I'm an early riser, and no amount of burning the midnight oil can keep me from getting out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and feeling like I'm up for the day. Of course, by seven that feeling may have dissolved and I'm back in bed again, but still there I am, proverbially clockwork, in the early morning hours looking for something to do.

Experience has taught me that no one sleeping in your bed finds it endearing that you have chosen to rearrange the contents of a drawer or start watching television at that hour--in many hotels I've stayed in, there were often registered complaints from adjacent rooms. But I had absorbed this lesson long ago: I was a quick learner and Laura an emphatic and persuasive teacher, so when I woke to a straw-colored dawn and saw Gwen lying next to me, her soft rustling snores passing by a mouth from which a glistening stream had emerged, I decided to find someplace to park myself for a few hours. I left a note; I invited her but not insistently. I couldn't remember enough about that portion of the evening to get a read on whether we had actually felt a spark between us or just perceived an opportunity. She was less pretty in the morning light than in the bar-smoke-hazed beer filter of the night before, but the cadaverous aging guy staring back at me from the mirror was a hideous doppelganger next to the rugged turk whose hair I had smoothed down in a similar mirror the night before. Gwen was getting the worse deal.

I threw down a couple of over-easy eggs and a half-dozen slices of toast at a Shari's a short walk from the Motel 6, which was the cheapest place with a vacancy I could find without wandering away from the interstate. Shari's is no great shakes but if you asked for runny eggs the eggs were runny. You have one in your area; even if it's not a Shari's: it's the restaurant that is always open, is strewn with Naugahyde booths in a pattern apparently only comprehensible when viewed from space, and is where an old person will take you on Sunday for "a real treat."

I had a busy day planned, told myself that no headache could convince me not to talk to the sheriff and find out the next link in this chain. Eugene seemed too small for what it contained, too placid for what seemed to lurk underneath it. Going from the East Coast to the west is a lesson in how people choose to communicate, how cities broadcast themselves. Eugene was a kind of swollen faux-blue-collar hippie's dream.

"It is all right if I join you, isn't it?" Gwen stood with her hand on the back of the booth seat, and it squeaked slightly as she clutched it to steady herself. "I think you'd better before you fall."

She fell into the seat and reached for my water. "I thought I'd lost my taste for coke." Then I remembered. Doing lines off each other's bodies. Whiskey shots. The kind of scene you shudder to think about afterwards because it feels as tawdry as it was. But as I remembered that and saw her low neckline enter my field of vision I was reminded of her body, the contoured slope of her hip, the sensitive flesh shadowed by her breasts. A part of me that was still dozing came to life then, and I took a long pull of coffee, knowing it was going to be a productive day.

* * *

Laura clearly married up. Sheriff Denton Trubull (nicknamed, I correctly guessed, "Gettin'-in Trouble" as a kid) couldn't wait to hang up on me when first I called. Panicking a little, I dropped Frank's name as clumsily as a social-climber at a garden party, but it did at least stop him reciting the list of hotlines that I should be calling instead of bothering him.

"I'm swamped until the end of the day." I expected him to push me off until tomorrow or next week or next month. I heard a pause which I figured could be him either thinking or being distracted by something near him. "Can you drop by at six?"

I told him I could, and was encouraged when he asked if I knew how to get there; I said I could manage from the map in the front of the phone book and told him I looked forward to meeting him, hungry to make a good pre-impression. But he just hung up.

I got bogged down in rush-hour traffic, which I didn't expect to find in Eugene, sitting stock still on a freeway in granola country, surrounded by Subaru Outbacks and VW minibuses. But none of the congested points took long to clear up, and I reached Trubull's office only five minutes late, my usual and seemingly unavoidable margin.

It has occurred to me at many times in my life: as a husband, as a scholar-in-training, as a nomad, as an amateur detective, that I have absolutely no aptitude for anything I attempt to do. I am a studied man; I contain no reflexive instinctual reactions to the world except those which I glean from various sources. Which is why I could not understand why Trubull got up from his desk when I appeared and gave me the warmest two-handed shake I've ever received. His face, long and creviced as the trunk of a fir tree, hid a thin-lipped mouth under the shade of a wide and bushy mustache, an impressive specimen; his thin lips curled up, just barely appearing at its edges.

Taking a stab at a joke: "That's an excellent handshake you have there, Sheriff."

He laughed, reached into a ceramic turtle which contained a little cupola in its shell (undoubtedly a painful configuration had the turtle been alive); he pulled from it a tiny button and tossed it to me. "Have a seat." I turned the thing over in my hand. It said, in simple block letters on a blue background, "Elect Trubull."

