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ratted you out.”
    “Too bad he wasn’t watching the night the Gleasons were killed,” Virgil said.
    “Got that right.”
    Jensen was easy enough, took him in the house, told him how he thought the killings must have happened, and his reconstruction jibed with Virgil’s. They walked through the rest of the house, including the basement, and on the way back up, Jensen said, “I have the feeling…” He hesitated.
    “Yeah?”
    “I have the feeling that this was something that stewed for a long time. I went through every scrap of business dealings that the Gleasons had in the last ten years, I talked to about every single person that they knew, interviewed the kids and the kids’ spouses. I have the feeling that this goes back to something we don’t know about. I’m thinking, Russell was a doctor. What if he did something bad to somebody. You know, malpractice. What if back there somewhere, years ago, he killed somebody, or maybe didn’t save somebody, a wife or somebody’s daddy, and they just stewed and stewed and now they snapped? I mean, Russell dealt with a lot of death in his time—he was the county coroner for years—and what if it goes back to something that just…happened? Like happens to all doctors?”
    Virgil nodded. “That’s a whole deep pit…”
    Jensen nodded. “When I worked through it, I decided that it meant everybody in the county would be a suspect. So it’s meaningless.”
    Virgil said, “I’ve got a question for you, but I don’t want you to take offense.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “Did your office ever issue .357s? To your deputies?”
    “Yeah, you could of gone all day without asking me that,” Jensen said. “We did, but years ago. We went to high-capacity .40s when the FBI did.”
    “What happened to the .357s?”
    “That was before my time. As I understand it, guys were allowed to buy them at a discount. Some did, some didn’t. Tell you the truth, some went away, we don’t know where. Record keeping wasn’t what it should have been. This was two sheriffs ago, so it doesn’t have anything to do with Jim.”
    “But you thought of that,” Virgil said.
    “Sure.”
     
    T HEY TALKED for another fifteen minutes, and Jensen said that he was looking through medical records at the partnership that had taken over Gleason’s practice, and also at the regional hospital. “It’s buried back there somewhere. Maybe the same guy killed Bill Judd, if Judd is really dead. He and Gleason were almost exactly the same age, so there’s gotta be a tie. Maybe this killer-guy is waiting to go after somebody else, sitting out there thinking about it.”
    “Could have gone all day without saying that,” Virgil said.
     
    V IRGIL FOLLOWED J ENSEN back into town, cut away when Jensen turned north toward the courthouse. The motel clerk had recommended two lunch spots, Ernhardt’s Café and Johnnie’s Pizza, both on Main Street. Virgil decided Italian might be too much, and checked out Ernhardt’s.
    The café turned out to be a combination German deli and bakery, cold meat, fresh-baked potato bread, pickles, and sauerkraut. Virgil got a roast beef on rye with rough mustard, a pickle, and a half pound of bright yellow potato salad, and took it to one of the low-backed booths that lined the wall opposite the ordering counter.
    A minute or so after he sat down, the sheriff’s sister stepped in, blinked in the dimmer light, said hello to the woman behind the counter, ordered a salad and coffee, spotted Virgil in the back booth and nodded to him. He nodded back, and a moment later, she carried her lunch tray over and slid into the seat on the other side of the booth.
    “Are you going to save Jimmy’s job?” she asked.
    She was not perfectly good looking—her eyebrows might have down sloped a little too much, her mouth might have been a quarter-inch too wide—but she was very good-looking, and certainly knew it. She was smiling when she asked her question, but her green eyes were