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a problem. But I’ll tell you what is a problem.” He turned his chair around again, a full circle, thinking, and then said, “Of all the women I ever wanted in my entire life, Jesse Laymon is right at the top of the list. We even went out twice, but not three times. She wants somebody with more of an edge. A ramblin’ gamblin’ man.”
    “A bad country song,” Virgil said. The second he’d found in so many days. The prairie was full of them.
    “But it’s true,” Stryker said. He took a hit on the Coke. “I get my heart in my mouth every time I see her, but the fact is, what she wants is one of those black-eyed dope-dealing rascals who drinks too much and drives too fast and dances good. That’s not me.”
    “Well, hell.”
    “Yeah.”
     
    T HEY SAT for a minute, thinking it over, then Virgil said, “Maybe it’s because your dick is the size of Roche.”
    Stryker had been taking another sip of Coke, and he choked, sputtering, laughed, said, “Come to speak of it, what were you and Joanie doing on her front porch last night about ten o’clock?”
    Virgil laughed, but not hard, touched by a finger of guilt. So much apparent friendship, and he was sitting here smiling, and thinking that the Strykers would be suspects in the Judd killing, on any rational list…
     
    V IRGIL SAID, “I’m gonna go talk to Todd Williamson, see if he’ll let me look in his files, if he’s got any. Then I’m heading out to see George Feur.”
    Stryker’s eyebrows went up. “You got something?”
    “Not exactly. I want to talk to him, look him over, push him a little,” Virgil said.
    “When you say, ‘Not exactly’…”
    “Feur’s a Bible beater and he’s an asshole and he was working on Judd,” Virgil said. “Bible beaters don’t beat anything harder than the book of Revelation. I noticed when I was up at the Gleasons’ yesterday, that Anna Gleason had a book of Revelation right under her hand when she was shot. A pretty new one, it looked like.”
    “She did?” Stryker frowned and leaned forward. “Why didn’t I know that?”
    Virgil shrugged. “Maybe nobody noticed. This was before Judd was killed, and Feur’s name didn’t really come up until the fire.”
    “Hell of a thing not to notice, though,” Stryker said. “I’ll have to talk to Larry and Margo about this. They should have seen it. At least had it in the back of their minds.”
    Virgil didn’t disagree. “Maybe they should have,” he said. “Especially for a guy with Feur’s history.”
    “You know about him and me, right?” Stryker asked. “I busted him for robbery, when I was a deputy? He went to Stillwater. Claims I railroaded him.”
    “Nothing to that, though,” Virgil offered.
    “No. He was caught on a liquor store camera,” Stryker said. “He had a hat pulled down low, but I knew him the minute I saw the tape. Went and dug him out of his hole, got his gun, too. The gun did it as much as anything—it was an old piece with a nine-inch barrel, and that, you see perfectly, on the tape.”
    “So it was a good bust.”
    “Yup. It was, and still is.”
     
    V IRGIL SAID, “Another thing—if this all somehow involves Judd’s money, then your friend Jesse might be in trouble, could be a target for somebody.”
    “You think?”
    “Maybe. Or maybe not.” Virgil scratched his ear. “If she’s got one of those ramblin’ gamblin’ guys around, who figured she might become a millionairess, under the right circumstances…”
    “Man, that hadn’t occurred to me,” Stryker said. He sat back in his chair, rocking.
    “Could Jesse or Margaret set something up?” Virgil asked.
    Stryker rubbed his chin. “Not Margaret. Don’t see that. Jesse wouldn’t do it on purpose. I could see her sitting around, suckin’ a little smoke, bullshitting with somebody, dreaming about all the money…and she wakes up in a world of hurt, when her pal goes off and does something about it.”
    “A concept to consider,” Virgil said.
    “I