Deadline (14 page)

The guy with the twine arrived, and while Dan took his dogs down the hill as a pack, they hooked the other dogs together with makeshift collars and the twine, and led them down the hill.

They’d recovered sixteen dogs altogether, and eight of them were immediately identified by owners, either present or known. Johnson called the Humane Society, which sent a truck to collect the rest of them, where they’d be held until they were identified.

It was eleven o’clock before it was all settled, and Virgil went down the hill and called Davenport, and told him about the dogs.

“Are you pulling my leg?”

“No, no, I’m not,” Virgil said.

“Well, Christ, I hope nobody else finds out about it.”

“I’d like to put out a BOLO on Sharf’s truck and horse trailer. Can we at least do that?”

“You’re in the same place as that guy who was killed, right? That Corn guy?”

“Zorn. Yeah.”

“All right. Put your BOLO out, but say it’s in connection with the investigation into the murder of Corn.”

“Zorn.”

“Zorn. Whatever. That could almost be true.”

“When I think about it, it is true,” Virgil said. “That’s what I will do.”

A number of the dog owners were still hanging around, some with dogs, newly recovered, and some without—tears in a few
eyes—and Virgil gathered them around and said, “One of the big shots in the BCA just okayed a be-on-the-lookout alert for Sharf’s truck and trailer. We’ll spread it all over southern Minnesota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin.”

“’Bout time,” somebody said.

Another guy said, “I got Bobby back, but I’ll go out after the rest of them, if you call me. We all oughta hang together, not just guys still looking for their mutts.”

They all agreed they’d do that.

And he said, “Virgil, you’re okay.”

They started breaking up, and Virgil got a ride with Johnson back to his truck.

“I’ll tell you something, Virgie. No matter what you do, you’re never gonna get people more grateful to you than these guys,” Johnson said. “You ever need to get somebody killed, all you gotta do is ask.”

“You got me all choked up, Johnson,” Virgil said. “I’ll make a note about it, you know, needing to kill somebody.”

“You never know,” Johnson said. He shook his head. “Never know.”

—

V
IRGIL WENT BACK
to the cabin to change clothes, shower, and shave. Standing in the shower, scrubbing off the DEET, he decided that the time had come to give Buster Gedney a deadline. Gedney, he was convinced, was a linchpin. If he could turn him, he could crack the whole case. Gedney could give him Kerns, the security guy who
may have done the shooting—he could almost certainly get a search warrant based on Gedney’s testimony and Conley’s notes—and that would likely get him Kerns’s rifle.

From there, using the legal levers he’d have, involving plea bargains and reduced sentences, he could get the rest of them.

He was out of the cabin a little after noon, stopped at a McDonald’s for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, fries, and a strawberry shake, and drove over to Gedney’s place while he ate.

He’d finished the burger and almost with the fries when he arrived, and found Jennifer Gedney standing in the driveway, the fingers of one hand pinching at her chin, while she looked into the open garage.

So preoccupied that she didn’t see him coming, she turned when Virgil called, “Mrs. Gedney,” and dropped her hand and asked, “Where is he?”

“Where’s who?”

“Buster. I know you’ve got him.”

“I don’t have him. I came over to talk to him.” She stared at him, as if working through the possibilities, then nodded and turned back to the garage. Virgil asked, “You haven’t seen him today?”

“I saw him this morning, before I went to work. But when I came home for lunch, he wasn’t here, and he always is, and when I came out to look in the garage . . . I was kind of worried . . . I found this.”

Virgil peered into the garage: “What?”

“His lathe is gone. And a bunch of his tools. All the welding equipment is gone. And his truck.”

Virgil noticed the hole in the line of equipment. The milling machine was still there, but that would have been too big to move, anyway, without a truck and a serious hoist. “Goddamnit.”

She turned to him again: “You know where he went?”

“No, but I know why he went,” Virgil said. “He knew the net’s about to drop on the whole bunch of you, and he wanted out.”

“The net?”

“The police net.” Virgil turned back to his truck, took a few steps, then looked back at her. “If you kept your cut in cash or other valuables, you better check your safe-deposit box, or wherever you keep it. If Buster’s running, he’d need all the cash he could get.”

