You are a seriously attractive woman. But this is better. We need to talk a lot more. Then jump in bed.”

“Deal,” she said, and she smiled, and the smile lit up the booth—and Virgil’s heart as well. But then, his heart wasn’t all that hard to light up. “God, you made that easy. Is it because you’re generous, or because you’re slick?”

“Hey, I’m from Marshall. There aren’t any slick guys from Marshall.”

“I once knew a slick guy from there,” she said.

“Now you’re lying,” Virgil said. “There are no slick guys from Marshall.”

“No, no, really—his name was Richard Reedy—”

“Richard,” Virgil said, laughing. “I know Richard. He was two years ahead of me. My God, you’re right. He used to wax his hair, so he had this little pointy thing that stuck up from his forehead, like the crest on a cardinal. He used to wear sport coats to school when he didn’t have to.”

“I saw him up in the Cities a couple of years ago,” she said. “He wears these plutonium suits and his hair is still waxed and he’s got one of those little telephone clip things on his ear, like he’s expecting a call from his agent,” she said. “Like his movie is being made.”

They both had a nice laugh, and then Virgil said, “All right. Now. Whoops, here comes a waiter. Shoo him away.”

She did and Virgil went on: “I’m getting more and more of a feeling that there’s something seriously wrong with this church. And that it might involve underage sex on a pretty wide scale. How underage, I don’t know.”

“Farm girls, not all of them, but some of them, can grow up pretty early. Sex is no big mystery if you grow up on a farm with animals,” Coakley said. “And when you’re out in the country, you spend quite a bit of time on your own, if you want. It’s easy to sneak off with a boyfriend.”

Virgil nodded. “Get a blanket out in a cornfield and you’re good.”

“Except you get corn cuts all over your butt, and itch like crazy,” she said.

They looked at each other and laughed again, and then she said, “If it’s under age seventeen, I think people would look past it. If it’s under age thirteen, we could get a lynch mob going.”

“Think about the fact that Kelly Baker was pretty badly abused, in a hard-core way, a porno-movie way,” Virgil said. “Whips. Multiple partners, possibly simultaneously, according to the Iowa ME. And that she’d been previously abused in the same way, and that nobody can find any sign that she was hooking, or any partners.”

“Virgil, that’s really ugly, what you’re thinking,” Coakley said, dead sober.

“Yes. It is.”

He told her about trying to call Sullivan, based on the interview with Tripp’s friend Jay Wenner, that she already knew about. “These farm guys, Craig and Van Mann, kept coming back to the fact that these church people are really tight with each other, and don’t much socialize with outsiders. If this gay kid was a friend of Kelly Baker, then he’s probably a church kid, and he probably knows everything she did. About everything. We need to find him. We need to talk to Sullivan, soon as we can.”

“He’s probably with his friend up there. You think we should try to track him down?”

“Ah, they told me he’s working tomorrow, so we can probably get him early tomorrow. Can’t do much more tonight, anyway,” Virgil said.

“Have you thought about the possibility of spying on one of these church meetings?”

He smiled: “Yes.”

“I’m up for that.”

“It’d have to be one of your guys you absolutely trust,” Virgil said. “It’s possible that Crocker was actually planted on the department by the church. . . . If you’re involved in some kind of mass child abuse thing, even if it’s religion-based, you’re going to be curious about what the local law enforcement agency is up to.”

She said, “It’ll be someone we can trust. Me.”

He nodded. “Okay. We’ll be like ninjas, black ghosts slipping unseen across the Minnesota countryside.”

“Probably get eaten by hogs,” she said.

“Minnesota ninjas fear no hogs,” Virgil said.

“And what else?”

“We need to track down a woman named Birdy Olms,” Virgil said. He explained. “With a name like that, I think we’ve got a chance.”

“I’ll get on that. And your DNA sample is at your lab. Jeanette took it up, and said they whined at her.”

“Yeah, well, I got my boss to jack them up,” Virgil said. “The problem is, everybody wants DNA. DNA for