as messy as any teenage boy’s might be. Books and papers were scattered over a desk, where a MacBook sat in front of an old-fashioned wooden office chair. A backpack lay at the foot of the bed, and a sports trophy, with a tennis player on top, stood on a chest of drawers. There were none of the expected jocko pennants on the wall, but there were posters for the Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans Saints, a couple of dozen postcards, mostly of nude women, stuck on the wall with pushpins. The place smelled faintly of sweat socks and male deodorant.

Irma said, “Those postcards aren’t anything—those dumb boys would find them and mail them to their friends with, you know, messages, on the back. Trying to embarrass each other. They were all doing it.”

“We’ll just leave you,” George Tripp said. “We don’t want to see any of this, to be honest. And we have our appointment, you know, we have to pick out . . .” He trailed off, and Virgil mentally filled it in: a coffin.

“Take off,” Virgil said. “I’ll wait until you get back.”

They left him, but then Virgil stepped into the hallway and asked, “Did he have a cell phone?”

“Yes, it’s on his desk.”

“Okay. You don’t know if he had a password on his computer, do you?”

Irma smiled for the first time, an almost shy smile, and she said, “Yes, he did, and he wouldn’t tell us what it was. He said it was his private business. You know, I think with what boys look at on the Internet . . . We have wireless.”

“Okay. I may want to take the computer with me,” Virgil said. “We have some people in St. Paul who can work around the password.”

George Tripp said, “I don’t know how valuable it might be. . . .”

“I’ll get it back to you,” Virgil said. “I’ll give you a receipt. You go on—we’ll work it out later.”

HE WENT to the computer first, and the first thing it did was ask for a password. He tried “Tripp” and “BJ” and “Bobby” and “RJ,” “Irma,” and “George,” and, from a school poster taped to the wall, “Cardinals” and “Vikings,” “wide receiver” and “receiver.” Nothing worked.

He checked the phone and came up with a list of names and phone numbers. He recognized “Sullivan,” the reporter, but the rest meant nothing to him. No Baker, Flood, or Crocker.

The phone would have to be run. He set it aside and turned to the room, starting with the chest of drawers. He pulled each drawer three-quarters of the way out, felt through the underwear and summer clothing, then pulled each drawer completely free to look under it.

Under the bottom drawer he found a plastic baggie containing a couple of joints and a package of rolling papers. He thought about it for a moment, then put the dope and the papers in his pocket.

Going to the closet, he shook down all the clothing, looking for paper, found a few gasoline receipts. Nothing in the shoes.

On impulse, he went back to the computer and typed in “gay” and “homosexual” and “homo” and the computer shook him off. He lifted the mattress off the box springs, found nothing. He went through the desk drawer, found it stuffed with receipts, ticket stubs, photographs. Nothing that set off a buzz.

He started sifting through papers and books, looking for anything that might be personal. Not much—no notes from anyone, just old schoolwork. The backpack contained workout clothes and two twenty-pound weights, probably to work his quads, and a printed-out calendar with a workout schedule on it, over the background image of a running horse, its tail flaring out behind it.

And a much-folded piece of copy paper, with a line drawing of the Statue of Liberty on it. No words, just the drawing. There was a long oval drawn from the base of the statue right up to its face, which might have been the number “eight” but, if so, heavily distorted, with the upper loop nearly round, the lower loop a very long oval. The distortion seemed to mean something, Virgil thought, but he couldn’t think what—but it looked as though the paper had been something that Tripp had looked at over and over, and carried with him on his daily workouts.

Virgil looked at the statue drawing, then the calendar with the horse, went back to the computer, typed “Mustangs”—the Southwest Minnesota State Mustangs, where Tripp would have gone to college—and the computer bit: he