"I met a Little Curly the other night…" Virgil said, shaking hands with the two men. Big Curly's hands were small and soft, like a woman's. Williamson's, on the other hand, were hard and calloused, as though he ran his own printing press.

"That's my boy," Big Curly said.

Stryker: "To answer your question, it was pretty much luck. They saw the wheelchair down there and started digging around, looking for a body, and they found that coil of surgical wire. Now they're trying to figure out how the wheelchair got on top of all that trash and the ash, and the body was under it. They're starting to think that Judd was in the basement, and the wheelchair was upstairs, on the second or third floor, and dropped down when the fire burned through the floor."

"Coincidence?"

"Seems like. I don't know what else it could be," Stryker said.

"You gonna take this case?" Williamson asked.

"I'm working the Gleason investigation," Virgil said. "Our contact with the press either runs through the local sheriff or the BCA spokesman in St. Paul. I can't talk to you about it."

"That's not the way we do things out here," Williamson said.

"They must've changed then, because I'm from out here," Virgil said. "I played high school baseball against Jimmy here, and kicked his ass three years running."

"You were seven and two, and three of those wins were pure luck," Stryker said. "People still talk about it. Haven't ever seen a run of luck like it, not after all these years."

"Bite me," Virgil said.

"You've been talking to Joan," Stryker said.

VIRGIL TIPPED his head toward the burn pit, and asked, "That's Judd, right?"

Stryker said, "Yup. I gave him a call, he came right up."

Big Curly said, "Probably been down at the bank, reading the old man's will."

Williamson said quietly, "He's about to inherit my newspaper. That won't be good. I'm job hunting, if any of you guys own a printing press."