Dark, moonless night, in the dog days of early August.

Virgil Flowers nearly fell off the bed when the phone began to vibrate. The bed was narrow and Frankie Nobles was using up the middle and the other side. Virgil had to crawl over her naked body to get to the phone, not an entirely unpleasant process, and she muttered, "What? Again?"

At ten o'clock the next morning, Virgil kissed Frankie good-bye, and walked out to his truck, which was parked at the curb with the boat already hooked up. Virgil was recently back from New Mexico, where he'd caught and released every tiger musky in what he suspected was the remotest musky lake in North America. Nice fish, too, the biggest a finger-width short of fifty inches. He could still smell them as he walked past the boat and climbed into the cab of his 4Runner.

And Virgil thought about Lucas Davenport for a while — Davenport was his boss at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and not a bad guy, though a trifle intense. There was a distinct possibility that he would not be pleased with the idea of Virgil working a dognapping case. Especially since the shit had hit the fan up north, where a couple of high school kids had tripped over an abandoned farm cistern full of dead bodies.

Johnson Johnson ran a lumber mill, specializing in hardwood timber — three varieties of oak, birdseye maple, butternut, hickory and some walnut and cherry — for flooring and cabinetry, with a side business of providing specialty cuts for sculptors. He and Virgil had met at the University of Minnesota, where they were studying women and baseball. Virgil had been a fair third baseman for a couple years, while Johnson was a better-than-fair catcher. He might even have caught onto the bottom edge of the pros, if baseball hadn't bored him so badly. Johnson's mill was a mile outside Trippton, Minnesota, in Buchanan County, in the Driftless Area along the Mississippi River.

For most of it, Virgil put both the truck and his brain on cruise control. He'd driven the route a few dozen times, and there was not a lot to look at, that he hadn't seen before. Trippton was at the bottom of a long hill, on a sandspit that stuck put into the Mississippi; it was a religious town, with almost as many churches as bars. Virgil arrived at lunchtime, got caught in a minor traffic jam between the town's three stoplights, and eventually wedged into a boat-sized double-length parking lane behind Shanker's Bar and Grill.

Virgil was a tall man, made taller by his cowboy boots. He wore his blond hair too long for a cop — but country long like Waylon Jennings, not sculptural long, like some New Jersey douchebag, so he got along okay.

"All right," Virgil said. "Somebody's taking dogs. You know who it is?"

Virgil was worried. Every one at the meeting seemed stone-cold sober, and they talked about shooting the dognappers with the cool determination of people who might actually do that, given the chance. They didn't seem anxious to do it, like a bunch of goofy gun nuts — they sounded more like farmers planning to eliminate a varmint that had been killing their geese.

Virgil said he'd look into it: "I'll be honest with you, this is not what I usually do. In fact, I've never done it before. I can see you're serious folks, so I'll take it on. No promises. I could get called off...but if I do, I'll be back. You all take care, though. Don't go out there with guns, I don't want anybody to get hurt."

When the meeting broke up, he and Johnson drove over to the law enforcement center, which housed the Buchanan County Sheriff and the Trippton Police Department, which were one and the same, and a few holding cells. In the parking lot, Johnson said, "I'll hang out here. Jeff don't appreciate my good qualities," and Virgil went in alone.

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.

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 dog and hillbilly dognappers.

In southern Minnesota, the Misssippi 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 first habitation in the valley was a single-wide trailer, crunched on one end, as though a tree had fallen on it. Two nineties cars were parked in a hard-dirt yard, with a mottled-gray pitbull tied to a stake.

Virgil turned off at Zorn's place, past a no-trespassing sign, and pulled up into the yard. All of the doors and windows at Zorn's were open, behind screens; and when they pulled into his yard, they saw Zorn look warily out through the door, disappear for a minute, then come through the door to his porch, where he stood waiting. As advertised, he was a tall, rawboned red-haired man with about a million freckles splashed across his face.

Virgil went carefully back to his truck, climbed inside, and found Johnson with a high-capacity Para Ordinance .45 in his lap.

The continued up the valley, looking at houses and dogs; most of the houses were ramshackle, but a few were neatly kept, with American flags on front-yard poles, and with good-looking gardens and neatly mown lawns. As someone had said at the Shankers meeting, they hardly ever saw more than one dog per house, usually in a chain-link kennel.

They moved back to Virgil's truck. Inside, Johnson said, "That didn't sound so much like a tip, as maybe a threat."

"Now what do we do?" Johnson asked, when they bounced back on Highway 26.

On the way back to Johnson's cabin, Davenport returned Virgil's call from that morning. Virgil saw his name flash on the phone screen, and said to Johnson, "Keep your mouth shut. This is the boss. I'll put him on the speaker."

"You're good," Johnson said, when Virgil had rung off. "Got the backing of the big guy himself. Let's get out on the river."

About the time that night that Virgil hooked into a two-pound smally, the Buchanan County Consolidated School Board finished the public portion of the monthly meeting. The last speaker had demanded to know what the board was going to do about buying better helmets for the football team.

Clancy Conley was a human train wreck. He hadn't started out that way, but he'd discovered speed halfway through journalism school, and that started his slow slide to hell, if hell can be defined as being a reporter / photographer / paste-up man on a small-town weekly newspaper.