She was still standing in the driveway when Virgil pulled away from the house. He drove down the street, over a low rise, down in the dip that followed, up the next rise, then executed a technical law enforcement maneuver called a “U-turn.” Rolling back up the hill until he was just high enough to see the end of the Gedney driveway, but the bulk of his truck was still below the crest, he got a pair of binoculars out of the back and sat and waited.

Jennifer Gedney pulled into the street three minutes later. She stopped at the end of the driveway and took a long look in both directions, then turned toward town. Virgil followed her in, watched her park at the Piggly Wiggly. He parked again, and waited, and five minutes later she came back out, hands empty, looked in both directions, got in her car, drove two blocks, and took a left. Virgil hurried after her and made the turn in time to see her turn into the Second National Bank parking lot.

Ten minutes later, she came back out, hands still empty. She got
in her car, but the car didn’t move for five minutes. Virgil edged closer and looked at her with the binoculars. She had her head down on the steering wheel.

Weeping?

Hard to tell. He waited, and after a couple more minutes she started the car, and Virgil drove on past the bank and watched as she turned away from him and disappeared back around the corner toward her home.

When she was out of sight, Virgil turned around and followed her. Five minutes later she pulled back into her driveway, got out of the car, and went into the house. Virgil drove back to the bank, went inside, identified himself, and asked to see the manager.

The manager was a heavyset, blue-eyed man with white hair, named Marvin Hiners, who emerged from a small office carrying a sheaf of papers, and asked, “Mr. Flowers?”

Virgil followed him back into the office and said, “I’m investigating the two murders we’ve had here, Mr. Conley and Mr. Zorn. I need some information from you. I’m not asking for documents, I’m only interviewing you as a witness. I’m telling you this so that you know I don’t need a search warrant. If you wish, I’ll wait for you to get legal advice about answering my questions.”

Hiners leaned back in his chair, concern on his pale German face. “What . . . uh, I’ll reserve the right to talk to the bank’s legal counsel . . . but ask the questions, and I’ll figure out if I want to answer. I can tell you, I’ve had no part in any crime.”

“I doubt that you have. Here’s the first question. Did Mrs. Jennifer Gedney, who was just here, get access to a safe-deposit box?”

Hiners had taken a yellow pencil out of a pencil jar on his desk, and he twiddled it for a few seconds, then said, “Yes. Well, she went into the safe area, where Carol David may have given her access, although I didn’t see it. But that’s the only reason for going back there. To access your safe-deposit box.”

Virgil nodded. “Do you know if Buster Gedney came in here earlier today and accessed the same box?”

More twiddling, then, “Yes. I will also tell you that I approved a withdrawal of nine thousand dollars from their joint savings account, which was almost everything in it. There’s less than a thousand left. Buster said he needed the cash to buy some kind of machine for his machine shop, and the man who had it wanted cash. I warned him that such deals can involve stolen equipment, but he took the money.”

Virgil: “I want you to isolate and preserve all the documents that show this, both the entry into the safe-deposit boxes, and the withdrawal. I’ll be back with a subpoena.”

Hiners asked, “Did Buster kill those people?”

“I don’t believe so,” Virgil said. “But I do need to talk with him.”

Virgil went out to his truck, called the BCA duty officer, and said that he wanted to issue two BOLOs, one for Buster Gedney and the other for D. Wayne Sharf, in connection with the murder of Conley and Zorn. He gave the duty officer what details he had on their vehicles, then rang off and scratched his head.

Now what? He couldn’t just sit around and see if somebody caught Buster Gedney, but admitted to himself that he’d been leaning pretty hard on the idea that Gedney would talk.

—

H
E WOUND UP
driving over to Janice Anderson’s house, the woman who’d given him the copy of the school budget.

She was outside nipping the heads off expired coneflowers with a pair of side-cutters, and when she saw him coming, dropped the pliers in the pocket of a gardener’s apron, picked up her cane, and walked over toward him.

“Good day for gardening,” Virgil said.

“I don’t do small talk,” Anderson said. She pushed her glasses up her nose. “You want something?”

“Need to talk to you. Confidentially.”

“Good. I’m bored,” she said. “You want an iced tea?”

“Thank you anyway—”

“Lemonade?”

“I could take a lemonade,” Virgil said.

