the Yellow Dog and Bill asked, ‘How’s Virgil?’ He . . . sorta knows. Not for sure.”

“So what?”

“I’d rather he didn’t,” she said. “So, I want people to see me walking out of here, without you, and you going down to your room by yourself.”

“It’s really cold and lonesome,” he said.

“Now, don’t worry, Virgil. I’m going to drive home, and I’m going to take my oldest boy’s car, and I’ll be back,” Coakley said. “Now, there’s some old friends of mine, sitting up at the end, and I’m going to get up and leave, and stop and talk to them about the case, and you can go by and say, ‘See you tomorrow,’ and leave. Like, really cool-like.”

“I don’t think that’ll work,” Virgil said. “The town’s too small.”

“It might not totally work, but it’ll confuse them,” she said.

SHE WAS BACK in an hour, satisfied that everybody was confused. “I told my son that we were working a surveillance,” she said, as she pulled her sweater over her head and shook out her hair. “So. Tell me about Omaha.”

He told her, and she said, “Too bad. So we stay local.”

“Looks like.”

“You know what we could have done? We could have mailed one of those pictures of Rouse to ourselves. An anonymous tip. Then we raid the place—”

“That would involve some heavy-duty lying in court,” Virgil said. “I’m up for an occasional breaking-and-entering, but serious perjury . . .”

She nodded. “Good. I agree.”

“Just checking?”

“Ah, God, I don’t know,” she said. “Ever since I started thinking about it, I’ve had all kinds of ideas, most of them bad. But I can’t stop thinking. It’s like a disease.”

Virgil was sitting on the bed, and he reached over and caught her by the belt, pulled her close, and began unbuckling it, and she scratched his scalp with her fingernails, and said, “Schickel and Brown were all over the west end of the county today, but they didn’t get much. I’m sure the rumors are starting to spread, though.”

Virgil dropped her jeans to her ankles, and she stepped out of them, and he stroked her thighs with his fingertips. “I do have one idea. But it’s probably crazier than anything you’ve thought of.”

“Tell me about it,” she said. “Later.”

LATER, HE SAID, “Birdy has been gone for eight or nine years. The World of Spirit people threatened her, but they’ve got no idea of where she might be.”

Coakley sat up and said, “Virgil, you can’t tell them.”

“No, I don’t want to do that. For one thing, she’s in Nebraska, and we don’t have the resources there to cover her. But. She has a twin sister here in Minnesota, and the twin looks exactly like her, and sounds like her.”

“Virgil, jeez . . .”

“I’d tell her about it,” Virgil said. “Go up there and explain what we’re trying to do. Maybe Birdy can’t get involved, but maybe her sister would be willing to. We put her in a house where we can give her good cover, get a phone. She calls Roland Olms, says, ‘Virgil Flowers was here and he’s investigating a murder of some kind. Kelly Baker. He says if I don’t talk about the church, they’re going to indict me, too, as an accessory. What should I do? I’m really scared.’ Then we cover her, and see who shows up.”

“She’ll tell them where she’s at?”

“No—but they’ll have her phone number,” Virgil said. “We’ll make sure she’s in a reverse directory, that they can look her up.”

“That sounds complicated.”

“If we can talk her into it, it’d only take a couple days to set up,” Virgil said. “We’ve got a house where we stash witnesses, up in Burnsville; it’s empty right now. We could do it.”

“Let’s try to think of something better than that,” she said. “I mean, I think it’s unlikely that she’d even go along with it.”

VIRGIL GOT UP in the morning, still a little worn from the long drive the day before, and headed in to the Yellow Dog. Coakley was already there, eating pancakes, and Jacoby came over with a menu and asked, “Anything new?”

“Nah. I’m thinking about heading out,” Virgil said. “Short stack of blueberry pancakes, Diet Coke.”

“So she’s gonna get away with it?”

“We don’t know that, Bill,” Coakley said, her voice crisp. “We don’t actually know that she did anything.”

“Well, Jesus, that just isn’t right,” Jacoby said. He wandered off to talk with the cook.

Virgil asked Coakley, “Did you think about it?”

“Not much,” she said. “My brains were banged too loose.”

“Nasty expression,”