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boots. She saw Virgil and said, “Well, this one’s dead.”
    “Thanks,” Virgil said. “He was dead last night, too. Are you going to get anything off them?”
    “Too early to tell, but I doubt that it’ll be anything conclusive if it’s a domestic. He was shot from eight to ten feet away, judging from the powder traces—there is some, but not much. The shooter was standing where you are, these two were standing where they fell. We’ll recover both slugs, and they should be in reasonable shape—not hollow points, they look to be solids. We’ll be able to identify the gun, if you come up with it. There were no shells around, and I won’t know for sure until we pull the slugs, but it was probably a revolver.”
    “If you get DNA, why won’t it be conclusive?” Duke asked.
    “Because if it’s a domestic, there’s a lot of reasons for the shooter’s DNA to be all over the place,” Sawyer explained. “There doesn’t appear to have been a struggle—no defensive or offensive marks on George’s hands or arms, which means that the killer didn’t close with him. Shot him from a distance.”
    “But you might get some DNA that would narrow it down,” Duke said.
    “Possibly,” Sawyer said. “But juries don’t usually convict on the outside chance that somebody committed a murder.”
    “They do if I tell them to,” Duke said. He didn’t smile.
    Another man, wearing a surgeon’s mask and yellow gloves, came in from the back and said, “Hey-ya, Virgie.”
    “Hey, Don.” Don Baldwin was a tall, thin man with a sharp nose who wore heavy black-plastic fashion glasses because he played in a punk-revival band on his nights off. Like Sawyer, he was wearing a sweatshirt and blue jeans. “What’re you doing back there?”
    “Looked like somebody might have slept in the back bedroom. We’re working it,” he said.
    Virgil said, “Um,” and then, “You look at their car?”
    “Yeah, we’ll process it. . . . I won’t say that I expect much from it.”
    “All right,” Virgil said. He turned to Duke and said, “Let’s run down the daughter. I need to talk to her friends.”
    “Darrell’s got the names.”
    •   •   •
    AS IT TURNED OUT, Rebecca Welsh didn’t have many friends. The Bare County deputies had come up with three names from high school, and only two still lived in the county. Nobody, including her parents, knew exactly where the third one was, but one of the deputies said he’d been told she was hooking out in Williston, North Dakota, among the oil crews.
    Of the other two, Virgil spoke first to Carly Redecke, a short, dark-haired, dark-eyed girl whom he found working at the same store where George Welsh had bought his last beer. Though she wasn’t exactly working when he found her: she was in the back room, sitting on a couple of beer cases, smoking a cigarette.
    “I haven’t heard from her since last summer,” Redecke said of Welsh. “She had a place somewhere up in the Cities and was doing night restocking at a Home Depot.”
    “Do you have a phone number for her?”
    “Yes, but she doesn’t have that number anymore,” Redecke said. “I called it at Christmas, and I got one of those messages that the phone had been disconnected. But I still got it, if you want it.”
    Virgil made a note of the number, asked her if she knew anyone who might know better where Welsh would be.
    “There’s a bunch of old Shinder people up in the Cities—I was up there myself for a while, but it scared me, so I came back. I’m thinking of trying over in Sioux Falls. There’s nothing here.”
    “Of the old Shinder people, was she hanging with anyone in particular?”
    “Wooo . . . you might try calling Mickey Berenson. She keeps track of everybody. I got her number, I think it’s still good.”
    Redecke didn’t have much more, other than to say that Welsh was “the hottest girl ever to come out of this place. She could be like a movie star.”
    On his way over to see the