into the church?”

“Oh, yeah. Because we know each other all our lives, and we have all these background things—don’t go to regular schools, so we don’t have any regular school friends. I always thought I might marry an outsider, if I fell in love, but when it came time to get married, I wound up with Jim. Somebody I’d known all my life.”

They pulled into the pharmacy, and Virgil said, “I might come back and talk to you again. I’m puzzled about Jim’s part in all of this. Why he might kill somebody like Tripp, and why he’d be so quickly killed in return.”

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” she said. “But if the Tripp boy knew both Kelly and Jacob, and you know he killed one of them . . .”

“But then why did Jim kill him?”

“That’s the mystery,” she said. “The only thing I can think of, is that he went a little crazy if the boy told him about killing Jake. Maybe he made a joke out of it, or something. Jim and Jake grew up together—they used to hunt and trap together, when they were kids, wander around the countryside. That’s all I can think of.”

“But then who’d kill Jim? And why?”

She shrugged. “Don’t know. Have you investigated the Tripps?”

“Well, we think the killer was a woman.”

“Oh. Well, it wasn’t me,” she said. “Mrs. Tripp is a woman. . . .”

“You’re right. You’re right. I’ll think about that,” Virgil said. He put out his hand and they shook, and she popped the door and climbed out, wiggled her fingers at him as she went through the door.

Virgil sat staring at the door for a minute, running it all through his head.

Einstadt had lied about not knowing the Bakers; he knew them quite well. That seemed critical, somehow. With Crocker being close to Flood, and married to Spooner, the church seemed more and more central to the whole situation. The only person not involved with it was Bobby Tripp.

And he wondered who’d been in Spooner’s apartment, not very long before himself, who’d left behind the damp footprints on the carpet, big bootlike footprints. And whether those footprints had anything to do with the fact that the hausfrau-looking Kathleen Spooner had a pistol in her pocket.

And he wondered about the color of the lipstick found on Crocker’s penis. Most Minnesota working women didn’t use lipstick, during the day, anyway. It was like a Minnesota thing. But Spooner wore it. Could the crime-scene people get enough of it off Crocker to match it to lipstick in Spooner’s bathroom or dressing table?

Stuff to think about: and while he was thinking about it, he carefully peeled off his parka and pulled back the sleeve of his shirt. He had a two-inch piece of double-sided carpet tape on his wrist. The sticky side was covered with fuzz, with a few dark hairs, from Kathleen Spooner’s