“Wait,” I said placatingly, but she was already nearly running for the exit. Everyone working around me stopped to watch her flight.

“Wait,” I said more loudly, standing. But she was gone.

“She’s fleeing the interview! She’s fleeing the interview!” a deputy said, mimicking Frances McDormand’s broad Minnesotan accent in Fargo . The other deputies laughed.

“Thanks,” I said. “If you enjoyed the show, my monkey will be around shortly with a tin cup.”

With no way to follow up on that resounding success, I drove to South Minneapolis to talk to my first informant about Prewitt’s medical-fraud case.

When Shiloh had gotten accepted to the FBI Academy and quit the MPD, he’d had a kind of fire sale, giving me some useful phone numbers, from his contacts with federal agencies to street-level informants. Like Lydia Neely, who he knew from his early career in Narcotics. Lydia had been arrested while driving over the county line with a lot of British Columbian marijuana in the trunk of her car. Several officers had been in on the bust, as is typical of Narcotics cases, but it was Shiloh who’d taken an interest in Lydia ’s situation. He was the one who’d found out that she had no priors and was muling for a boyfriend who subscribed to the theory that women are less likely to be stopped by drug agents. Had someone not informed on Lydia, the boyfriend would have been right.

Shiloh, with his typical concern for the unfortunate, had gone out of his way to intercede for Lydia and to keep her out of prison. She’d done some time in the workhouse, and checked in with a probation officer afterward. She’d also become Shiloh ’s informant, and when he left the MPD, I’d inherited her name and number.

I hadn’t seen Lydia in some time, mostly because she wasn’t the most useful informant anymore. She’d gotten a good job in a South Minneapolis salon, and the new and better boyfriend she’d found had recently become a husband. That sort of rehabilitation was the point of the intervention Shiloh had made, but it also meant that she didn’t associate with criminals much anymore, and so she didn’t get to hear interesting things. It’s a truth the public doesn’t want to hear: good citizens often don’t make for good informants, and good informants are necessary to police work.