that.”

VIRGIL CLIMBED the stoop and knocked on the door. No answer. No sound, except the faint hiss of the chimney. Knocked again, louder. Called, “Crocker? Jim Crocker?”

Silence.

Virgil stepped back from the stoop, asked the deputies, “There’s no chance that anybody called him? That he’s running for it?”

Dunn shook his head: “I know for a fact that the sheriff didn’t tell anybody but me and Gene, and Judge O’Hare, who’s about as tight-lipped as a guy could get.”

“O’Hare didn’t tell anybody,” Schickel said. He climbed the stoop and banged on the door again, yelled, “Jimmy?”

Dunn said, “Let me look in the shed. Maybe he’s over in Jackson or something.” He walked across the driveway to the shed, peered in a window, came back. “His Jeep’s there,” he said.

The three men looked at each other, and Virgil said, “I’m going in, on the warrant.”

Dunn nodded and said, “Probably best to take out a pane of glass, instead of breaking the door. Be hell to get somebody out here to fix the door.”

Virgil used the barrel of the Glock to knock out a pane of glass in the door, reached in, and turned the lock. He pushed the door open, then stepped back.

“Somebody dead in here,” he said.

Dunn, suddenly pale-faced, said, “What?”

“I can smell him,” Virgil said. “Not much stink, but somebody’s dead in here.”

“A mouse?”

“Not a mouse . . . You guys step careful, here. If he’s dead, we don’t want to screw up the scene.”

They found him on the living room couch, staring with blank eyes at a rerun of Married . . . with Children.

“Ah, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Schickel said, crossing himself. “He ate his gun. He must’ve killed Bobby.”

A pistol, a matte-black Glock like Virgil’s, except in .45 caliber, lay on the floor next to the couch.

“Did he carry a .45 Glock?” Virgil asked, looking at the big black hole at the end of the barrel.

“Yeah, he did,” Dunn said.

Crocker was on his back, an entry wound under his chin, a massive exit wound at the back of his skull. The arm of the couch, covered with a plush green material, was soaked with blood, hair, and what might have been pieces of bone; a couple of small holes in the wall beside the couch looked like they might have been made by fragments of the exiting slug.

“Maybe he knew he was gonna get caught,” Dunn said.

“Didn’t kill himself,” Virgil said. “He was probably murdered. Let’s clear the house, just to make sure there’s nobody hurt, somewhere. We don’t want to dig around, just clear it. Two minutes.”

The three of them moved through the place, but found it empty. Crocker had lived only on the first floor; the second floor was closed down, the door at the top of the stairs sealed with 3M insulating tape. They pushed through, and found a bunch of old dusty furniture sitting in cold, dry, dusty rooms.

When they were sure there was nobody else in the place, Virgil said, “Let’s call the sheriff. This is really gonna make her day.”

They stepped carefully past the body and back outside. Dunn made the call, and Schickel asked Virgil, “Why’d you think it’s murder?”

“When Lee was telling me about B. J. Tripp, she mentioned him being hanged from the bunk. I asked her if his dick was hanging out—you know, strangled himself while masturbating.”

“Heard of that, but never seen it,” Schickel said.

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t. Hanging out. But if you go up there and look, you’ll see that Crocker’s fly is down, and you can see his dick sticking out. I never, ever, heard of anyone who was yanking his crank and stopped to kill himself. Or anyone who took his dick out, and left it out, and killed himself. It’s not dignified. When people kill themselves, they tend to think about how they’ll be found—they imagine it. They imagine how sad everybody’ll be. They’re going to show them . . . but they don’t stick their dick out.”

“I didn’t pick up on that,” Schickel said. “His dick.”

Dunn came back: “The sheriff’s on the way. What about his dick? Whose dick?”

LEE COAKLEY LOOKED in on Crocker’s body. Her mouth was a thin line, with a twist at the end, as though she’d been sucking on a lemon. “He could be a jerk, but I’d never have wished this on him,” she said.

“I called our crime-scene people up in the Cities. I thought you might want to go that way, given the situation, instead of using