“Sit there,” she said, pointing him at a garden table. She hung her cane on the back of one of the garden chairs, went in the house, and came back carrying two glasses and a pitcher of lemonade. She poured the glasses two-thirds full and pushed one toward Virgil.

He picked it up, took a drink. “Good,” he said. “Homemade?”

“Yes, inasmuch as I made it in my home, with a can of Birds Eye frozen lemonade.”

“Okay,” Virgil said. “I got a trustworthy vibration from you the other day, and I need to ask a somewhat, mmm, sensitive question.”

“Stop beating around the bush and ask the question.”

Virgil nodded. “A brief preface. I had a guy who I was going to squeeze like a ball of Silly Putty. Buster Gedney. But early this
morning Buster ran for it. Loaded a good part of his machine shop into his truck, apparently, and headed out. I’ve got people looking for him in four states, but he could be damn near to Missouri or Nebraska or Ohio by now, and if he drives all night, he could be anywhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies by tomorrow morning.”

“You might not find him, then.”

“Having spoken to Buster, I think we’ve got a chance,” Virgil said. “But you can’t tell, and I’ve got two dead people on my hands. I’ve got an idea of who might’ve done it, but no proof. Here’s my question: If you assume that a good part of the school board and school administration is in on this, who’d be most likely to crack under pressure?”

“Hmm.” She took a sip of the lemonade, grimaced, stared at the sky over the roof of the neighbor’s house, and finally said, “Wouldn’t be Jennifer Gedney, she’s a pretty tough nut. I guess I’d go after Henry Hetfield, he’s the school superintendent. He’d almost have to be in on it. He’s a fussy old woman, and the idea of prison would terrify him. In fact, you’d have to be careful. He could wind up jumping off his workbench with a rope around his neck, or choking down a bottle of sleeping pills.”

“Can’t have that,” Virgil said.

“Okay. Well, there’s the auditor, Fred Masilla. He’d have to be in on it, too, but he’s pretty soft-looking. Soft-talking.”

“Okay.”

“You know who could really answer this question, is Vike Laughton. He covers the school board.”

“That would not be a good idea,” Virgil said.

Her eyebrows went up. “Really. Vike?”

“I have no proof, but Conley thought so.”

She took another sip of lemonade, then said, “You want to know the thing about this part of Minnesota?”

“Sure.”

“We’re isolated. We’re out in the sticks. There’s no other big town anywhere near here. I mean, La Crosse, but that’s on the other side of the river, and it’s a good long drive over there. Caledonia’s a bit closer, but it’s still a long way. We’re down here by ourselves, and we get to thinking that we really are by ourselves. The people who are stealing this money from the schools, it probably never occurred to them that an outsider might take an interest in what they’re doing. And insiders, people who live here, can be managed—they can be ignored, like me, with my silly campaign for art and music classes, or they can be bought off. The schools spend a lot of money, millions of dollars, and most of it they spend right here. Nobody but an outsider would want to get crosswise with them. We’d never say that out loud, not even to each other, but that’s the fact.”

“Can’t have people getting shot in the back,” Virgil said.

“Of course not—but keep in mind that they were both outsiders. They don’t really count for so much.” They sat without speaking for a while, then she added, “You know how much a house costs here?”

“No idea.”

“You could get a very nice dry lot on the river, with a dock, three or four acres, big modern house, excellent condition . . . for maybe four hundred thousand. I saw one like that last spring. You could get a house in town, an ordinary house, for a hundred.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. The point is, whatever these people have been stealing has probably been making them rich in Trippton terms. In this town, two schoolteachers married to each other are rich . . . so the money won’t have to be big. Not in New York terms, or Minneapolis terms, anyway.”

“Henry Hetfield.”

“He’s the one I’d go after.” She looked at a small gold watch that she wore as a locket. “You’re a little late in the day—he’ll be gone. He only works until three o’clock, and sometimes not even that, in the summer.”

“Does he live here?”

“Yes, he does. I’ll get a pencil and paper and draw you a map of where he lives.”

—

W
HEN
V
IRGIL GOT BACK
to his truck, he sat and thought about it for a minute, but in the end decided that Hetfield would have to wait until morning. He needed to do some research on him, talk to Johnson Johnson, look again at Conley’s notes, see where Hetfield fit in. He’d seen Hetfield’s name in the notes, now he wanted to nail down what Conley thought about him.