Deadline (17 page)

“What?”

“Somebody was already inside the offices, you know? Before I could leave Mrs. Duncan’s room, they came out in the hallway and broke into the offices. They were already in, but then they broke in. Then they went to the side door, down the hall, the outside door, and they broke in there, too. Then they came back, and whoosh, the fire goes up, and they ran. I heard them running, and I peeked out, and I don’t know who it was, but it was a full-sized man. Wasn’t a high school kid.”

Virgil said, “Huh.” Then, “Somebody had a key, and then they faked a break-in.”

“I believe so,” Bacon said. “The fire was burning for a couple of minutes—the alarm in the district offices should have gone off right away, but it didn’t, and I was headed for the basement to call the fire department, but then another alarm went off—I think one out in the hallway. So I didn’t have to call anyone. The firemen showed up in five or six minutes and put the fire out in one more.”

“If I say a name, could you keep it under your hat?” Virgil asked.

“Nobody but you knows about this room—I’ve kept it under my hat for all these years.”

Virgil said, “Randy Kerns.”

Bacon said nothing for a minute, then cupped his chin in his hand and rubbed for a couple seconds, and said, “I didn’t want to say that.”

“You think it was him?”

“Never saw his face, and it was dark in the hallway, except that the fire was going—but when I saw him running, something made me think of Randy.”

“Is Kerns a big enough asshole to do this?”

“Randy’s a big enough asshole to do anything,” Bacon said.

—

V
IRGIL GOT UP
and took a turn around the apartment; he felt like he had to keep his head down because of the low ceiling. Then, “Mr. Bacon, I believe that Clancy Conley was killed because he discovered some serious corruption here in the school system. I think another man was killed in an attempt to throw us off the scent. Would you know anything about that? About people stealing from the school?”

He shook his head. “I don’t. I can tell you that sometimes when the school board meetings end, the board runs everybody off, and then continues the meeting. Sometimes for an hour or more. A couple times when I was working around there, Randy came out and run me off. Didn’t want me to hear what was going on. That’s all I know about that.”

“All the school board?” Virgil asked. “Or did some of the board members leave, too?”

“They all stayed: the board members, the superintendent, the
accountant . . . uh, Viking Laughton, he’s the newspaper editor, and Randy. They all stayed in there. Just about every meeting.”

Virgil looked at Bacon’s bookshelves: mostly young adult fiction and textbooks, probably from the school library. “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Bacon. I believe those people are stealing a lot of money from the schools. A lot. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I think they’re taking enough to pay every one of them four or five times what you get, and they’re not doing a thing, except stealing taxpayers’ money.”

“That ain’t right, either,” Bacon said. “Lots of bad people in this world, that’s for sure.”

“Yes, there are,” Virgil said. He returned to the chair and sat down. “With this fire down in the offices, how long you think it’ll take before they can meet here again?”

“Oh, the meeting room didn’t get burned,” Bacon said. “They meet in the little auditorium, where the choir practices and they have the student council. I think they were talking about meeting tomorrow night, about the fire.”

Virgil nodded. “Good. If I brought you a court order, and some video equipment and a microphone, do you think you could fit that in there where nobody could see it? Close enough to record everything?”

Bacon scratched the back of his head, then said, “I could probably fit it up among the stage lights. I don’t know how you’d turn it off and on.”

“Remote control. You’d have to step inside the room just for a moment, like, when the regular meeting ended,” Virgil said. “I can’t do it, because it might spook them if I showed up.”

“I could do that,” he said. “I usually go in right when the meeting ends and pull out a trash basket. Then Randy runs me off, and I bring the basket back later at night.”

“Let me see if I can get the equipment and the court order before tomorrow,” Virgil said.

“You could bring it in tomorrow afternoon, late, when everybody’s eating dinner,” Bacon said. “Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to stick it up there. Black duct tape, make sure the remote works. Might need some help getting the ladder up there.”

Virgil said, “Okay. I’ll call you—but you don’t have a cell?”

“No, but there’s a message machine on the custodial phone down the basement. Just say that you either have, or don’t have, the plumbing equipment I ordered. If you got it, show up about five o’clock at the back door. I’ll let you in.”

“That’s a deal,” Virgil said, and he stood up.

Bacon asked, “How’d you find out about me?”

“A certain person has noticed that you sometimes seem to be at the school when you shouldn’t be. Late at night, early in the morning. This person said that normally, everybody in town that they know, knows where the other person lives. Not you. Nobody knows where you live.”

