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serious.
    “Does it need saving?” Virgil asked.
    “Maybe,” she said. And, “My name’s Joan Carson. Jimmy said you had some nice things to say about my ass.”
    “Jimmy’s job just got in deeper trouble,” Virgil said, but she was still smiling and that wasn’t bad. “Tell me about that, though. His job.”
    She shrugged, dug into her salad. “This is his second term. Most sheriffs have to get over the third-election hump. That’s just the way it is, I guess. You’ve pissed off enough people to get fired, if they’re not so impressed that they feel obligated to vote for you.”
    “They’re not impressed?”
    “They were, until the murders,” she said. “Jimmy runs a good office, he’s fair with his deputies. Now, he’s got these murders and he’s not catching who did it.”
    “Did he tell you that?” Virgil asked.
    “Common knowledge,” she said. She picked a raw onion ring out of her salad and crunched half of it, and pointed the crescent-moon remainder at Virgil. “Everybody knows everybody, and the deputies talk. Nobody’s got any idea who did the shooting.”
    “Who do you think did it?”
    “It’s just a goddamn mystery, that’s what it is,” she said. “I know every single person in this town, and most of the relationships between them, and I can’t think of anybody who’d do something like that. Just can’t think of anybody . Maybe…” She trailed off.
    “Maybe…”
    She fluffed her hair, like women do sometimes when they think they’re about to say something silly. “This is really unfair. The newspaper editor, Todd Williamson, has only been here for three or four years, so I know him less than I know other people. So maybe, before he came here, there was some knot in his brain that we can’t see because we didn’t grow up with him.”
    “That’s it?” Virgil asked.
    “That’s it,” she said.
    “That’s nothing,” Virgil said.
    “That’s why I said it’s unfair. But I lie in bed at night, going through everybody in town over the age of ten, figuring out who could have done this. Maybe…”
    “What?”
    “Could we have some little crazy thrill-killer in the high school? Maybe somebody who had some kind of fantasy of killing somebody, and for some reason picked out the Gleasons? You read about that kind of thing…”
    “I hope so,” Virgil said. “If it’s like that, I’ll get him. He’ll have told his friends about it, and they’ll rat him out.”
    Virgil’s cell phone rang, and he slipped it out of his pocket and she said, “I hate it when that happens during lunch,” and Virgil said, “Yeah.” The call was coming in from a local number, and he opened the phone and said, “Hello?”
    “Virgil, Jim Stryker. You know that Bill Judd had a heart bypass fifteen years ago, and also had some work done on his lumbar spine?”
    “Yeah?”
    “My crime-scene girl found a coil of stainless-steel wire in the basement of Judd’s house, and she swears it’s what they used to close up his breastbone after the bypass. And eight inches away, she found a couple of titanium screws and a steel rod that she says came out of Judd’s spine. She says there should be X-rays up at the medical center, and she can check, but she thinks that’s what she’s got. She also thinks she found the back part of a skull, looks like a little saucer, pieces of two kneecaps and maybe some wrist and ankle bones.”
    “So he’s dead,” Virgil said.
    “I believe so—DNA will tell, if they can get some out of the bone marrow. The arson investigator says that there was an accelerant, probably ten or twenty gallons of gasoline, because he says the fire did a broad lateral flash through the house, instead of burning up,” Stryker said. “He means it spread laterally much faster than up, and with all this wood, it should have gone up faster.”
    “How can he tell?”
    “Beats me. That’s what he said—so, we’ve got another murder.”
    “Huh,” Virgil said.
    “What’s