happened with it, and then, soon—day after tomorrow—tell her we’ve got her. Offer her a deal: give us Rouse. If we can just get in there. . . .”

“But there’s not enough here.”

“The question is not whether there’s enough, it’s what she remembers about it. That, along with the whole deal on being with Crocker when he died. If we agree not to file charges on Crocker, and limit the time she could serve on whatever comes out of our investigation . . . We can tell her that she can either talk, or go down with the rest of them, no second chance.”

Coakley said, “Okay, it’s there if we need it. But if you’re right about everything, that she killed Crocker and knew about Baker, was involved in some kind of conspiracy to cover it up, there’s gonna be an enormous stink if she walks. We could be giving immunity to one of the major players.”

“So we keep looking,” Virgil said.

WRIGHT FINISHED with the kitchen and came to the bedroom doorway and said she’d found nothing of serious interest, except four hundred and twenty dollars in a plastic cup hidden under the flour in a flour crock; and Shickel came up empty in the basement.

“Nothing down there but a washer, dryer, and water heater, and a lot of dust and old junk. Looks like she only goes down to do the wash.” He went to help Wright in the living room, while Virgil continued working through the computer, and Coakley, finished with the photos, went back to the master bedroom.

Virgil opened a primitive version of iPhoto and found none. He stuck his head in the hallway: “Anybody found a camera?”

Coakley: “There’s an Instamatic in here, but there’s nothing in it.”

“Doesn’t she have a junk room anywhere?”

“Bunch of cupboards in the mudroom off the kitchen, there was an old Polaroid in there, looked like it hadn’t been used in years,” Wright said.

“No digital?”

Nobody had seen a digital camera. Nobody had seen any guns, either. “I’m starting to think that she cleaned the place up, just in case,” Virgil told Coakley. “We ought to take a look at her car.”

The car was included in the search warrant as a matter of course. Coakley called back to her office, got Greg Dunn to check around the parking lot for Spooner’s car. “Get Stupek to open it up, go through it, get back to me. We’d be interested in paper, photographs, cameras, guns, whatever.”

Virgil said, quietly to Coakley, when they were alone, “You know what? We didn’t take Dennis’s advice seriously enough— you know, that we hit Spooner with a search warrant. She’s implicated Flood and Crocker in the Baker case: let’s hit Flood with a search warrant. If we could separate Alma Flood from her daughters for a while, get somebody with Social Services with the kids, see what the kids have to say . . .”

“Then they’d know what we’re looking at, and if it didn’t pan out, we’d be screwed,” Coakley said. “I hate to give up that edge. The word would spread with these people in an instant—cell phones. They’ll destroy every bit of physical evidence that might be around. If they warn Rouse, do you think those pictures will still be in the closet?”

Virgil scratched his forehead, thinking. “Let’s get the computer and everything else, like the photo of Flood, locked up in your office, or up at the BCA. We don’t arrest Spooner . . . we let her slide.”

“That might be up to Harris Toms, depending on what he sees in her story,” Coakley said.

“Talk to him. No big rush. Ask him to let it slide for a few days,” Virgil said. “Spread the word that I’ve gone back to Mankato on another case. I’ll stop by the café and mention it there.”

“And in real life, you actually . . .”

“I’m going to track down this Birdy woman and see what she has to say,” Virgil said.

“I looked, but I couldn’t find her.”

“I’ve got somebody who can, unless she’s completely changed her name. . . . I’ve just been negligent in getting her started. I’ll call her right now.”

He got Sandy on the phone and explained the problem.

“You don’t know whether she’s alive or dead, or where she might have run to?”

“No, but she’s a Midwestern farm woman who was on her own, with some cash. I don’t know how much, but as I understand it, her husband was reasonably affluent, and she cleaned out his