“Since you said it was a ‘person,’ I guess it was a woman?”

“Could be,” Virgil said. “But then again, maybe not.”

“I’ll have to think on that,” Bacon said. “Makes me nervous, somebody knowing.”

“I don’t think the person will tell,” Virgil said.

Bacon showed just the hint of a smile. “You almost said ‘she.’”

“Did I?”

V
IRGIL CALLED HIS FRIEND
in the attorney general’s office about getting a court order for the surveillance equipment. “You don’t need a court order for a public meeting,” the lawyer said.

“I’m told they kick everybody out, saying that that meeting concerns personnel action,” Virgil said. “I was told that was an exception.”

“Hmm. Yeah, it probably is. You got anything on which we could base a court order?”

“Got two witnesses,” Virgil said. He explained, and possibly polished the potential testimony. “The fact is, if we don’t get anything with the camera, we’ll never mention it. If we do, then people won’t care what prior testimony we had—anything will work.”

“Okay, let me talk to the big guy, see if he’s up for a court order. Is this gonna come back to us anywhere?”

“Only if you prosecute some people for stealing a few million bucks from the state, taking full credit for cleaning up public corruption and stopping the theft of taxpayer funds, on your way to the governor’s office.”

“You do know how to present a concept, I’ll give you that,” the lawyer said. “Okay. I’ll push it, call you back tonight. You got the gear?”

“I can get it.”

“Stay by the phone.”

—

V
IRGIL WOUND UP
the day by backtracking to the Gedneys’ house. Jennifer Gedney wasn’t home, so he knocked on a neighbor’s door and asked the woman who answered where Gedney worked, and was told that she was the manager at the Woolen Mill, on Main Street. “Can’t miss it: looks like a windmill.”

Virgil drove out to the edge of the business district and found a two-story replica of a Dutch windmill, with two cars in the parking lot. One, he remembered, was Gedney’s; the other belonged to the customer with whom Gedney was talking when Virgil went inside.

Gedney did a double take when Virgil walked in; Virgil busied himself with some balls of yarn in a bushel basket, and Gedney hurried her customer along and when she’d gone, asked, “What do you want?”

“Heard anything from Buster?”

“Not a word. He’s run away, and it’s your fault, with your threats. I’m talking to a lawyer.”

“Good luck with that,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you what, Mrs. Gedney. Buster was about to give me the whole bunch of you. I guess he couldn’t stand the stress. But we’ll find him. One of the two of you is going to prison—if you want to talk to me first, it’ll be Buster. If not, well, like I said, we’ll find him. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Get out of here.”

“You know who the last guy was, who told me to get out of here? Roy Zorn. Two days later, he was shot in the back. So, take care of your back. People see me coming around to your place, they might think you’re making a deal.”

She pointed at the door: “Get out.”

—

M
ODERATELY PLEASED
with
himself—adding another log to the fire—Virgil called Shrake.

“We’re on it. We looked over the whole place, and set up on the bank right behind the cabin. Nobody’s coming through there without us picking them up, especially if we leave the yard light and that back wall light on. We’ll take four-hour shifts, starting at seven-thirty. Probably be best if you took the first shift.”

“Lots of mosquitoes,” Virgil said.

“Got that covered, too.”

“See you at seven-thirty.”

—

V
IRGIL WENT TO DINNER,
and halfway through, got a call from the lawyer at the attorney general’s office. “You got your warrant. You can put up a camera only for tomorrow’s meeting, and we’ll have to
file a return on it within ten days, although we can probably get an extension on that, if you need it.”

Virgil called Davenport and asked about a camera and recording equipment. “No problem about the gear, but there might be a hitch getting it down to you. Could you meet somebody halfway?”

“I could check and see if Johnson could meet somebody in Rochester.”

“Do that,” Davenport said. “Then I can just have a guy run down with it, won’t have to worry about overtime.”

“You know, I’m working a double murder down here, why are we sweating the overtime?”

“Come work here sometime,” Davenport said. “The Black Hole case ran our overtime budget into the middle of next year. I can pretty much fuckin’ guarantee that if you put in for one minute of overtime for chasing dogs, Rose Marie will personally come down there and shove the overtime chit up your ass.”

Rose Marie was the commissioner of public safety.

