"No!"

I looked at Goober. "What?"

"No, no, don't take me in there. We can't go in to Maitland."

"We can't?" I looked at him over the top of my reading glasses. "And just why would that be?"

Suddenly, he looked as if he were about to cry. "They, they, they need me there…"

"'They,' Fred? Who are 'they'?"

I'd known Fred for about five years, since the time I'd busted him for DWI when he was sixteen. We'd always gotten along fairly well, really, and had met officially three or four times since his DWI. Minor stuff, a small theft, a couple of vandalism charges. Fred wasn't exactly what you'd call a career criminal. Just a bored kid in a very small Iowa town, who honked his horn at deer.

He opened his mouth, and made a tiny choking sound. He didn't look directly at me.

"You know, Mr. Houseman, those break-ins you beh, beh, been having around the county, in the farmhouses?"

"Yeah," I said, being noncommittal. I knew them, all right. Eleven burglaries at rural residences in the last sixteen days. That was just as far as we knew. One of the problems was that the burglaries were at a select number of farmhouses that were empty for the winter, the owners being elsewhere. Elsewhere as in warmer. Most of the burglaries were reported by whoever was looking after the place, when they showed up to check the furnace and the water pipes. Usually once a week or so. The main problem was, we had no idea if, or how many, more would be discovered. Neither did we have much of an idea of when they'd been done, except after the date the owners had left. We only knew the date when they'd been found.

"Well, uh, do you have a, a, a list, like, of the places that have been robbed?"

"Yeah." We had two lists, actually. The first was a simple listing of the known burglaries, in chronological order.