“Couldn’t find me in a million years,” Knox said.

WHEN THEY were gone, Virgil called Davenport.

“I got a killer,” he said. “Might not be able to get him, because it was all so far away and long ago, but I’ve got pictures of the crime in progress.”

“Anybody I know?” Davenport asked.

“Yeah.”

Long moment of silence, and then Davenport said, “Virgil, goddamnit…”

“Ralph Warren,” Virgil said.

Longer moment. Then: “I gotta see the pictures. How fast can you get back?”

“I’m heading out now,” Virgil said. “I’ll be back by dinnertime.”

“Then come to dinner at my place. Six o’clock,” Davenport said.

“See you then.”

VIRGIL GOT his gear out of the cabin, threw it in the truck, and went to get a beer to drink as he headed south. The fisherwoman was putting the little girl in a new Mercedes station wagon, and she nodded at Virgil and asked, “Was that some kind of meet?”

“What?”

“Well, they told me in the bar that you’re a state investigator, and a writer, but you were up here on that awful murder, and all of you guys were wearing black sport coats like you’re covering up guns, and I could tell that those other guys were hoodlums of some kind.” The woman had a small handhold on his heart, and it was getting stronger. The way she could roll that fly line out there…

“A meet. That’s what it was, I guess,” Virgil said. “I’d be happy if you kept it under your hat.”

“Mmm. I’ll do that. Virgil Flowers? Is that right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She had little flecks of gold in her eyes.

“Are you armed right now?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Virgil said.

“Huh. Well, my name is Loren Conrad.”

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

She walked around the car and stopped before opening the door. And the little girl, maybe ten, was looking at Virgil out through the glass of the passenger-side window, solemn, as if something sad were about to happen. “Maybe if you come up again, during the week, we could go fishing.”

17

VIRGIL THOUGHT about the woman and daughter as he drove back. Had Mom been hitting on him, just the lightest, mildest of hits? What was the sadness in the small girl’s eyes? Had she seen other men spoken to when Dad wasn’t there?

The whole thing seemed less like an invitation to romance than an invitation to a story of some kind. Not journalism, a short story. Something Jim Harrison might write.

Virgil had had an interest in short stories when he was in college, but journalism seemed more immediate, something with its claws in the real world. The older he got, though, the wider he found the separation between reported facts, on one hand, and the truth of the matter on the other hand. Life and facts were so complicated that you never got more than a piece of them. Short stories, though, and novels, maybe, had at least a shot at the truth.

He was so preoccupied by the idea that he almost ran over a mink that crawled out of a ditch, poised for a dash across the road. He dodged at the last minute, wincing for the crunch as the animal went under the tire, felt nothing, looked in the wing mirror and saw it scurry across the tarmac, unhurt.

A small blessing.

THE WORLD was little more than a month past the summer solstice, so the sun was still high in the sky when he got off I-94 and turned south on Cretin Avenue in St. Paul, past the golf course with all the rich guys with their short pants and stogies, and farther south, hooked west on Randolph, then over to Davenport’s house on Mississippi River Boulevard.

He parked on the street so he wouldn’t block the three cars already in the driveway, and as soon as he stepped out, smelled the barbecue, heard the people talking in the back. He walked around the garage and pushed through the back gate, and Weather, Davenport ’s wife, spotted him and called, “Virgil Flowers!”

Davenport was there, with a former Minneapolis cop turned bar owner named Sloan, and his wife; and fellow BCA agent Del Capslock and his pregnant wife; and a spare, bespectacled woman named Elle, who was a nun and a childhood friend of Davenport’s; and Davenport’s ward, a teenager and soon-to-be-gorgeous young woman named Letty; and Davenport’s toddler, Sam.

Weather came over and pinched his cheeks and said, “It’s about time you got here, you hunk.”

He gave her a little squeeze and asked, “Why don’t you run away with me?”

“Then you wouldn’t have a job and I’d have to support you,” Weather said.

“Then he’d be dead and you wouldn’t have to support him,” Davenport said.

“Still, couple good days at a Motel 6 in Mankato… might be worth it,” Virgil said to her.

Davenport said, “Yeah, it would be. When you’re right, you’re right.”

Elle, the nun, amused, said, “You guys are so full of it.”

“The shrink speaks,” Del said. Elle was a psychologist.

“Give the poor boy a hamburger, Lucas, and then let’s hear his story,” Elle said to Davenport. She patted a chair next to her in the patio set. “Sit next to me, so I can ask questions.”

DEL HAD BEEN doing counterculture intelligence for the upcoming Republican convention, and had been out of the loop on Virgil’s investigation. All the others had read about the killings in the newspapers, but knew nothing else. Davenport told him to start at the beginning, with Utecht, and let it all out. Virgil did, all the details he could think of, ending with the conversation with Knox.

Then they wanted to see the pictures, and Virgil went out to the car to get them, and Davenport looked through them and handed them to Del and Sloan, and Elle got up to look, and Letty wanted to see, but Davenport snapped at her, “Get your nose out of there.”

“It’s not fair,” and she sat down and put on a pout; Weather patted her on the leg.

“If that’s actually Mr. Warren, then he is a very troubled man, with the kind of trouble you don’t cure yourself of,” Elle said. “If he did this, I would not be surprised to learn that he did similar things, here, over the years.”

“Really,” Virgil said. He put the pictures back in the envelope. “What would we be looking for?”

“If he’s a smart man… maybe dead prostitutes. Perhaps dead prostitutes in other cities. Bigger cities that he knows well, or that attract prostitutes, or an anonymous population of women. Brown women-Latinas, Filipinas, Malaysians, Vietnamese. Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Houston.”

“Tortured?” Virgil asked. He was thinking of Wigge.

She shook her head. “Not as such. Not coldly. Not calculated. He’d kill them in an excess of violence. Beat them. Strangle them. A violent show of dominance and sexuality.”

Virgil looked at Davenport. “ Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Houston.”

Davenport shook his head. “There’s so much background noise, we’d never sort them out.”

“DNA,” Sloan said. “If he’s raping them, they’ll have DNA in a DNA bank. Get some DNA from Warren, send it out there. Hell, circulate it everywhere.”

“YOU THINK Knox was really scared?” Del asked. Del knew Knox better than any of them.

“Not scared-careful,” Virgil said.

Del nodded. “That sounds like him. Where’d he get those guys?”

“One of them told me Chicago – Chicago came up a couple of times during the conversation,” Virgil said. “There was a woman there, fishing, who told me when I was leaving that they looked like hoodlums. I guess they sorta did.”

Del said to Davenport, “When we find him again, it’d be good to get some surveillance shots of these guys. If they’re heavy-duty, it might tell us where Knox’s connections go.”

“We can do that,” Davenport said. To Virgil: “What kind of vibe did you get from him? From Knox? Does he know more than he’s telling us?”