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showing restraint.
    “That’s good, Maude,” said Sally, not sure what else was expected.
    “I really think the community needs to get together to talk about how to fight this kind of violence,” Maude insisted. “Maybe some public expression of outrage is in order. This kind of thing should not be happening in our town.”
    Sally tried to focus on what Maude was saying. “Like some kind of demonstration or something?” she asked. “I sympathize with your point, but in the middle of Jubilee Days? I don’t know about that. A lot of people aren’t going to be too thrilled about the idea of focusing on this murder during the biggest business week of the year.”
    In her younger years Sally would have been rushing to the barricades too. Like Maude, she was horrified, but she was more realistic nowadays. Thousands of people were coming to Laramie to watch cowboys do battle with large, unruly mammals, to drink rivers of beer and boogie until their shoes melted, maybe try to get laid. If instead, you laid a Take Back the Night rally on them, how many would just close up their wallets and say adios?
    “I know there’ll be people worrying about their bank accounts instead of our women, but for me it’s a matter of honor,” said Maude. “Let’s keep in touch. I’ve got some more calls to make,” she finished, and hung up.
    And so Sally’s day began. Hawk, always an early riser, was already up and gone. He’d left a note—“At the gym. Back soon. Here’s your newspaper. Love, Fido.” He was off to his early morning basketball game at the university gym. Sally wondered if Detective Atkins was there too, keeping to the routine. Such a normal thing to do, on such a strange day.
    Do normal things, she told herself. It helps.
    She began the elaborate but familiar ritual of morning coffee making, a consumer ceremony that was, Sally had to admit, threatening to get out of hand. She’d thought her coffee obsession bad enough when she’d insisted on mail-ordering coffee beans from Peet’s in California, to Laramie. But it turned out there was another level of fetishization she had yet to achieve. When Hawk gave her a cappuccino maker for Christmas, she reached that new plateau.
    It was an elaborate rite that bordered on excessive: meting out beans and grinding them, measuring water, watching every second while the coffee dripped to just the right level in the glass carafe, pouring just enough milk into a stainless steel pitcher, getting the amount of steam and foam just right. The results were pleasing, but were they worth the damn fuss? When it came right down to it, you could get just as good a caffeine buzz by drinking four or five cups of the translucent horse dung extract Delice served up at the Wrangler.
    Well, Sally thought, at least I know the difference between shit and shinola.
    Good thing. More shit was on the way. She sat down at the table and unfolded the Laramie Daily Boomerang. The story of Monette’s murder appeared on the second page, below the fold—the top story on the front page was, of course, about the Jubilee Days rodeo queen and her court. There were large photographs of five carefully coiffed and made-up girls, smiling in spangled Western wear, with accompanying stories about their hobbies, studies, religious beliefs, missions in life, and favorite rodeo events. Young and pretty, full of fire and piety and promise, sweethearts of the rodeo.
    The murder didn’t even lead the second page. That honor was reserved for a piece about a rancher who’d found himself compelled to “put down” a calf that had been attacked, and grievously chewed up, by a coyote. Wyoming newspapers could be hell on predators, at least the four-legged kind. A color picture of the mutilated calf took up a quarter of the page, roughly five times the space allotted to the murder of Monette Bandy.
    Way down below, a small headline read, “Newcastle Girl Slain Near Cheyenne.” True, Sally thought, Monette had moved to