Virgil eased into the chair. "Nothing in the house?"

"I'll tell you something. When most people build houses, there's a whole bunch of stuff in it that just don't burn too well," Stryker said. He tapped his fingers on his desktop; anxiety. "Judd's house was all wood-floors, paneling, bookcases-and a good amount of it was pine. Dry as a broom straw. There was nothing left up there this morning but the basement and a few pieces of metal and rock-refrigerator, stove, furnace, and even those are melted down into lumps. We think he was in there. But we haven't found a thing."

"Huh."

"I'll tell you, Virgil. If we don't find something, this is gonna plague me," Stryker said. "And everybody in the county, for that matter. We won't know if he went up in smoke, or if he's down on some French island someplace. We won't know if that truck last night didn't have Bill Judd in it, heading for the West Indies."

"Jesus, Jimmy, the guy's what? Eighty?" Virgil said. "They were saying down at the Holiday that he'd been pretty sick. In and out of the hospital. Why in the hell would he sit here for eighty years, and then with six months to live, take off for the West Indies?"

"Probably because he'd think it was funny, fuckin' everybody up one last time," Stryker said. He was unsettled, mumbled, "Sonofabitch," then sighed, looked at two fat file folders on his desktop, and pushed them across at Virgil.

"This is it. Everything we got. There's also a DVD in there, all the same stuff, if you'd rather use a computer. You need Adobe Reader."

"All right," Virgil said. "But boil it down for me. What'd you get, and what are you looking at now?"

VIRGIL WASN'T in Bluestem for Bill Judd, though.