—

S
O
J
OHNSON AGREED
to go to Rochester—“Clarice can hit the Macy’s”—and Virgil finished dinner, and as he was walking out to the parking lot, Gomez, the DEA agent, called.

“One of the guys we arrested was more scared of going to jail than he was of talking, so he’s talking to us. He says Zorn once got drunk and told him that the Seed would never fuck with him, because he had the goods on them. We’ve got a search warrant for his house, and we’re going to hit it early tomorrow morning. Also, there’s another guy, D. Wayne—”

“Sharf.”

“Ah. You know him. We’re going to hit him, too,” Gomez said.

“We’re looking for him all over four states, on the Zorn shooting. We don’t think he did it, we want him for a different reason, but . . .”

“The dogs?”

“Well, basically, yeah. Anyway, he’s not home,” Virgil said.

“Okay by me. We’ll take the house apart, and leave him a note. Anyway, you’re invited. Be there, or be square.”

After a moment Virgil said, “I last heard that, ‘Be there or be square,’ when I was in high school. Seventeen years without it, and you ruined the run.”

“We’re going in at six.”

“I’ll be there,” Virgil said. “And I won’t be square.”

—

A
T SEVEN,
Virgil rolled down the dirt track to Johnson’s cabin and found Shrake and Jenkins on the deck, though there was no sign of their vehicle. “We parked at a neighbor’s, up the road,” Jenkins said. “We got a deer blind up on the bank behind the house.”

Virgil told them about the raids planned for the morning, and asked if he could cut an hour and a half off his share of the ambush. “Got to be up by five-thirty. If I can get to bed by ten . . .”

“Not a problem,” Shrake said. “I’ll take it until two, Jenkins will take it until six, and by then you’ll be gone.”

“What do you think the chances are?” Jenkins asked.

“Maybe twenty-five percent,” Virgil said. “The shooter’s nuts, and I’ve dropped enough hints that I’m on to them.”

“They might think it’s more dangerous to kill a cop than to let it go,” Shrake said.

“They might,” Virgil admitted. “But they’ve already murdered two people. If they go down for that, they’re all looking at life sentences anyway. Killing a cop won’t make any difference on that.”

“Still, they’d have to be panicked . . .”

“I’m doing my best to get them there,” Virgil said.

—

A
T SEVEN-THIRTY,
with the Wisconsin trees going pink across the water, Virgil took a flashlight, a 12-gauge shotgun, two bottles of water, and a peanut butter sandwich back to the deer blind and zipped himself in. Jenkins and Shrake had pulled all the blinds on the back and sides of the cabin, and would take care to move around one at a time. The foliage around the cabin was thick enough that the shooter would have to get in close for a shot.

The night was still and warm, and Virgil sat cross-legged for a half hour, then in a series of increasingly twisted forms for another hour, and then lay down and looked out over the edge of the screen, as the hands on his watch crept around the dial.

At ten, Jenkins whispered, “Go on down.”

“Nothing moving,” Virgil whispered back, as they traded places.

Nothing moved that night, until Virgil twitched at five-thirty, when his cell phone’s alarm began to vibrate.

—

H
E GOT CLEANED UP,
waved toward Shrake’s hideout on the way past, and turned north toward Orly’s Creek.

Virgil had served a few dozen search warrants in his life. His favorite had been a raid on a set of burglars who’d been working the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul, during his first year as a St. Paul detective. For a bunch of dumbasses, they’d been remarkably hard to catch.

The burglars were two couples, involved in a sexually ambiguous foursome, working out of a rented home. They always hit in broad daylight, as far as Virgil had been able to tell. They were hard to catch because they didn’t dress like burglars. They dressed like tennis players, or like joggers, while they were scouting targets, and they scouted all the time.

When they picked out a target, they’d break a garage door or a back door, pull up in the alley—they always worked homes with alleys behind them—in a Toyota van with soccer-ball stickers in the back window.

That didn’t make them dumbasses; that actually made them smart. What made them dumbasses was what they stole.

When Virgil finally identified them, he tracked them, watched them break into a house, then followed them back to their hideout. When he and the SWAT team kicked the door two hours later, they found the entire house packed from floor to ceiling with the kind of plastic kids’ crap that you get at Walmart and Target—Big Wheels, play kitchens, wetting dolls, inflatable swimming pools, used croquet sets, ancient lawn darts—along with small TVs, DVD players, CD players, video games, stuff that would sell for ten dollars on the street. Literally, floor to ceiling—they’d had to walk sideways down narrow aisles cut in the piles of junk, just to get to the bong room, where they all slept, and the kitchen and bathroom.

