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rush-hour car, went to his room, got undressed, set the alarm, and fell facedown on the bed.
    Too much.
    Four Leinie’s at the club, bedtime with Janey, then the murder. He’d started the day at five o’clock in the morning in Mankato, eighty miles south of the Twin Cities, and now was twenty-five hours down the line, with a hard day coming up.
    He would have been asleep in forty seconds, except thirty seconds after he landed facedown, the nightstand beeped at him. Beeped again thirty seconds later; again thirty seconds after that. No point in resisting: it wasn’t going to quit.
    He pushed up on his elbows, looked at the nightstand. Nothing there but a pile of dollar bills, the clock, and the lamp. Another beep. Had to be the clock, which had gone nuts for some reason. There was nothing to turn off except the alarm, and he needed the alarm, so he put the clock on the floor, pushed it under the bed, and dropped back on the pillow.
    Another beep, right next to his ear.
    Groggy, he looked at the nightstand. Nothing now but a pile of dollar bills and the lamp. He pulled open the only drawer, found a Gideon’s Bible, which he opened. The Gideon was not beeping him.
    Another beep. The lamp beeped? With the feeling that he was actually going insane, he inspected the lamp but could find no sign of anything that might beep. He’d just drawn back from it, looking at his pillow, when it beeped again.
    He was losing it, he thought. There was nothing there; the beep was in his head, and it would never go away. He flashed on a scene with himself at the Mayo Clinic, surrounded by shrinks, shaking their heads at the syndrome now known as Flowers’s Beep.
    He reached out to the stack of dollar bills . . . and found his cell phone beneath them, thin enough to be invisible. The low-battery warning. Jesus. He staggered over to his briefcase, got out the charger, plugged it in, and thought later that he must have passed out while hanging in midair over the bed, falling onto the pillow.
     
 
WHEN THE ALARM went off at nine o’clock, he woke bright-eyed, but in the bright-eyed, dazed way that means he’d feel like death at two o’clock in the afternoon. He cleaned up, staring at himself in the mirror as he shaved, and then said to his own image, “You’re too old for that Janey thing. You gotta wake up and fly right, Virgil. This is the first day of the rest of your life. You don’t have to be this way.”
    He wasn’t convinced. He got dressed, and spent a moment choosing a T-shirt that would go with his mood—eventually choosing one that said “WWTDD.” He pulled on a blue sport coat, stuck his notebook in the pocket, smiled at himself in the mirror.
    Not bad, except for the black rings under his eyes. He checked his laptop, which was hooked into the motel’s wireless system, and found an e-mail from Shrake with the vet center’s address. Shrake had also run Sanderson through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, and the feds had come back with two hits, both DWIs in the 1980s.
    After pancakes and bacon and a glance at the Star Tribune at a Country Kitchen, Virgil rolled along behind the last car in the rush hour, west on I-94, got off at 280 and then immediately at University Avenue. The vet center was in a long, old, undistinguished brown-brick building, between an art studio and an architect’s office. Virgil dumped the truck on the street and went inside.
     
 
THE WOMAN AT THE reception desk took a look at his ID and called the director, listened to her phone for a couple of seconds, then pointed Virgil down the hall. The director was a Vietnam-era guy named Don Worth. He must have been coming up on retirement, Virgil thought, mild-looking with his gray hair in a comb-over, brown sport coat and khakis with a blue button-down shirt, brown loafers. He shook Virgil’s hand after looking at his ID, pointed him at a chair, and said, “You need . . .”
    Virgil took the photograph of Sanderson out of his briefcase