Jill had left early, barely after sunup, to go home and shower and get ready for work; she seemed more shaken, more troubled this morning than she had in the thick of things last night. Holding each other in the dark had made getting through the early morning hours a snap; getting through the day on our own would be a whole ’nother deal. I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after Jill left, so at nine o’clock I was sitting at the Sports Page having breakfast—biscuits and gravy, very good but settling in my stomach like an anchor. Shortly after I was on the road. I felt a little stiff from my skirmish with the guy in my kitchen last night, and a little uneasy about the direction my unofficial investigation into Ginnie’s death was taking. Specifically, that direction was (at the moment anyway) the Quad Cities, which despite its name included half a dozen cities and a handful of smaller municipalities, about a half-million population’s worth sprawled along either side of the Mississippi River as it separated Iowa from Illinois.
