Supervisory Special Agent Derek Morgan had long since grown accustomed to that. But the short time he had spent in Bemidji, Minnesota—at the sheriff’s office, in the hotel lobby, and going for a five-mile run this morning—had convinced him that he now found himself in the whitest place on the planet. And according to some Internet research he’d done on returning from his run, the town turned out to be nearly eighty-five percent white. The dominant minority, Native Americans (everyone around here called them Indians), made up another thirteen percent. That meant that only three percent of the population, or about 450 souls if Garue’s census figures were right, were African-American, Latino, Jewish, Asian, Arabic or Klingon, for that matter. Certainly not the racial mix of Washington, D.C., or Chicago, where Morgan grew up. . . . Up here, snow wasn’t the only thing that seemed to be all white. On his trek through the aptly named Paul Bunyan Park, the only individual of color he’d encountered was a statue of Babe the blue ox, standing next to a sculpture of the park’s legendary lumberjack namesake.
