Virgil thought about the okra. Okra is essentially a squid that grows in the ground instead of swimming in the ocean. He said, “I can’t. I’m looking for a guy. Wouldn’t mind walking you around the block, though.”

“You should ask my daddy if it’s okay.”

“REALLY BORED,” she said. They ambled along, and somewhere down the block she took hold of a couple of his fingers, and they went the rest of the way hand in hand. “ St. Paul would be a nice place to live if you had something to do. I don’t have anything to do.”

“There’s always sex,” Virgil said. “You’re away from home, where nobody knows you. You could indulge all your sexual fantasies and nobody would ever find out.”

“But who would I sleep with?”

“We could put a notice in the paper, ask for volunteers.”

“Did you ever find that guy you were looking for?” she asked.

“Yes, I did. He told me a strange story, which I just told to daddy. Something weird is going on. But I’ll crack it,” Virgil said.

“You think?”

“These things have a rhythm,” Virgil said. “You get something going… it’s like a plot in a novel. You start out with an incident, a killing, and there are millions of possibilities, and you start eliminating the possibilities. Pretty soon, you can see the line of the story and you can feel the climax coming. We’re not there yet, but I can feel it. It’s taking form.”

“Be careful,” she said. “This whole thing is pretty creepy.”

BACK AT THE apartment, inside, at their door, she said, “You’re sure you can’t stay?”

“Got to move along,” Virgil said; but he took a minute to kiss her. Didn’t exactly catch her by surprise, but he felt a second of what might have been resistance, which surprised him, because they’d been getting along and he rarely miscalculated in these kinds of things-Sandy, for example, you wouldn’t feel her stiffen up-and then Mai melted into him and the kiss got long and his hand drifted to her backside…

“We gotta find a place,” she said. She patted his chest. “The other night when I was sitting on your back… I got pretty warm.”

“Well, I know a cabin over in Wisconsin,” Virgil said. “We could go up for the day… but today and tonight, I’m working. I’m hunting for this guy-”

“ Wisconsin. Let’s go soon. I mean, I really need to go soon.”

VIRGIL LEFT HER at the door and headed back to the motel, checked his e-mail.

Sandy had sent along a PDF file of a large-scale plat map, with an arrow pointing at the precise location of Knox’s cabin on the Rainy River outside of International Falls, two hundred yards from Canada. A strange place for a cabin, for anyone else-but maybe not for a guy who did a lot of business there and might want to cross over without all the bureaucratic hassle of the border.

He called Davenport to tell him what he’d found out during the day.

When Virgil had finished, Davenport said, “I can’t deal with this anymore. I got a tip that some real trouble is headed this way, and I need to work it. Nothing to do with Knox or your killings.”

“Okay. Well, it’s gonna break, I think.”

“You going to International Falls?”

“Yeah. You know it?”

“I played hockey up there a few times when I was in high school,” Davenport said. “It’s a long way. Maybe you oughta see if you could get the Patrol to fly you up there-rent a car when you get there.”

“Ah, I’m thinking about driving up tonight,” Virgil said. “Get a few hours’ sleep. The day’s shot anyway, might as well drive. I could hit Knox’s place first thing in the morning.”

“Your call,” Davenport said. “I got problems of my own. Just get this thing done with.”

VIRGIL SET HIS alarm clock, and crashed. He woke at nine o’clock, scrubbed his mouth out, got his stuff together, and headed for the truck.

He always had fishing gear with him. He could drive for five hours, bag out at a backwoods motel, rent a boat at a resort in the morning, get in a couple hours on the water, and still make it to International Falls before noon.

Another good night to drive.

THE SHOOTER was city, not country.

He wore comfortable, low-heeled shoes with pointed toes made of delicate Italian leather, summer-weight dark-blue wool pants, a short-sleeved cotton shirt, and a black cotton jacket. One of two things would happen that evening, he thought, because of his citiness: he’d either be eaten alive by mosquitoes, or he’d freeze.

The scout had spotted Bunton’s hideout and had delivered both precise GPS coordinates and a satellite map that would take the shooter to a little-used, dead-end trail that ended at a marshy lake a hundred yards from Bunton’s. From there, the scout suggested, the shooter could walk in. He’d be coming out of the deep woods, in the night, a direction that the Indian wouldn’t expect, even if he was on his guard.

“I couldn’t hang around, but I got good photographs. There’s no security system that I can see. There’s not even a motion-detecting garage light. The only wires going in are electric. No phone. The TV comes off a satellite dish, so there’s no way for a remote alarm system to call out…”

The shooter hadn’t even driven past the Bunton place, hadn’t even given them that much of a chance to spot him. He’d come from the opposite direction, from off the res, and had taken the trail down to the lake, where there was an informal muddy canoe launch. He pulled off into the weeds, checked the GPS, got his pistol and his sap, and called the scout.

“Going in.”

The scout hadn’t walked it himself in the daylight, because he’d been afraid to give it away. So the shooter was on his own going in-and within fifty feet of the car, he was slip-sliding through stinking mud and marsh, and kicking up every mosquito in the universe, spitting them out of his mouth and batting them away from his face, until he was driven into a jog just to stay ahead of them.

But the bugs dropped on him like chicken hawks when he came up to the house, and he’d eventually pulled his jacket over his head, blocking out everything but his eyes, retracting his hands into the coat sleeves.

Then they went after his eyes…

BUNTON’S HIDEOUT was in a cluster of five small suburban-style houses that might have been built during the sixties, all facing a narrow wooded road from town. His house was the second from the end-the one with a cop car parked in the driveway.

The shooter called the scout: “I’m in, but he’s got protection from the Indian police.”

“Let me call,” the scout said. He meant to call the coordinator. Three minutes later, the phone silently vibrated in the shooter’s hand as he got back to the car.

“Take him alone if you can,” the scout said. “If you can’t-we’ve already broken the protocol. We need these two as fast as we can.”

“Of course,” the shooter said. He was in the back of the van, going through the garbage he’d accumulated during the drive up from the Twin Cities. “So if I need to take a police officer…”

“If we have no choice, we have no choice.”

The shooter rang off, risked a light, found what he’d been looking for-two plastic grocery sacks. He put the sacks in his jacket pocket, then took off his jacket. Using his penknife, he cut out the rayon lining.

He could lose Bunton while he did all of this, he knew, but he also knew that he couldn’t tolerate even a half hour in the wood, with the insects. When the lining was free, he carefully wrapped it around his head, mummylike, until nothing was open except a small breathing hole and his eyes. He got his sunglasses off the passenger seat and stuck them in his jacket pocket with the plastic bags.

When he was ready, he got his equipment and walked back through the woods to Bunton’s house, slipping and sliding in the oily slime at the edge of the marsh. By the time he got there, he was wet and muddy to the knees, and his Italian shoes felt as though they were about to dissolve.