It turned out that the women drove, and the men stole, but they couldn’t steal anything big, because they both had bad backs and couldn’t lift anything heavy.

When Virgil asked them, “Why’d you steal all this shit?” one of the men had answered, “I dunno. I guess ’cause it’s what they had.”

—

A
T SIX-TWENTY THAT MORNING,
ten federals from the DEA, all armored up, led by Gomez, simultaneously hit Roy Zorn’s and D. Wayne Sharf’s homes, both off Orly’s Creek Road. Bunny Zorn was arrested, cuffed, read her rights, and put on a couch. Sharf’s place was unoccupied, but it appeared that Sharf was planning to come back, because all of his stuff was still in place, including four one-gallon Ziploc Double-Zipper freezer bags full of methamphetamine. The meth was cleverly hidden behind a loose board under the basement stairs, the second place the feds looked.

Virgil was more interested in Zorn’s computer than anything else, and so was Gomez. The five-year-old PC was password-protected, but one of the feds cut through the password in a few minutes and popped open the e-mail file. Zorn didn’t do much with e-mail, and none of the e-mails mentioned any names that Virgil recognized. When Virgil did a search for “Kerns,” “Randy,” “dog,” and “dogs,” he came up empty. A check of website history showed that Zorn mostly visited hunting, gun, and porn sites.

Sharf’s place was a long step down from Zorn’s in just about all ways, including odor and neatness. He hadn’t taken the garbage out before he left, and the non-air-conditioned one-bedroom shack smelled of old tomatoes and rotting meat. Like Zorn, he
had a computer, and when Virgil looked for “dogs,” he found an e-mail from somebody named Con that said that he’d be bunching up dogs starting at eight o’clock sharp. The date was only three days away.

“Find something good?” Gomez asked, when Virgil began taking notes.

“Maybe. If D. Wayne Sharf doesn’t come back before then, he’s got a date to sell some dogs. I’ve been dealing with a lot of angry dog people—they might know where this sale’s gonna be.”

“We can keep that date,” Gomez said. He patted the case that contained the bags of meth.

“Let me take it,” Virgil said. “I really do need to see the man about a dog.”

—

A
SEARCH WAS
always interesting, especially when dealing with assholes like Zorn and Sharf, and it was nearly noon before Virgil got out of the house. Jenkins and Shrake were playing golf at Trippton National, so Virgil called Johnson, who’d picked up the video surveillance equipment in Rochester the night before, and arranged to meet him for lunch at Ma & Pa’s Kettle.

Johnson was more than pleased by the discovery of the dog note. “I’ll get the posse together, see if anybody knows where this thing is.”

“It’s gonna be more complicated than that, Johnson,” Virgil said around his cheeseburger. “For one thing, the dog sale itself isn’t illegal, and the ownership of the dogs will probably be contentious. And—”

“Hey, no need to harelip the Pope. We’ll just get the boys together and hammer the place flat. You cops can pick up the pieces.”

—

T
HEY LINGERED OVER LUNCH,
because Virgil had nothing to do until it was time to meet Bacon, the school janitor. When they left the Kettle, it was almost two o’clock. Johnson gave him the bag with the video camera, an integral telescopic mike, a remote control, a battery charger, a set of earphones, and a roll of dull black gaffer’s tape. Virgil went back to the cabin, checked the approach road for unknown parked cars, and found none. At the cabin he made sure he knew how to operate the camera and that the batteries were charged, then took a nap.

—

A
T FIVE O’CLOCK
he hurried across the school’s parking lot to the back door, where Will Bacon was waiting. “There are still a few people around, but we can go in through the stage entrance to the little auditorium, and that comes off the gym, and there’s nobody in there, because I checked,” Bacon said. “You got the camera?”

Virgil: “Here,” and he patted the bag.

“Let’s go. Stay close, listen for voices.”

They were at the back of the school, walking past metal- and wood-shop classrooms and then hesitated outside the gym while Bacon poked his head in. “Let’s go,” he said, waving Virgil through the door.

They crossed the gym, went through a double door into a long
narrow hallway with closed, knobless doors all along the way. “These are the emergency exits from the shops and the little auditorium,” Bacon said. He used a key on his key ring to open the door at the end of the hall, and peeked inside. “All clear.”