house, like a finger in the eye.

He didn’t worry much about the fact that his target was a cop. Virgil wasn’t a brother-cop believer; he was not disposed to either like or dislike other cops before he met them, because he’d known too many of them. To Virgil, cops were just people, and people with more than their fair share of stress and temptation. Most resisted the temptations. Some didn’t. Fact of life.

He did wind up liking most of them, though, simply because of shared backgrounds, and the fact that Virgil was a social guy. So social, he’d been married three times over a short space of years, until he finally gave it up. He didn’t plan to resume until he’d grown old enough to distinguish love from infatuation. He felt he was making progress, but he’d thought that the other three times, too.

He considered Lee Coakley, and thought, Huh. She had a glint in her eye, and he knew for a fact that she was recently divorced. And she carried a gun. He liked that in a woman, because it sometimes meant that he didn’t have to.

HE CUT I-90 at Fairmont, stopped to stretch and get a Diet Coke, and headed west. The sun was already low and deep into the southwest, and the sky was going gray.

Homestead was an old country town of fourteen thousand people or so, the Warren County seat, founded in the 1850s on rolling land along a chain of lakes. Warren was in the first tier of counties north of the Iowa line, west of Martin County, east of Jackson. Most of the downtown buildings, and many of the homes, were put up in the first half of the twentieth century. Interstate 90 passed just to the north of town, and Virgil stopped as he went by and reserved a room at the Holiday Inn. That done, he drove on into town, to the sheriff’s office. Her office was in an eighties-era yellow brick building built behind an older, mid-century courthouse. The office included working space for the worn deputies, a comm center, and a jail.

COAKLEY WAS WAITING, with two deputies, big men in their thirties, both weathered, square-jawed Germans, one in civilian clothes, the other in a sheriff’s uniform.

“Agent Flowers,” Coakley said, “I’ve got your warrant. These men are Gene Schickel and Greg Dunn, they’ll be going out with you.”

He shook hands with the two, and Virgil said to Dunn, “I remember you from the Larson accident.” Dunn nodded and said, “That was a mess,” and added, “I gotta tell you, I don’t like this.”

“Nobody ever does,” Virgil said. “Me coming in, it’s like internal affairs. When I was a cop up in St. Paul, I shaded away from those guys as much as anybody. No reason to, but I know what you’re talking about.”

Dunn said, “Just a feeling that maybe we should clean up our own messes.”

Virgil nodded. “But you’ve got a lifetime job, if you don’t screw up. Sheriff Coakley has to get elected, and you’ve gotta see the political problem in all this.”

Dunn nodded. “Yeah, I do. I just don’t like it.”

Virgil looked at Schickel, the one in uniform. “What about you? Or are you the strong and silent type?”

Schickel’s lips barely moved: “We got to look at Crocker. I’d do it, even if nobody else wanted to.”

“Then let’s go,” Virgil said.

SCHICKEL RODE with Virgil, to fill him in on Crocker, while Dunn took a sheriff’s truck and led the way. Crocker lived seventeen miles out, most of it down I-90. Schickel said, “Greg wasn’t trying to give you a hard time. He says what he thinks.”

Virgil nodded. “I appreciate that. He didn’t cut Larson any slack, either.”

Larson had been a state senator who’d gotten drunk, but not very, had run a rural stop sign and T-boned another car on his way home from the bar. The driver of the other car was killed. The question had been whether it was purely an accident, or vehicular homicide. Virgil had helped with the investigation, and though Larson had been indicted on the homicide charge, he’d been acquitted.

“Greg’s a good guy, but he doesn’t cut anybody a lot of slack,” Schickel said. Then, loosening up a little, “Including his wife. He’s halfway through a divorce.”

“Been there,” Virgil said. “So what’s with Crocker? Good guy? Bad guy? You think he knew Tripp? Any rumors around?”

“Jimmy’s not a good guy,” Schickel said. “I’m not talking behind his back. He knows what I think, and