He hit her in the mouth again, and she went down, and he kicked her in the thigh once, twice, and finally thought, now what? And, I’m out on bail . . .

He looked at her, cowering on the kitchen floor, and backed away and took his cell phone from his pocket and dialed 911. When the county officer answered, he said, “I found somebody broke into my house and I’m holding her until a cop gets here. She attacked me . . .”

—

Virgil had talked to Frankie the night before, and she’d said he better come out to the farm. “I’m kinda hung up here.”

“By what?”

“You’ll see when you get here,” she said.

When he got there, he found a strange car, a new Chevrolet, parked in the driveway; and when he went inside, he found Frankie sitting in the kitchen with her sister, Sparkle, who was apparently the hang-up. Sparkle was a thin, pretty blonde of suspect morality with a freshly minted Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.

She said to Virgil, “How ya doin’, good-lookin’?”

“Sparkle was going by on her way back to the Cities. She dropped in to see how I was,” Frankie said.

“So how are you?” Virgil asked, taking a chair.

“Today wasn’t bad, until Sparkle got here,” Frankie said. The sisters loved each other—maybe—but had a thorny relationship; Sparkle deliberately exacerbated the thorniness by flirting with Virgil.

Frankie asked him how the investigation was going, and Virgil said, “We might finally be seeing some movement,” and then had to explain it to Sparkle, and Sparkle asked, “Listen, if you were to arrest me for some reason . . . would you put handcuffs on me?”

“Probably around your ankles,” Frankie said. “Then you wouldn’t be able to spread your legs apart.”

Sparkle: “Says the woman who has five children with five different men and has a bat in the cave with a sixth guy.”

“Maybe I ought to go home and mow the lawn,” Virgil said.

—

Sparkle left a half hour later, after some further snarling and spitting, promising to return as soon as she could. Virgil and Frankie got Frankie’s youngest kid off to bed—the others could take care of themselves—and then they sat in the farmhouse living room and talked about the case. Frankie suggested they get a pad of paper and think up and list all the possible reasons for the murders in Wheatfield.

“There’s greed,” she said. “Money—that’s number one. Always is.”

“Or a religious kink in a crazy guy,” Virgil suggested.

“Outright love or hate,” Frankie said.

“Does somebody benefit if the town is ruined? Or was somebody damaged when it started doing well?”

“That should be under ‘Money,’” Frankie said.

“I’m not making that kind of a list, where there are subtopics,” Virgil said. “Besides, the benefit or damage wouldn’t have to be financial, it could be psychological.”