park over the Floods’ place, track them from a distance,” Virgil said. “They can call us on the ground. We could wait in Battenberg or wherever.”

“You think you can get it?”

“I think so. I’d have to talk to my boss, but the dimensions of this thing are getting to be interesting,” Virgil said. “He’ll go for it.”

“It is interesting,” Coakley said, “but I doubt that it’ll do me much good in the next election.”

“You can live with it,” Virgil said. “If what I think is going on, is going on . . .”

“I can live with it,” she said.

HE STARTED the truck and eased out of Loewe’s driveway, turned left, back toward town. “The thing is,” Virgil said, as they drove along, “if we get the DNA back from the lab tomorrow, we may be close to finished—if we can show that Spooner killed Crocker, and that closes the chain of murders.”

“But we’re not done,” Coakley protested. “Flood is dead, but there were more people involved with Kelly Baker—”

“That’s an Iowa case,” Virgil said. “We send them a file with what we think.”

“Oh, come on, Virgil,” she said. And apparently without thinking about it—or maybe she did, he thought later, because he sometimes tended toward cynicism, or at least the study of human calculation—she reached over with her inboard hand and put it on his thigh. “This is our case now. Iowa’s going nowhere with it.”

She pulled her hand back, leaving behind a hand-sized warm spot; and she still seemed unaware of the casual intimacy. Virgil tended to think that women were hardly ever unaware of even the most casual intimacy; they had intimacy detectors more powerful than a rat’s cheese detector, although, he decided, the analogy might not be precise.

“So we agree on that,” he said. “In fact, I was planning to kill most of the rest of the day hanging out, waiting for the DNA to come in. But now I’m thinking I’ll go talk to Alma Flood. I’d like to catch her without her father around.”

She patted him on the thigh again: “Do that. Check the plane first. And call the lab about the DNA, see where they’re at. I’m going to get some of the boys who know about the church, get a list of names, and run every one of them through the feds. Maybe something will pop up.”

They came up to a stop sign and Virgil said, “I hate this truck for this. The guy who invented consoles must’ve been some kind of über-nerd.”

“What?”

He put the truck in park, reached an arm around her shoulder, pulled her as close as the console would allow, and kissed her. She saw it coming and went with it, and when they ran out of air, he backed off a few inches, then kissed her again, and when she sank into him, he twisted a bit more so he could cup her far breast in his left hand. She went with that, too, though only for a few seconds, before rolling away from him, and she said, “Mmmm.”

“Well, hell, it’s a start,” he said, putting the truck back in gear. “I’ve never kissed a sheriff before.”

“Probably never felt one up, either,” she said, patting her hair back into place. “Not that I didn’t like it.”

He thought about a wisecrack, but instantly suppressed it, going instead for a sincere-sounding, and possibly shy-sounding, “I wouldn’t have . . . characterized it like that.”

She squinted at him, one eye blue, one eye green, and then, he thought, bought it. If you can sell sincerity to a woman, you’re halfway home. Not to be cynical about it.

VIRGIL CALLED the BCA office as soon as he got a cell phone signal, talked to Davenport. “You fly around in that plane more than any six other guys,” Davenport said.

“I don’t want to fly in it,” Virgil said. “I’ll be on the ground. We’ll send along one of Lee’s deputies to watch one of the houses, maybe the Floods, or this Einstadt guy, see where the meeting is.”

“I sense an emotional resonance in the way you said ‘Lee,’ ” Davenport said. “I heard she’s a looker.”

“That’s correct,” Virgil said. “I plan to further explore those aspects of the case.”

“Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to hear it,” Davenport said. “Well, actually I do, but some other time.”

“Wouldn’t be good right now,” Virgil said.

“She’s sitting right next to you, right?”

Virgil nodded at his phone. “Yup.”

“You know, if the DNA comes through, we could just let the rest