I scanned it for a date. "You coming up for re-election?"

"I haven't had a contender in seven elections, so we just recirculate the same buttons. I trained hard for the first campaign, though." He gazed up at the ceiling intently then, as if that's where the memories were. "You ever grabbed onto a moldy leg of lamb like you were shaking its hand? If you can learn to smile through that, you can smile at anybody." He slid open his top drawer, reached in and slid over to me a faded, laminated newspaper article. The plastic laminate warped and shimmied in my hand as I looked at the headline: "Stuffer Helper Convicted."

"Stuffer?" I asked.

"Newspapers gotta have nicknames that jump off the front page, you know? We had an interesting medical case lived down in Cottage Grove, a guy named Peter Turcan. He had something wrong in his brain where he couldn't shut off his hunger sensation; would eat himself to death if someone didn't stop him or he could restrain himself. He'd lived all right with psychotherapy and training, was about twenty-five years old and decided he couldn't take it anymore."

I leaned back in my chair and my ass squeaked against it. The chair threatened to pitch over backwards but I stayed aloft.

"When we found him we realized he had tried to divert some of the food straight from his esophagus using some surgical tubing and an air compressor. The idea seemed to be that he was trying to find a way to fulfill his need to eat without forcing his system to deal with all that material. From what the forensics guys pieced together, it actually worked for a while, but none of the incisions were adequately cleaned, he went septic, and died. We knew he had a helper, someone with medical experience, and the trail finally led to Otis Murray, who'd been an army medic in Korea. They were friends, it seemed; according to Otis, Peter couldn't take it anymore. He was on antidepressants, hunger suppressants, but he didn't care. He wanted to kill himself gorging so he could try to feel what it felt like not to be hungry."

I was glancing at the article in my hand. "You headed the investigation?"

"I asked the right questions of the right people; I didn't figure any of it out myself. The DA convinced a jury that Otis had actually committed murder because not only did he aid and abet a suicide but he had convinced Peter to do so."

"You believe that?"

"Much was made of the nature of their relationship. This was 1982. Peter was twenty-five, and Otis was twice that. There was no direct evidence of sexual contact between them, but it couldn't be ruled out and, in my non-scientific opinion, seemed likely. Say you love somebody and the only way to see them happy is to let them die... Otis did the wrong thing, in my opinion, but for making the wrong choice he spent the remainder of his years in prison." Gauging my look, he said "I'm not a liberal, but how much can you people who do the wrong things for all the right reasons, or when choosing the wrong thing is as much a matter of luck or circumstance as anything else?"

For a moment, I felt bad that it was his business to figure this question out. Most of us make a decision about where we stand on crime and punishment, and we bask in the glory of our brilliance and glower at the system, which is always broken from whichever vantage point we choose. But Trubull every day had to live with his beliefs and construct his working moments, probably his waking moments, accordingly. Since Boston, I had wondered if I was giving up any opportunity to have an impact on the lives of others. Trubull reminded me I was quite relieved not to have any.

"Anyway, not to sidetrack us. The moral is that name recognition is more important than competency when it comes to politics."

"Seems like you have both," I said, glancing around at a wall bedecked with plaques and signed photographs from governors. "And don't worry about sidetracking; I didn't realize we'd established a main track yet."

"I presume you're here to talk about this woman Kay," he said, his eyes glinting as he leaned forward onto his forearms, and it occurred to me that he was an expert interrogator, knowing just when to inject the appropriate information.

That's when it suddenly made sense to me. "You talked to Frank?" It wasn't really a question.

He leaned back in his chair and placed his arms along those of the chair. He looked contemplative, and it struck me that some day he might run for judge. "Frank says you're Laura's crazy ex-husband who came stalking his wife to give her an old cat and hit him up for information. He also says that you're on the level and a good man, and let's put it this way. If this were a job interview and Frank was listed as a reference, I'd be getting your 401k paperwork right now."

We talked about Frank, about what he knew of my story and then I filled him in on the rest, at least what I knew of it. He frowned when I told him about the bartender Dave, and I presumed it was because I had failed to call anyone and tell them. "There's no necessary connection. Whoever did it is cold-blooded, and that matches what we know of Kay and the crew she worked for up here, but there are a lot of such people in the world. It's the letter that concerns me. They know who you are, and they know a great deal about you. They were following you then; why do you presume you're now following them?"