"No. He had to take some kind of a test. Over at the university in Duluth. He's trying to get in there. He last worked on Friday."

"I'm gonna need his number."

VIRGIL CALLED JARED BOEHM on his cell phone, got no answer, went back to the motel, got a Coke from the machine in the lobby, and lay on his bed and thought about Slibe and Margery and Jared and the boys.

Just as an everyday, walking-around matter, nothing Slibe said had sounded crazy-if every music wannabe stuck with his old man's business, the world would probably be a better place, Virgil thought. If you didn't mind raising dogs and digging septic systems and splitting wood for winter heat…

Margery. She didn't look like a madam, and he supposed she wasn't, technically; but she did get money from the boys, if only because the boys pulled in the women who wanted a little nocturnal carnality to go with their diurnal snipe hunts.

Jared: the problem was, if Jared was the age Virgil thought he might be, then his "hasty relationships," as somebody had called them, might constitute statutory rape under the laws of Minnesota if the female partner was old enough; or child abuse. If he was getting paid for sex, it was prostitution. If it were any of those things, and there had been an attempt at blackmail, if there had been threats or counterthreats…

He needed to talk to Jared.

And he felt bad about Margery. She was a type he liked: tough old ornery woman yanking a good livelihood out of the North Woods. Who ran a few whores.

He remembered the camera memory card he'd taken from McDill's camera. He'd looked at them on the LCD on the camera, but not closely. Had there been a male face anywhere along the way? He rolled off the bed, got the card, read it into his laptop, started paging through the photos. Not much, women at the Wild Goose, pictures taken out on the lake, some down by the swimming beach… and a young boy on the dock, standing with a couple of women, apparently telling them something about a boat.

He was tall, thin. Girlish? Maybe; but with some thin, hard muscle, like you might see on a cyclist or a runner. He was subtly at the center of the photograph… Jared…

HE WAS STILL THINKING about Jared when the motel phone rang. Almost anyone he wanted to talk to had his cell phone number, so he contemplated it for a moment, then picked it up: "Hello?"

"This is Signy. I'm thinking about ordering out for a pizza, but I'm out of beer. Are you up for an emergency beer run?"

"Sounds fine," Virgil said. "Give me twenty minutes."

He was surprised; but then, on second thought, not totally surprised. He and Signy had shared a little spark. He got up, brushed his teeth and shaved, thought about it for three seconds, then jumped in the shower and scrubbed down with Old Spice body wash.

He went out in the night: still hot. Could be thunderstorms lurking somewhere, but the stars were bright overhead, and he heard no thunder anywhere. Signy had given him a Negra Modelo the night before, so he got a six-pack of the same, already cold. He got lost again, on the way out to Signy's, and she talked him in on the cell phone.

WHEN HIS HEADLIGHTS PLAYED across the front of her house, she was waiting outside the door, looking up at the sky, and she came to meet him. "I just ordered it a minute ago, when you called. I didn't want to get stuck with a whole meat lover's if you had to cancel."

" ' S okay," he said. "Probably ought to put the beer in the fridge."

He followed her inside, took a couple of bottles out of the six-pack, put the rest in the refrigerator, very aware of her moving around him in the narrow space of the kitchen, and she said, "We ought to take these out to the gazebo."

"You got a gazebo?"

"Last thing Joe did before he went to Alaska-built me a gazebo. Never got the screens in, so I had to do that part. C'mon…"

She got a flashlight and led the way out the back door, down a flagstone path, over the lip of the lake bank, and down to the water. The night was dark enough that he couldn't see much but the cone of the light over the path, from the flashlight, and then the greenish timbers of the gazebo. They went inside, and she wedged the door shut, to keep the bugs out. There were two aluminum lawn chairs and two recliners, and she took one of the recliners and Virgil folded into a chair.

"Great night," he said. "Million stars."

"Lot of great nights in August," she said, turning off the flash. The lake was quiet, with still some blue in the west, stars in a thick crescent overhead, and dots of light that were cabin windows on the far shore. Far down to the right, a more golden dot, a weenie-roast fire on a beach. "So what happened with the murder? Did you get anywhere?"

"I don't know. I went around and pissed off a lot of people, hinted that I knew about stuff that I don't know about. See what I could stir up."

"Zoe told me how you massacred the Vietnamese."

"I didn't-"

"Yeah, I know. So does Zoe. She's figured out that talking about it is a way to get on top of you," Signy said. She pulled up her knees, draped her hands over them.

"Fuckin' women," Virgil said.

THEY SAT AND DRANK their beers and Virgil told her about his encounters with Berni and Cat and the others, and with Slibe, and the boy toys. She said, "Slibe. Now there is a wickedly mean guy. Slibe did it."

"You think?"

"He could definitely kill someone," Signy said. She burped. "He's a sociopath. Came up dirt-poor and his old man used to beat him like a cheap carpet. He never saw anything wrong with that, so that's what he did with his wife and son. His wife took off one day, and nobody's heard from her since, but Slibe was pretty hosed. His kid, Junior, is another one to keep your eye on. He might not be violent, but he's not right."

"How about Wendy? Did Slibe abuse her?"

She said, "You know, I don't think so. Wendy is the apple of his eye. Probably the only apple his eye has ever had. Except maybe for his wife."

"Does everybody around here know about the boys going up to the Eagle Nest?"

"I don't know if everybody does," she said, "but I suppose quite a few people do. The word leaks around."

"The sheriff didn't tell me anything about it."

"Well… nobody's going to tell the sheriff. He's really straight," Signy said. "He'd probably think he had to do something about it."

"And you don't think so."

She shrugged. "Hey. It's a little goddamn squirt in the dark. People having a good time, nobody gets hurt. So why would you care?"

"I know most people don't think about young guys this way, but if they were under eighteen, there could be some legal issues with older women. Statutory rape, child abuse…"

She said, "I don't believe the boys would be thinking that way."

"A lot of female hookers think they're in the entertainment industry-you know, like movie stars," Virgil said. "But they're not."

SIGNY GOT ON HER CELL PHONE, pushed a speed-dial button, identified herself, and asked about the pizza, said, "Uh-huh, uh-huh. When do you think, then?" When she hung up, she said, "Jim's on the way. Probably ought to get back."

He trailed her back up to the cabin, and she flopped on the couch and he arranged himself cross-legged on the carpet and asked, "Hear anything more from Joe?"

She laughed and said, "Yes! Today." She jumped up, went out to the kitchen, and came back in a moment with an envelope and took out a picture, laughing as she did it. The picture showed two men, one of them Joe, looking down at a furry black lump; it took Virgil a moment to recognize it as a dead black bear. "He was sleeping in his car and a bear tried to get in with him," Signy said. "This was at a campground by Fairbanks, and he started yelling and the bear started running around knocking everything over and somebody came out and shot it."