everything. We’re jumping the line, which pisses everybody off.”

“We’ve got four dead,” she said.

“But if the DNA pans out, we’ll have a hammerlock on Spooner. She grew up in the church, but she’s already stepped away from them. If we can get her with a murder charge, we might be able to open her up.”

She thought about that, and then said, “They’ve been out there for a long time, this church. I wonder what they’d do if they thought it was about to come down on them?”

11

Patrick Sullivan, the reporter, woke Virgil at seven o’clock in the morning: “Hope I didn’t wake you up. I just found your message.”

“I need to talk to you,” Virgil said. “Are you at home?”

“Right now, I am. I need to get cleaned up and head into work by eight,” Sullivan said.

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Virgil said.

He got cleaned up in a rush, stood for an extra minute in a hot shower, storing up some warmth, dressed, and headed out. The predawn was bitterly cold, the dry air like a knife against his face; and dark, as the season rolled downhill to the winter solstice, and the days were hardly long enough to remember. Sullivan had given him simple directions, and Virgil was at the curb outside his house twenty-nine minutes after he’d gotten out of bed, street-lights twinkling down the way.

Sullivan lived on the second floor of a stately white-and-teal Victorian on Landward Avenue. When Virgil arrived, the reporter was in the driveway, chipping frost off the windshield of a three-year-old Jeep Cherokee.

“When did you get in?” Virgil asked, as they headed up the walk to his apartment. If he’d driven down from the Cities, he wouldn’t have been chipping frost.

“I came back late last night. I was afraid if I stayed over, I’d get jammed up in traffic. What’s up?”

“A couple more questions about Tripp,” Virgil said. Sullivan led the way through the front door and up an old wooden staircase with a polished mahogany railing curling around a halfway landing.

“Not bad,” Virgil said.

“The price is right,” Sullivan said. He unlocked the door of his apartment. “Up in the Cities, this place would cost me fifteen hundred more’n I’m paying here.” He had three rooms—living room, bedroom, and kitchen, with a bath off the bedroom. “Microwave some coffee?”

“Fine,” Virgil said. He took a chair at the kitchen table, and when Sullivan brought the cups over, took one, and Sullivan sat opposite. “So.”

“There’s a lot going on out there,” Virgil said. “Kelly Baker, these other killings, they’re all hooked together, I think. We’ve been talking to people, and one guy who should know tells us that Kelly hooked up Tripp with another gay guy. Probably somebody she knew from this church she belonged to.”

“And you want to know if I know who he is,” Sullivan said.

“In a nutshell.”

“I don’t,” Sullivan said. “I’d be a little surprised if Bob was sexually active.”

“What if he kept it from you? I mean, this would be something he might not even want to admit to himself, much less to somebody outside the relationship,” Virgil said. “Since whoever he is was a friend of Kelly’s, we wonder if you ever saw a guy hanging around with her, who might’ve given you a look . . .”

Sullivan stared down into his coffee for a minute, then said, “There’s something . . .”

Virgil took a sip of coffee, waiting.

“I didn’t hang around with Bob in public. He wasn’t ready for people to know. But I ran into him once at the Dairy Queen, and he and Baker were with another man. The other guy gave off this vibration. . . . I didn’t remember until you asked.”

“You know him?”

“No. He was a real tall guy,” Sullivan said. “I mean, six-seven or six-eight. Not real good-looking, but interesting-looking, like somebody had chipped him out of wood. Abe Lincoln.”

“How old?”

Sullivan fingered the rim of his ear, thinking, then said, “I can’t say for sure, but I’d say, older than Bobby. Twenties. Probably not thirty. Dark hair, wore it long. Not hippie-long—farmer-long.”

“Huh,” Virgil said. “Thank you.”

THAT WAS WHAT Sullivan had, and Virgil stood up to leave. “Give me one thing for my story,” Sullivan said. He reached over to the kitchen counter and picked up a narrow, half-used reporter’s notebook and a ballpoint. “Anything good.”

Virgil considered, then said, “We think we’ve linked the Baker killing to the murders of Jacob Flood and Bob Tripp. I can’t tell you more than that.