to look for Loewe. Give me a call when you get there, though. . . . I’m still skeptical about the whole idea.”

“It’s what we’ve got,” Virgil said. “I’m gonna give it a shot.”

On the way north again, Virgil thought about the idea of using Louise Gordon as bait in a trap: and thought better of the idea of putting her in a BCA witness-protection house. The problem was, the house was in Burnsville, a Twin Cities suburb that was simply too large. They needed a small town, like Sleepy Eye, he thought, so they could spot whoever came in after her.

That could be handled, he thought: Minnesota had no shortage of small towns, where strangers would be picked up in a minute.

SLEEPY EYE had thirty-five hundred residents, more or less, the usual clutter of small businesses, including two cafés. Virgil had eaten at Doreen’s once before. He stopped at Gordon’s house, knocked, found it empty, because she was at work, and went down to Doreen’s.

The place was going through the afternoon slump, and there were only two other customers in the place, a couple of older men huddled at one end of the counter, arguing about medical care. Virgil ordered a hamburger and fries, and when they came, showed the waitress his ID and asked, “You know where Louise Gordon works? I just went by her house and there was nobody home.”

“What’s going on with Louise?” she asked.

“Nothing, really. I was talking to her night before last, about a person she knew—actually, her sister—and I need to talk to her again. I forgot to ask her where she works.”

The woman took another look at his ID, then said, “She’s down at Phillips’. The Ace Hardware. She’s not in trouble, or nothing?”

“Not at all. I just need to check in with her,” Virgil said. And, “You guys got any berry pie?”

“Five kinds—cherry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, and mixed berry.”

“Put a piece of raspberry on there, too.”

“Warmed up?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“Ice cream?”

“Might as well,” Virgil said. “Long as there’s no calories in there.”

She snorted: the laugh of a woman who’d heard the line six hundred times, and was being polite. “Lucy. That’s her name. Louise’s sister. Twin sister.”

“Nice lady, too,” Virgil said.

LOUISE WAS SORTING nuts and bolts into metal bins at the back of the somnambulant hardware store. When Virgil walked in, he could hear two men’s voices, working in a small-engine repair shop, then the tink-tink of metal on metal, and when he turned the corner, Louise spotted him, frowned, and asked, “How’d you do that? Find my call?”

“Lucy called you? Lenore? Birdy?”

“As soon as you left,” Louise said. “She knew you must’ve figured it out from my call. I don’t call her in three months, and then I do, and you show up the next day.”

Virgil bobbed his head and said, “Well, she’s right. I followed you down to your friend’s house and had the outgoing calls checked the next morning.”

“I watched to see if anybody was following me,” she said.

“I was over on the street behind your house, so I could see when you got in the garage. I stayed on parallel streets as much as I could, and then, way back.”

“Tricky,” she said. She looked at a bunch of nuts in her hand, selected one, and threw it in a bin. “So what do you want now?”

“I want to tell you a story, and then see if you could help me out.”

“Why should I help you out?”

Virgil said, “Because you’re a good person? Because it’d be a lot more exciting than sorting nuts?”

She looked at the nuts in her hand and said, “Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”

They wound up back at Doreen’s, sitting in a booth, and Virgil made his pitch, starting with a couple of questions, spoken quietly. “How much do you know about Lucy’s love life? When she was married to Roland?”

“Enough,” she said. “I know about the swapping and so on. And you said that they might be abusing children now.”

“Not just now . . . for a long time. Generations.” He told her about Kelly Baker and the evidence of multiple partners, and sadism. He told her about Bobby Tripp, and his murder of Jake Flood.

“I’m not a prude. I’ve been married and divorced a lot, and I like women a lot—but that’s not what we’re talking about here,” Virgil said. “And this isn’t some phonied-up sex ring where there’re a bunch of wannabe therapists manipulating the kids. . . . This is