* * *

—

Virgil said good-bye to Quill and headed south on I-35. Faribault was a bit less than an hour straight south, and, on the way, he talked to the duty officer at the BCA and got Krause’s home address. He got turned around once he was in town, but he found the house with help from his iPhone map app; it was an older but well-kept neighborhood whose maple trees were already showing a hint of autumn orange. An older woman came to the door, looking sleepy, said she was Jerry’s mother. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”

“No. A good friend of his has died, and it’s possible that it’s suicide. We’re talking to his friends—”

“Oh, boy, not Brett?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Oh, boy. Oh, Jerry’s going to be upset,” she said. “Let me get my jacket. He just walked over to the Kwik Trip.”

Virgil and Krause’s mother, whose name was Connie, walked a zigzag course four blocks over to the Kwik Trip and saw Krause walking back toward them, eating an ice cream cone. “Always with the ice cream,” his mother said.

Krause stopped eating the cone as they came up, and he said, “You’re that Virgil officer.”

“Yes. Have you heard from Brett recently? Talk to him at all this morning or last night?”

“No. Why? What happened?”

“I’m afraid he’s dead,” Virgil said.

Krause started, his hand tilted, and the top of his cone fell on the grass verge. He cried, “Shit,” and kicked it into the street. “Oh my God!” Tears came to his eyes, and he asked, “Was it drugs?”

“It looks that way,” Virgil said. “Did you know—”

“Does Megan know?”

“She found him.”

“Oh my God! I gotta get up there. She’s gonna be wrecked.”

“Did you know he was using?”

“Yeah, I did,” Krause said. “Megan and I—we tried to get him to stop. But he said it was just an experiment. He did all kinds of research on the internet, how much you could use, about addiction and all that. He used opium, is what he did. He said he got these great dreams, and he was going to write a book about it . . . Ah, God!”

“It wasn’t opium,” Virgil said. “It was probably heroin.”

“Ah, yeah, it could have been, he was talking about that. He didn’t tell me he’d started because I gave him so much shit about the other stuff.”

Tears were streaming down his face, and his mother patted him on the shoulder. “I’ll take you back up there,” she said. And to Virgil, “Jerry doesn’t have a car.”

Virgil asked a few questions. Krause had seen Renborne the afternoon before, and they had talked a while at the student center. Then his ride had shown up, and he and another student, Butch Olsen, had driven down to Faribault.

“When I saw Brett, he was perfectly cheerful. He wasn’t high. He said he and Megan were going out that night, over to the U. I thought they’d probably spend the night at her place. They did that sometimes. I was invited, but I had to come back here: I was, like, wearing the same underwear for the third day running . . . Butch is going to pick me up tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll take you,” his mother said again.

He’d spoken to Megan once, Jerry said, that morning, about nothing. “She just called me, said she was walking around, might go over to Grand Avenue, look at some jeans. That’s all she really said. She was bored, and I think Brett was in class this afternoon.”

“Do you have any idea where he got his dope?”

Krause looked up at the sky and blinked. “He told me he got it from a woman in some skanky club up by the university. Maybe her name was White? . . . Yes, I think it was White . . . I think she got all the other shit, too. He told me once that his connection was Vietnamese, but I’m not sure that was the same person. I think it was, I’m just not sure.”

China White, Virgil thought. Vietnamese were nothing like Chinese, but if you were street scum in St. Paul, they probably didn’t spend a lot of time parsing the difference.

Virgil asked a few more questions that didn’t produce anything significant, and then they went back to the Krause place. “I may want to talk with you again,” he told Jerry. “If you could check with Brett’s friends, if they have any idea of where I could find his connection . . .”

“I will,” Krause said. He pressed the heels of his hands in his eye sockets, and said, “Ah, Jesus. Ah, shit . . .”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

   Virgil cut cross-country to the farm.

He hadn’t spent much time thinking about it because he hadn’t had children, but now that Frankie had a couple of his buns in the oven, it occurred to him that there could be no lower point in life than losing a kid. And when you have a kid, you’re putting a heavy mortgage on your future. Everybody dies eventually, but when you have a kid the best you can hope for is to die first. Preferably, in the distant future.

Brett Renborne hadn’t seemed like a bad kid, no more lost than a lot of guys who later turn out to be good people. The drugs were a little extreme, but, in his heart, Virgil could understand the experimentation. A bit lost himself, he’d wandered out of college and into the military, looking for adventure and willing to risk his neck for it. Brett had done something analogous, in a way, and had gone down. If he had decent parents, they’d be hurt more deeply than Brett ever was. Even in death.

When he came up on the farm, he saw Sam, Frankie’s youngest at eleven years old, rolling down the road on a fat-tire bike, Honus the Yellow Dog running along beside him in the weeds in the ditch. Sam looked back over his shoulder at Virgil’s approaching truck and waved, and Virgil felt a sudden pang of fear: a mortgage on your future.

Like, if this ever ends, because somebody dies too early, my life will be over . . .

* * *

—

He parked by the barn, and Frankie came out of the house, and said, “Let’s go eat in town. I’m starving and don’t feel like cooking anything.”

“Gimme kiss,” Virgil said. She gave him a kiss, and he held on for a while, and when Sam came up, skidding in the gravel, he said, “Holy shit, you guys are goin’ for it.”

“You say ‘shit’ again and I’ll kick your ass,” Virgil said. “Or your mom will.”

Frankie said to Sam, “It’s all right to say ‘shit’ sometimes, but only when it’s appropriate. You have to learn when it’s appropriate and you haven’t done that yet. I’m not sure I like that ‘goin’ for it,’ either.”