"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."

THEY 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."