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have bet she did it every morning with Sanderson. "Something else," she said. "It's possible that the Indian's name is Ray. I don't know that, but it could be."
    "Why Ray?" The microwave beeped and she took the cups out, and slid one across to Virgil. They both took a sip, the coffee strong and boiling hot, and Virgil said again, "Ray?"
    Ray was an Indian, an Ojibwa, a Chippewa, from Red Lake. She'd never met him, but he was an old pal of Sanderson's--Bobby never explained how they met--and the past three weeks they'd been going to vet meetings in St. Paul.
    Virgil perked up. "Vet meetings?"
    "Yes. Bobby didn't tell me about those either. I mean, it's starting to sound like he didn't tell me about anything, but that's not true. He could be a talkative man. But these men in the street, these meetings . . . it's like he couldn't talk to a woman about them. This was man stuff, like maybe it went back a long time."
    Virgil wrote "Ray/Indian" in his book, and "vet meetings."
    "When you say vet meetings," he asked, "did you get the impression it was just a bunch of guys, a bull session, or was it more like group therapy or what?" Virgil asked.
    "Group therapy. Maybe not exactly that, but more than a bull session." She squinted at him across the work island. "I don't know why Bobby would need vet's therapy, though. He worked in a motor pool for some obsolete missile battalion. He said they'd shoot off their missiles, for practice, and they couldn't hit this mountain that they used as a target."
    "In Korea."
    "Yes. Someplace up in the hills," she said. "Chunchon? Something like that."
    "You know which vet center?" Virgil asked.
    "I don't know exactly, but it's on University Avenue in St. Paul. He said something about parking off University."
    The meeting in the street, she said, had involved the cop-looking guy, the Indian, Sanderson, and a man who never got out of the car.
    "The weird thing about that was, he was sitting in the backseat. Like the cop guy had chauffeured him out here. Like he was some big shot. Anyway, at one point, the window rolled down, the back window, and the cop guy got Bobby's arm and tried to pull him over there, and the Indian guy pushed the cop guy away," she said.
    She was becoming animated as she remembered. "I thought there was going to be a fight for a minute; but then they all quieted down and they were looking around like they were worried that they disturbed somebody. Then they finished up and the Indian man went down the street, and the cop got back in the car and Bobby came in, and I said, 'What the heck was all that?' and he said, 'Nothing. Some old bullshit. I don't want to talk about it. Tell you some other time.' That's what he said, exactly. He was harsh about it, so I didn't want to push him about it. I should of pushed."
    Virgil wrote it down, exactly.
    Owen had an extra photograph of Sanderson, taken standing next to his boat, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. "I don't need it back," she said.
    They talked for a few more minutes, but she had only one more thing, having to do with the bowel regularity of the dog. "It was like the train coming through town," Owen said. "They were out the door every night, same time, within five minutes. Walked the same route. If you knew him, if you wanted to kill him . . ."
    "I understand the dog was security-trained," Virgil said.
    "Sort of. You know, one of those Wisconsin places where they say their dogs are all this great, but you think, if they're so great, why are they so cheap? I liked him, he was a good dog, but he wasn't exactly a wolf."
    HE LEFT HER in the kitchen, staring at the future, went out the side door, took a look at the boat. Boats had always been big in Virgil's life, and this was a nice one, a Lund Pro-V 2025 with a two-hundred-horse Yamaha hanging on the back, Eagle trailer, Lowrance electronics, the ones with the integrated map and GPS. Sanderson had fitted it with a couple of Wave Whackers, so he did some back-trolling; walleye fisherman,