THE NIGHT was full of stars and night lights, like a Van Gogh painting, and Virgil followed the red taillights of a million cars headed toward cabin country. He got off at the I-35 rest stop where Wigge had been shot and David Ross was killed, to take a leak at the restroom and to look at the scene again. There was no sign of a murder, and a young couple and two children were sitting at the pavilion in back, near the murder scene, eating white-bread sandwiches in the light of a fluorescent camping lantern.

On the way out the exit ramp, a tall thin blond kid with a backpack stuck his thumb out, and Virgil pulled over and popped the door. “Where you going?”

“ Duluth. Trying to get a ship out.”

“I can take you most of the way,” Virgil said.

The kid looked at all the lights on the dash as he settled down and asked, “Are you a police officer?”

“Yeah.”

“I know I’m not supposed to hitchhike along here-”

“Don’t worry about it,” Virgil said. “Not many roads out here that I didn’t hitchhike over.”

The kid, whose name was Don, had come off a farm outside of Blooming Prairie, had done a year at the University of Minnesota, working nights at UPS, throwing boxes, and finally realized that the whole thing wasn’t for him.

“I was too tired to read, and the university… the place is sunk in bullshit,” he said. “I tried to figure out how long it would take me to get through, and it might take me six years, going full time, because there’s so much bullshit that you can’t even figure out ahead of time what you need to take to graduate.”

Virgil had gone to the university, and they talked about that and looked at the stars, and the kid confessed that he had all three volumes of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. in his pack, and had read them so often that they were falling apart, and that he had just started Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and that he couldn’t get over the second paragraph.

He quoted part of it from memory: “In the offing the sea and sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.”

“ London,” he said. “I’d give my left nut to go to London.”

“You got a ship for sure?” Virgil asked.

“I got a guy who says he’s got one, for sure. I’m probably gonna be lifting weight, but I don’t care-heck, I grew up on a dairy farm. There’s no ship that could be harder than that.”

Virgil thought he was probably right, and wished for a moment that he was going with him.

He dropped the kid at the I-35 intersection east of Moose Lake and cut cross-country to the west, thinking about the lakes he knew, and where he might bag out for the night, and still get a good couple of hours on the water before he had to move in the morning.

The lights of Duluth were fading off the far eastern horizon when his cell phone rang. He glanced at it, saw that it came from the northern Minnesota area code, thought Ray, and then Ray’s gonna tell me something…

He flipped open the phone and a man on the other end said, “Virgil Flowers? This is Rudy Bunch. The Red Lake cop?”

The young one. Virgil said, “Hey. How’s it going?”

“Not so good, man. We’re in deep shit up here. We’ve got a dead cop and Ray’s gone.”

Virgil peered into the dark; it was something like an embolism-part of his brain shut down for a minute. Then: “What?”

“Somebody shot Olen Grey on the side of the road. He was watching Ray. Ray’s gone,” Bunch said.

“Ray shot him?”

“We don’t know what happened, but… I think maybe somebody took Ray. We’re calling both the state and the feds. Where are you at? St. Paul?”

“No, no, I’m heading your way, I’m over by Grand Rapids,” Virgil said. He was still befuddled. “Man, what’re you telling me here? When was this? Have you closed down the roads?”

“No. We’re pretty sure it happened an hour and a half ago. Olen and Ray were going to buy groceries and Ray’s mom saw them leave. Then a guy named Tom Broad was driving out and he saw Olen’s car sitting kind of in a ditch, and he thought that was strange, but it was a cop car, so he didn’t do nothin’. Then he was driving back out to his house and saw the car still sitting there, so he stopped and looked and he could see Olen dead in the front seat. He called us, and… that’s what happened. There’s blood on the passenger side and there’s bullet holes in the passenger-side window, and shit, I think somebody took Ray.”

“Goddamnit. Listen, have you got a veterans’ memorial there?”

“We got a flagpole with an MIA flag,” Bunch said.

“Have somebody check it, see if they can find a body,” Virgil said. “You say you’ve got the state coming in? You mean us? The BCA?”

“Yeah, the crime lab,” Bunch said.

“Okay, freeze it… I’ll be there quick as I can.”

“What about Ray?”

“I think Ray’s gone,” Virgil said.

CHARLES WHITING, the BCA agent-in-charge at Bemidji, said he’d sent the crime-scene crew and had been about to call St. Paul looking for Virgil. He said he would call the local cities, to have them check and then watch the veterans’ monuments.

“We can do the crime scene, but this is gonna be a federal case. The FBI has two guys on the way from Duluth,” Whiting said. “There might be some question about why we arrested Bunton and then turned him loose, and he gets killed the next day…”

“I’ve got some questions about that myself,” Virgil said. “I haven’t been to Red Lake for five years, but unless it’s changed, it’s a mess of roads and tracks, and how in the hell did the killer find him? How? The whole point of going up there is that nobody could find him if he didn’t want to be found.”

“Well-I don’t know. You left him at his mother’s house.”

“Yeah, but, she has a different last name,” Virgil said. “They didn’t look him up in the phone book.”

“No. She doesn’t have a wired phone, anyway, so that wasn’t it. You know, Virgil, I don’t know how they found him. But I will start pushing that question with the Red Lake cops.”

“Do that,” Virgil said. “Bunton had to be under observation. I thought the deal was everybody could spot an outsider in a minute.”

“I’ll push it. How far out are you?”

“I don’t know exactly, I’m somewhere out in the dark, on 2, south of Grand Rapids. Coming fast as I can…”

“You be careful up there in Red Lake. Olen Grey was a pretty popular guy, and they… you know. They’re gonna be looking for somebody to blame,” Whiting said. “We’ve had some problems, even before your stunt the other night. Some of the drug task-force guys went up there, undercover, and got their asses kicked out. They were told if they came back, they’d be arrested.”

“I’ll take care.”

ANOTHER TEN MINUTES, and Rudy Bunch called: “Nothing at the flagpole. Nobody’s seen anything there.”

“Okay. Chuck Whiting is calling the other towns around, telling them to keep an eye out,” Virgil told him.

“If we don’t find him, that’s good, right? There wasn’t too much blood in the car, on the passenger side. Ray might not have been hurt that bad.”

Virgil thought about the bag full of Wigge’s finger joints. “I don’t know, Rudy. I don’t know. I got a real bad feeling.”

HE WENT THROUGH Grand Rapids with lights and siren and never did slow down, heading northwest in the dark, and then Whiting called again. “They found him. Here in Bemidji. At the veterans’ monument on Birchmont Drive. Got the lemon in the mouth. Shot in the heart and the legs.”