accounts. So, where do Midwestern farm women run to? Florida? California? Arizona? Or maybe someplace else in the Midwest?”

“Does she have any relatives she might be in touch with?”

“Sandy, it’s like this,” Virgil said. “I don’t know anything about her, except her name, and I can’t ask, because that would tip off people that we’re looking for her.”

“Interesting,” she said. “If she’s on her own, she probably had to get a job, so she should be in Social Security records.”

“And in state employment records, and probably DMV records, possibly insurance records . . . The way people talked, her husband doesn’t know where she went, so she probably never served him with divorce papers.”

Coakley, in the background, said, “She’s not in the NCIC, I looked.” Virgil passed that on, and Sandy said, “Unless she’s gone completely underground—changed her name, got a fake Social Security number, and so on, or is dead, or is on the street, this shouldn’t be too hard. I’ll get back to you in a bit.”

“I’ll be on my cell,” Virgil said.

VIRGIL LOADED Spooner’s computer into his truck, leaving behind a receipt. When he went back in the apartment, Coakley was on the phone with Dunn, the deputy who was searching Spooner’s car. Schickel was listening in. When she got off, she said to Virgil, “Nothing in the car at all.”

“We know she had a gun, because I saw it,” Virgil said. “She cleaned the house out before she came in, and stuck stuff away somewhere.”

“How do we find it?” Coakley asked.

Virgil shrugged. “We don’t. She’s not a dumb woman. Could be in a safe-deposit box in some small bank fifty miles from here—or in a friend’s basement. No way to tell.”

Schickel said, “You saw her gun?”

“Yeah, she was carrying one in her pocket.”

“Come here and look at this.”

Virgil followed him into the front room and showed him a small pocket roughly sewn to the side of a couch. The couch was set diagonally from a wall, with the pocket against the wall, where it couldn’t be seen.

“Couldn’t figure out what the hell it is. You think it could be, like, a holster?”

Virgil got down on the rug, pulled the pocket open with a finger, and sniffed it, leaned back and said, “Smells like Hoppe’s to me.” Hoppe’s was the most popular brand of gun solvent and lubricant, with a distinct, oily-acid odor.

He moved aside, and Schickel sniffed it: “Yeah. So why would she have a gun pocket sewn to the side of her couch, for gosh sakes?”

“Maybe she’s scared, or a gun nut,” Virgil said. “We can ask her, but it won’t get us anywhere. She thought this out.”

“But the computer . . .”

“She didn’t understand the computer, and screwed up,” Virgil said.

THEY DIDN’T FIND anything else immediately, and Virgil and Coakley headed back to Homestead in Virgil’s truck, leaving Schickel and Wright to finish. “If we knew more about the church members in detail, we might be able pick out some weak ones. Maybe that’s the way to go: slow down, find the weak ones,” Coakley said.

“I’d have to leave that to you,” Virgil said. “I just can’t pick up and move down here and devote my life to it: I’m doing three or four cases at a time, as it is.”

She thought that over, then said, “Cold out here.”

Virgil looked across the barren landscape and said, “Amazing the change between fall and winter. From harvest time to January. In September it looks like you could feed the world with one hand tied behind your back; in January, even the buildings look starved.”

Somewhere along the way, they agreed that Virgil should sneak her in the back of the Holiday Inn, so she wouldn’t have to go through the lobby. They did that, and wound up in bed again, more intense this time, and less happy: the cloud of the case hanging over them.

“Some way,” she said, “we’ll be able to get into the Rouses’ place. The question is, will they know we’re coming, and get rid of the photographs and whatever else they have. I mean, Virgil, it’s right there, the whole case, and we can’t touch it. It’s driving me crazy.”

They were propped up on the extra pillows, snuggled together, when Virgil’s phone rang. He picked it up, looked at the incoming number on the display, and said, “Sandy. Maybe she found Birdy.”

He clicked on the phone and asked, without preamble, “You find her?”

“No, but I didn’t find her in a pretty interesting way,”