Marjorie Dawkins was the mother of two boys: Bobby was ten, Tommy was twelve. She was a busty five foot four, had a photogenic smile, and her hair was a lustrous chestnut brown. She used to wear her hair shoulder length but got tired of fussing with it. Now she had Carla over at Selene's — for sixty bucks every three weeks — keep it short and simple so all she had to do was blow dry it after she showered. Marjorie didn't have time to spend more than five minutes in the morning on her hair. Whenever anyone described her they didn't say she was pretty; they always said she was cute.

Her husband, Dick, was a good-looking, easygoing guy who could spend hours perfectly content doing nothing but punching a TV remote. When asked what he did for a living, he would say he was a day trader. The truth was that Dick was a stay-at-home dad, a nanny for their boys. As for the day trading, she'd give him five hundred a month to play with and figured that so far this year he'd made a profit of maybe nineteen bucks. Since Marjorie earned a quarter million a year, she figured any money Dick lost playing the market was a cheap price to pay to salvage his pride, plus it gave him something to talk about at parties. He was also, she had to admit, a good father — Bobby and Tommy adored him — and after fourteen years of marriage he could still jump-start her libido. Like with her hair, Marjorie didn't have a lot of time for sex so she was glad she had someone handy with the proper appendage when she was in the mood.

Bill Logan was six foot one and weighed exactly the same as he had in college: one hundred and eighty pounds. He had thick dark hair, an attractive widow's peak, and when he smiled, a dimple appeared in his right cheek. Women loved that dimple.

Bill's first name was actually Leslie — he was Leslie William Logan — and he'd never forgiven his mother. After he started to catch shit for the name — which began when he was about six — he asked her why in the hell she'd named him that. She told him that Leslie had been her father's middle name and that there were a lot of famous people named Leslie. There was Leslie Howard, the British actor in Gone with the Wind, and Leslie Nielsen, the guy in all those funny movies, like The Naked Gun. You know, his mom said, the movie O.J. Simpson was in. And then there was the most famous Leslie of all: Bob Hope. His real name had been Leslie Townes Hope — which was why, Bill Logan said to his mom, Hope changed his name to Bob!

Like his partner, Marjorie Dawkins, Bill made a cool two hundred and fifty grand a year. Unlike Marjorie, he didn't have a useless spouse and two kids to gobble up what he earned. He'd been married for a year when he was in his twenties, cheated on his bride three months after they said their vows, and was divorced fourteen months after the wedding. There'd been nothing wrong with his wife; she had been, and still was, a sweet, attractive woman. The problem, Bill knew, was his nature: he just couldn't stay faithful. He could have been married to the actress Scarlett Johansson, who some magazine had just named the sexiest woman on the planet, and he would have cheated on her. He'd always figured that it was a good thing that he'd learned this about himself when he was young and before he had kids. He never again subjected any poor woman to the agony of marrying him.

Bill Logan figured — all false modesty aside — that he'd probably slept with more women in North Dakota than any man his age. In Bismarck, he could hardly go into a bar or a restaurant and not run into some woman he'd bedded. The one woman he hadn't slept with and never would was Marjorie Dawkins. They just had too good a thing going, business-wise, to screw it up with sex.

Bill parked his fire-engine red Porsche Boxster next to Marjorie's black Jeep Cherokee. He drove the Porsche from May until September but after that switched to a practical four-wheel drive Chevy Tahoe with studded snow tires. Winters in North Dakota were a bitch. Their office was in a strip mall with four other businesses: a HairMasters staffed by a bunch of Vietnamese girls; a Subway operated by a cheerful, overweight Hispanic lady; and a FedEx-Kinko's place that was really convenient for him and Marjorie.

The fourth business had a sign next to the door so small you could barely read it that said laptop repairs. More than half the time, the door had a closed sign in the window. The guy who owned the laptop repair shop was a long-haired doofus named Gordy Hewlett, and Bill and Marjorie hired him whenever they had any computer-related work they needed done — including a few jobs that some nitpickers might consider illegal. Gordy bathed infrequently, liked to wear jeans with holes in the knees, smoked a lot of pot, and quite often when Bill went into his shop, Gordy would be playing video games. And all those things were okay with Bill and Marjorie because when they needed Gordy, he performed okay.

When Bill walked into the office he and Marjorie shared, Marjorie waved a hand at him but kept talking to whomever she was talking to on the phone. She'd been there since six thirty. This was the way it had always been in the ten years they'd worked together: Marjorie arrived at six or six thirty and stayed until three thirty or four because she was always attending her boys' after-school functions: soccer, basketball, baseball, whichever sport was in season. She wouldn't let her sons play football.

Bill usually arrived at nine or ten and stayed as long as necessary. If there was something that needed to be done at night, like meeting a guy on a backwoods road, Bill handled that sort of thing. Business-related social events were different and they both attended a lot of those: fundraisers, parties, rubber-chicken dinners. Sometimes they'd both go to the events and sometimes only one of them would go. Marjorie was just as good as Bill when it came to schmoozing folks.

So they worked whenever they needed to, splitting the time and the various jobs in a way that suited them both. No one paid any attention to how many hours they worked or if they were in the office or not. The only thing that mattered to old man Curtis was that they got results.

Their office was as bare-bones as you could get. They had serviceable desks they'd bought at a place called Office Furniture for Less, and both had comfortable, ergonomic, tilt-back leather chairs. There were also a couple of rarely used visitor chairs and four tall metal file cabinets. They were really careful about what they put in the file cabinets. If they were ever served a subpoena or if someone executed a search warrant, there couldn't be anything in those cabinets that could bite them on the ass. This meant that the only things in the file cabinets were phone directories and documents that were a matter of public record, like bills going through state legislatures, property records, and environmental studies. The stuff that could land them in jail was encrypted and stored in the Cloud, and Gordy — the pot-smoking laptop repairman — had the files rigged so they could be wiped out in three seconds from their smart phones if it ever came to that.

One reason the office was so poorly furnished was that they really didn't need anything better. If they wanted to impress someone, they rented a suite in a hotel. The other reason was that Curtis didn't mind paying their salaries, but he'd go crazy if he...