Deadline(7)

            —

            BACK OUTSIDE, Virgil took a minute to call Davenport’s office. He didn’t actually want to talk to him, which was why he called the office: Davenport was out working a multiple murder that everybody was calling the Black Hole case, in which a BCA agent had been murdered.

            Virgil hadn’t worked the case, and was happy about that, because the killing of Bob Shaffer would have preyed on his mind for weeks, or years, whether or not the killer was caught. He left a message for Davenport, which might possibly cover his ass, if worse came to worst.

            Then he and Johnson drove out to Johnson’s river cabin and rolled Virgil’s boat into the water and tied it to Johnson’s dock. Johnson’s jon boat had been pulled up on shore, and a long orange extension cord snaked out of the cabin to a power drill that lay in the bottom of the boat.

            “You break something?” Virgil asked.

            “Changing the oarlocks,” Johnson said. “They were getting too wore down.”

            “You never rowed six feet in your entire sorry life,” Virgil said. “How’d they get wore down? I mean, worn down?”

            “Pedant,” Johnson said. “Anyway, I use them to steer my drifts. Saves gas.”

            They unhooked the trailer, parked it behind the house, stuck a tongue lock on it, and went inside for coffee and to continue the conversation about dogs and hillbilly dognappers.

            Virgil said, “Since the sheriff couldn’t handle it, you call the high-priced BCA guy down to figure it out?”

            “Actually, I was calling my old fishin’ buddy Virgil to figure it out,” Johnson said.

            “Well, fuck you, Johnson, that puts a kind of unnecessary obligation on it. I mean, would you do that for me?”

            “You don’t have a dog.”

            “Well, something like this . . .”

            “Suppose you were going away for a couple of weeks,” Johnson said, “and you needed somebody to keep Frankie warmed up. I’d jump in my truck—”

            “All right, okay.” Virgil waved him off. “Where’s this Orly’s Crick?”

            —

            IN SOUTHERN MINNESOTA, the Mississippi flowed through a deep, wide valley. The main channel of the river was rarely down the middle of the valley. Instead, it usually flowed down one side or the other, snaking between steep valley walls. The other side of the valley was often occupied by sloughs or marshes, before they ran into equally steep bluffs.

            The bluffs were dissected by free-flowing streams, ranging from seasonal creeks to full-sized rivers. Johnson’s place was tucked into the north end of a slough, where the river began to bend away from the Minnesota side, toward Wisconsin; so his cabin was protected from the waves generated by the towboats and their barges, but he still had fast access to the river itself.

            When he and Virgil left Johnson’s cabin, they drove a few hundred yards west to Highway 26, and then north for fifteen miles. By the time they got to Orly’s Creek Road, the river was running right beside the highway. Orly’s Creek ran below a fifty-foot-long bridge, into the river, with the road going into the valley on the north side of the bridge.

            “Goes back here about a mile, or a little more,” Johnson said. “The crick comes out of Orly’s Spring, which gathers up a lot of water from west of here, then runs underground to the spring. The good thing about that is, it hardly ever floods at all. Don’t believe I’ve ever seen water over the road.”

            “Any trout in there?” The creek was maybe twenty feet wide, tumbling over limestone blocks, with an occasional pool.