“I called the Border Patrol. Ought to have somebody here in ten minutes,” Mahler said. Another sheriff’s car turned in the driveway.

“All I want to do is look in the house,” Lucas said.

“Fuckin’ Nazis,” Pap shouted at them.

•   •   •

HE AND FLOWERS went into the house, stepping through the Somalis now clustered despondently on the porch. One of the kids was crying and Flowers said, “I kinda wish we hadn’t done this.”

Lucas nodded. “Didn’t want to. As far as I’m concerned, they can put them in a bus and haul them down to Minneapolis and turn them loose.”

Not going to happen; they were now in the system.

“Stinks,” Flowers said, as they stepped into the house.

The interior of the house was old, moldy, and poorly kept. The kitchen appeared to have been built in the 1930s, and not cleaned since, smelling of bacon grease, fried eggs, and flatulence. The refrigerator was full of ready-to-microwave frozen food, in the top compartment, and a dozen eggs and the remains of a pound of butter in the lower. An overflowing trash can smelled of rotten coffee grounds.

Tillus had used what had once been a parlor as storage for every kind of paper—bills, magazines, catalogs, newspapers; the rug on the parlor floor was not much thicker than a sheet, most of the nap worn through. The living room featured an oversized television, two chairs facing it, and probably thirty fox tails pinned to the crown molding, so that they hung down all around the room like fuzzy red icicles.

As they walked around, pulling drawers, looking in corners, they found a half dozen guns—three rifles, three revolvers, ranging in age from old to ancient.

A wired telephone sat on a side table in the living room. Lucas went there while Flowers, still with his shotgun, crept up the stairs, ready for trouble if any was up there.

Lucas found a sheet of paper under the phone and the stub of a pencil off to one side. A dozen phone numbers were written on the paper, a doctor, the “county,” a few names that meant nothing to Lucas, and one that might have said “Chet.”

Lucas wrote down the Chet number, and started for the door, when Flowers called from the second floor: “Hey, Lucas. You better come up here.”

Lucas turned back and climbed the stairs. Halfway up, a long strip of wallpaper had fallen from the wall, and now seemed to be mostly held up by spiderwebs. At the top of the stairs, he found two bedrooms and a bathroom. Flowers was standing in the front bedroom, shotgun over his shoulders, next to an antique single bed with flat springs and a two-inch-thick mattress, like an army bunk. It was covered with a dirt-gray sheet, flocked with dust bunnies.

Lucas recognized the symptoms: “What have you done, Virgil?”

Flowers said, “There’s a roll of carpet under the bed.”

“What?”

“A roll of carpet under the bed.” Flowers was smiling, sort of, but his voice wasn’t.

Lucas knelt next to the end of the bed, saw a carpet roll—and in the middle of the roll, a fold of clear plastic, maybe Saran Wrap, now as dusty as the top sheet, but very clearly wrapped around the bones of a human foot, which were held in place by the wrapping plastic.

Lucas stood up and brushed off his knees and said, “You know what? We ought to sneak out of here and let the deputies find the body.”

Flowers said, “Even if we could work it . . .”

“Yeah. We’re too straight,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, all I wanted was a fuckin’ phone number.”

“You get it?” Flowers asked.

“Maybe. Gotta check.”

Flowers said, “We better go tell them.”

•   •   •

LUCAS LET FLOWERS HANDLE THAT, while he walked to his car and got on the phone to the BCA duty officer and asked him to check the owner of the phone number he’d found. As he waited, he saw a couple of deputies, including Mahler, follow Flowers into the house. Tillus was still sitting on the steps with the Somalis; a moment later, a Border Patrol truck rolled into the yard, followed by another sheriff’s car.

The duty officer came back and said, “Goes to a Chester Tillus, on Verizon.”

“Good. Get onto Verizon and tell them to ping it. We need to know where the phone is, right now. And tell them that this is official business and the phone owner is not to be notified . . . however you do that. As soon as you hear back, call me.”

That done, he got out of his truck, met Flowers coming out the door.

Flowers asked, “Now what?”

“I’ll call Sands and see if we can unload this on the Bemidji guys, and get the hell out of here,” Lucas said. Sands was the BCA director. Bemidji was the BCA’s northern outpost.

Flowers looked around the yard: there were now five or six deputies and a couple of Border Patrol guys wandering around.

“Quite the little party you got going here, Lucas,” Flowers said. “Reminds me of the stuff I do every day.”

“Thank you.”

A little while later, the sheriff arrived, followed by a white bus-like conversion van to transport the Somalis. Lucas and Flowers chatted with the sheriff for a few minutes, and the sheriff went up to look at the foot in the carpet roll.

A few minutes later, he came back and said he suspected that it was George Tillus’s mother, who hadn’t been seen for a couple of decades. She supposedly had gone to California to live with her sister; but now, it appeared, might not have gotten out of the driveway.

They were still chatting when the duty officer called back and told Lucas, “He’s off the grid right now, but they had him last night, first in Ironwood, and then a few minutes later, in Bessemer. Looks like he was heading east into the UP.”

“Tell them to keep pinging him. I want to know if he comes back up,” Lucas said. To Flowers: “My boy is on his way to Sault Ste. Marie. I will see you later.”

“I’m not going back to Fergus Falls,” Flowers called after him.

“You got anything else to do?” Lucas asked, turning back around.

“Lucas . . .” Flowers always had things to do. He covered roughly one-third of a large state.

“Then go do them. If Moore calls, I’ll personally tell him to go fuck himself,” Lucas said. Moore was the state senator who had influence on the budget.

•   •   •

LUCAS HEADED HOME, driving fast, stopped once to pee and buy an ice cream cone, cut I-35 at Moose Lake, and made it into St. Paul a few minutes before eleven o’clock. He’d driven a little over six hundred miles since leaving the cabin that morning, and he was beat.

Letty was still up: she met him at the door from the garage, and he looked at her face and said, “Wow.”

“Yeah, he really plugged me,” Letty said. Her black eye extended probably two inches down from her eye, and was a deep blue-black. “Mom’s in bed. She’s working early tomorrow.”

“And you’re okay?”

Letty nodded. “Mom took me all over the place, an eye doctor because she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to have a detached retina, which I don’t and won’t have, and an ENT guy. The ENT guy said it’ll be three days before the nose stops hurting inside and three weeks before the black eye is gone.”

“Sounds about right. At least he didn’t break your nose. I can tell you, that hurts.”

“What happened in Baudette?” Letty asked.

Lucas told her about it as he led her into the kitchen, where he stuck his head into the refrigerator looking for something substantial to eat. He told her about the phone number and the body under the bed. “Beneath its blond exterior, Minnesota is a very weird place,” Letty said.

“On the basic weird-shit-o-meter, you’re going to college in a state that’s probably an eleven. They don’t notice it so much, because they’ve gotten used to it.”

“Are you going to Sault Ste. Marie?” she asked.

“Don’t know. I’ll talk to some people in Michigan, but I might run over there, depending on what the Michigan cops say. Put more of a point on things.”