“The owner’s name is George Tillus, and the kid’s name is Chet, or Chester,” Flowers said. “Supposed to be a farm, but Tillus never farmed it. He always rented it out. Then, a few years ago, they quit farming altogether: don’t even rent it out anymore. He’s been on welfare, off and on, gets some medical aid, and that’s about it.”

“Chet Tillus is a jerk, I can tell you that. We were glad to see the last of him. Likes to fight, at least, when he won’t lose—he’s a classic bully that way—and he’s been in trouble since he was a kid,” Mahler said. “All crappy stuff. Got caught doing a couple of small-time burglaries. One time, four or five years back, he broke into this guy’s house and stole a sackful of computer equipment and some other stuff, and the vic’s hat. The vic had a black cowboy hat, pretty expensive for a hat. Bought it in Denver. Chet, who’s got all the brains of an oyster, was wearing it around town. The vic sees him, called us, Chet told us he’d had the hat for years, and when we took it off his head, here was the vic’s name stamped on the hatband. Hadn’t even bothered to scrape it off.”

“So we’re not talking about Einstein,” Flowers said.

“We’re talking about a mean little jerk who, if you told him you were a cop, he’d spit on your shoe,” Mahler said. “The general feeling around the office was that sooner or later, he’d kill someone, or one of us would kill him. We were just waiting for it to happen. Then one day, he picks up and leaves town. This was maybe a year ago, and we haven’t seen or heard from him since.”

“Well, you might have your murder,” Lucas said. He’d never in his life called a victim a “vic,” and it made him think that Mahler might have spent too much time looking at the TV.

“Virgie told me about it,” Mahler said. “You think he’s back at the farm?”

“Could be, if he thinks it’d be a good place to hide,” Lucas said. “What I’m really hoping is that he’s still running with Pilate and his gang, and we can get a cell phone number. If we can get a number for him, we can probably figure out where he is, and where the gang is.”

Virgil squared up the photos, tapped the top one, and said, “The farm’s this fuzzy square you see here. They were fields once, but now they’re getting overgrown with trash trees. You can still see the outlines. At some point, I was told that George Tillus . . .”

“He’s called Pap,” Mahler said.

“. . . tried to start a cheap RV campground down there, but that went nowhere. He’ll still get a camper now and then, but it’s the bottom of the campground heap.” He touched the map: “Here’s the house, it’s pretty far back, a couple hundred yards, so he’ll see us coming. And then way back, by this pond, there are actually two campgrounds. The back one looks like it’s got four single-wides. I don’t know what they’re about. They’re not RVs.”

Lucas looked at the photos, and touched a wide, dark stream that showed up a few hundred yards north of the farm. “Is that the Rainy?”

“Yeah, it is,” Mahler said.

Lucas said to Mahler, “Virgil once illegally shot a guy, I think it was across the Rainy, wasn’t it, Virgil? You were in Minnesota, the guy was in Canada?”

“Purely self-defense,” Flowers said.

“Gee, I’d like to hear about that,” Mahler said to Flowers. She was close enough to him, leaning over the backseat, that she could have stuck her tongue into his ear.

“We better get going. I want to get back home tonight,” Lucas said. He added, “I suspect Frankie’s probably pining for you, too . . . Virgie.”

•   •   •

THEY WENT OUT SEPARATELY, led by the deputy, Lucas behind her, Flowers trailing with his 4Runner and boat. The farm was fifteen minutes east of Baudette. Mahler signaled the turn well before they got to it, and they followed her bouncing down a dirt track into what looked like a forest, but was actually a fairly thin tree line that opened out into swampy-looking onetime fields now dotted with short evergreens.

Farther back, a weathered, dirty two-story farmhouse dominated the fields, with crumbling outbuildings off to the left side of the dirt patch that surrounded the house. Lucas could see that the driveway led past the house, back toward the campgrounds.

They pulled into the dirt parking area, and a few seconds later, an older man stumbled out of the house: George Tillus had hair longer than Flowers’s, and hadn’t shaved for a week or so, the gray beard making him look even older than he was. He was wearing overalls over a stained white T-shirt, and rubber boots. “What the hell’s going on?”

Mahler said, “Pap, we’ve got a search warrant for the house. Looking for that boy of yours.”

“He’s not here and I ain’t seen him. What’d he do?” He was talking to Mahler and Lucas, but his eyes kept sliding over to Flowers. Flowers was standing next to the open driver’s-side door of his truck, watching the confrontation across the hood. He had a shotgun lying across the front seat.

“Might be involved in a murder,” Mahler said. “We’re gonna have to take a look inside.”

“Well, now, I’d have to talk to my attorney about that.” His eyes shifted again.

“As far as I know, you don’t have an attorney,” Mahler said. “We’ll get one for you, but we get to look inside right now. So, if you’ll show us the way . . .”

She stepped forward, toward the house, but Tillus moved in front of her and shouted, “Is this what America has come to? The cops—”

Lucas looked at Flowers and called, “He’s stalling.”

“I’m gone,” Flowers said. He grabbed the shotgun and jogged down the far side of the house and disappeared.

Tillus stepped back and shouted, “What’s going on? I know my rights. I want an attorney—”

Mahler: “You’ll get an attorney—”

Lucas hooked her by the arm, said, “Get behind my truck, pull your firearm, I’ve got to cover Virgil.”

“What?”

“Just do it.”

Lucas pulled his gun and ran past Tillus, down the near side of the house. At the back, he saw a line of people running, seven of them, strung out toward the campgrounds. Flowers had passed two of them, women wearing long dresses and head scarves, and then slowed and pointed his shotgun into the air and fired a shot.

BOOM!

The 12-gauge sounded like an artillery piece, and the five runners ahead of Flowers slowed, and looked back, and one cried out something that Lucas didn’t understand, and they slowed and finally stopped on the dirt track. Far down the track, Lucas saw two young children and a woman run into a clump of trees.

Ahead, Flowers was shouting, and the runners now had all their hands in the air. They were tall, thin people, frightened. Lucas came up and Flowers said, “Illegals. He’s running a campground for Somalis coming across from Canada. Goddamnit.”

They got the Somalis back to the house, checked them for weapons, had them sit on the porch with Tillus, who’d gone silent, and left them with Mahler, who said more cops were on the way.

•   •   •

FLOWERS GOT AN M16 out of the back of his truck, gave it to Lucas, and the two of them walked back to the campground, where they found seven more Somalis, four women and three children, hiding in the single-wides. No guns, anywhere. They waited until the women had packed up some clothing, then escorted them back to the house.

On the way, Flowers said, “They come in by ship, get dropped off on the Canadian North Shore, get trucked over here, and cross the river at night. Next day, they’re in Minneapolis.”

“How do you know all that?”

“From a story in Musky Hunter magazine,” Flowers said. Then: “Just kiddin’. Saw it on Channel Two.”

At the house, two more sheriff’s cars had arrived, and the late-arriving deputies were chatting with Mahler, and watching the Somalis.

Mahler asked, “That all of them?”

“Might be some hiding out in the weeds, I don’t know,” Lucas said. He didn’t much care, either.