“He’s a cousin to one of them. We don’t know that he’s there for sure, but a farmer called in this morning and said he saw him in Jim Button’s yard last night, in the rhubarb patch. Button’s the cousin. And a Nazi. The other Nazi is Raleigh Good.”

“Raleigh? It’s not pronounced ‘Really’?”

“Nothing really good about Raleigh Good,” Bakker said. “He is an asshole of major dimension, believe me.”

“Hate assholes,” Virgil said. “You can’t even put them in jail for that.”

“That’s pretty hateful. I sometimes think we’d be better off if we put the assholes in jail and let the criminals go,” Bakker said. “Now, Jim and Raleigh are mean guys. Mean! They like to start fights in bars with guys they know they can beat up. They made a mistake with one old boy a couple of years ago; he just about beat Raleigh to death, and was starting in on Jim Button, when some people pulled him off. Jim and Raleigh—they usually know their limits, though. Black eyes and bloody noses. I don’t think they’d kill anybody, not on purpose anyway. The whole idea of prison scares them. The ‘Don’t drop the soap in the shower’ thing.”

“Glad to hear it. Too many guys look on it as free health care,” Virgil said. “You want to lead the way?”

—

Virgil followed Bakker down eight miles of blacktop highway, three miles of blacktop side road, and a half mile down a dead-end gravel road. Jim Button lived in a decrepit clapboard farmhouse that a Midwestern cartoonist might have drawn: it appeared to be taller than it was wide or deep, like an inhabited silo, and it had all gone crooked, as if the two floors had rotated in different directions. Virgil could see eight windows, none of them matching. The last flakes of paint were peeling off the boards, and the front steps had collapsed into the weeds beneath the porch. The only new-looking thing anywhere was a silver propane tank next to a stand-alone machine shed.

A too-heavy blond woman was in the backyard, hanging clothes, and a red-and-black Nazi flag, on a clothesline. She stopped to look at them, and instead of running for the house, she took a cell phone out of her pocket and made a call.

Virgil parked beside Bakker, who had gotten out of his car and was talking into his shoulder microphone. When Virgil came up, he said, “I let the boys in the office know that we got here alive.”

As he said it, a man in a black wifebeater shirt came out a side door, looked them over, called something back inside, and started toward them. Behind him, another man and two women came out of the house and trotted after him to catch up.