Ghislaine Morris had been another of Shiloh ’s informants. He had given me her number, too, but I hadn’t had much opportunity to deal with her.

“She was my roommate,” Lydia said. “Before the bust.” She meant her own arrest for transporting.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll talk to Ghislaine.”

Lydia slid a clear plastic bin of rollers into a cabinet above the line of shampoo bowls and closed the door. I moved into the doorway but didn’t leave.

“How’s married life?” I asked.

“Good,” Lydia said.

“You like it?” I added lamely. She just said as much, stupid, I told myself.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Well, I’ll let you get back to work,” I said.

But she spoke as I turned away. “Detective Pribek,” she said, hesitant.

I turned back.

“I noticed… I don’t mean to pry, but I noticed that you don’t wear your wedding ring anymore.”

“Oh,” I said. Self-consciously I touched my ring finger. “I’m doing a detail on the street that doesn’t allow me to wear a wedding band.” I didn’t say the words prostitution decoy, but Lydia probably got the picture.

Maybe she sensed even more than that. “ Shiloh ’s okay, isn’t he?” she said.

Had she read the papers? Did she know about Blue Earth? Her dark eyes gave me no clue.

“I’ll tell him you asked about him,” I said, evading her question, “the next time I see him.”

The next time I see him. I hadn’t been back to Wisconsin since the visit I’d made shortly after Shiloh was sent there. We were separated by more than simple geographical distance. Blue Earth lay between us. My trip West to meet his family lay between us. Things that were too difficult to speak about. Even in the good times, Shiloh could be unnervingly quiet; for my part, I was never good at putting feelings into words. I suppose it was inevitable that in hard times we’d fallen back on old ways. We’d fallen silent.