Deadline

14

While Virgil was at Janice Anderson’s house, Jennifer Gedney was using the only remaining pay phone in Trippton, the one at the back of the drugstore, to call Jennifer Barns, the chairwoman of the school board. “We need a meeting and it’s urgent. We need to talk about personnel matters and budgetary questions.”

Barns asked, “How urgent?”

“Very.” Gedney looked around, half-expecting to see Virgil lurking behind the greeting-card rack.

“Is this a DefCon One?”

“No, but it’s a two,” Gedney said. “Maybe going to one.”

“Oh, shit. Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“At my house tonight at nine o’clock,” Jennifer 1 said.

“You’ll have to call everybody — I’m afraid to use my cell,” Gedney said.

“That bad?”

“Yes.”

At ten after nine, Gedney parked her car on a side street, a block away and around the corner from Jennifer Barns’s house. She collected her purse and got out under a starlit sky, stood for a minute, decided it might get chilly, got her sweater from the passenger seat, and slipped it over her shoulders.

She was deliberately late, waiting to see if the arrival of the others stirred any interest from… anybody. Other than familiar cars being parked on the street by Jennifer 1’s, she’d seen nothing unusual.

She’d started to walk to Jennifer 1’s when her cell phone chimed, and she looked at it: a text message. WRU?

She texted back: 1 min.

When she arrived, they were all waiting, some looking skeptical, some scared, a couple just curious. Jennifer 1 had provided a couple bottles of white wine, and everyone but Jennifer 2, a recovering alcoholic, had a glass. She could smell the fear rolling off them.

“So what happened?” Vike Laughton asked.

They’d left an empty chair for her, but Gedney spoke on her feet: “The state agent, Virgil Flowers, was pushing Buster around. Buster was intimidated. Flowers came back yesterday and told Buster that if he didn’t identify the person he sold the… I can’t remember what he called it, but it’s the parts that make Randy’s gun shoot three bullets—”

“Burst kit,” Kerns said.

“Yes. He knew that Buster made them. Buster denied it, but he knew anyway, because Buster couldn’t get a lie past a two-year-old. So yesterday he told Buster that if Buster didn’t tell him who he sold the burst kit to, he’d be charged with first-degree murder. He said he’d go to prison for thirty years, and when he was there, he’d be… sodomized. Buster was so scared—”

“He told you all this, Buster did,” Barns said.

“Yes. Last night. He said he wouldn’t tell Flowers about the burst boxes, but he sounded really shaky.”

“Time to do something about Buster,” Laughton said. A couple of people nodded.

Gedney waved them down: “Too late. When I came home for lunch, I found out that Buster had loaded up most of his equipment, everything movable, and he’d run for it. He also cleaned out our savings account, and the safe-deposit box.”

“Oh my God,” Jennifer Houser said. “Did he get it all?”

“No, I’m not dumb enough to put it all in one place. I’ve got another one, but he took everything at Second National. More than a hundred thousand, plus nine thousand from our savings. Anyway, I’d just found out about it when Flowers showed up looking for Buster. Buster had left the garage doors open, and Flowers saw that his lathe was gone. He knew that Buster had gone, and he took off: I suspect they’ve put out some kind of watch for him.”

“Buster’s too damn dumb to get away clean,” Henry Hetfield said. “I believe when they catch him… I believe he’ll talk.”

“That’s correct,” Gedney said about her husband.

Laughton said, “I don’t have a philosophical problem with killing Buster, but there’s a practical one. Randy shot Zorn to steer Flowers away from us. That makes total sense. If we kill Buster, that steers him back. If you’ll excuse me for saying so, a string of three murders does tend to catch the eye. If that happened, we’d have more than one cop down here. We’d probably attract the FBI.”

“You should have called a meeting on Zorn,” Barns said. “I would have voted against it. If I had seen—”

“Water under the bridge,” Laughton said. “It’s done — and to tell you the truth, I think it still has some value, should this all get to court. It’s an alternative theory on the murders, and a good defense attorney will make it into something.”

“What do we do about Buster?” Gedney asked.

“We hope you can reach him before Flowers does, or that he calls home,” Laughton said. “If Randy can get to him, then Buster, bless his heart, could disappear. Instead of leaving the body out there for all and sundry, Randy could put him down someplace deep, out in a forest or a swamp, and it’d just seem like he ran away and was never found.”

Kerns said, “I could do that.”

Laughton held up a finger. “I’m officially scared shitless. But — all Buster knows is that he sold a burst kit to Randy. I suggest that Randy get rid of that gun, soak the burst kit in some gasoline to get rid of any powder residue, then wash it with soap and water and put it in a plastic bag. If Flowers gets to him, he could claim he never used the kit. Then he gets another gun — hell, I’ll give him mine, I got it at a gun show, there are no numbers on it — and if the cops ever get that far, he denies everything. They check the gun, it wasn’t used to kill anyone. They got nothing.”

“Buster knows we’ve gotten a lot of money we shouldn’t have, and he knows where it came from,” Gedney said.

“Did you put the money somewhere they could find it?” Laughton asked.

Gedney said, “Well… not exactly. They could find out about my safe-deposit boxes. I’ve got one here and one in La Crosse. I could clean out the La Crosse one, leave a couple thousand dollars there, tell them I was hiding it for a divorce.”

“That should work,” Houser said.

Larry Parsons, the fifth board member, who hadn’t spoken, said, “Here’s what I think. I think it’s time to shut down, at least for a while. I think we need that really bad fire at the school board offices, something that takes out the whole computer system, all the records. We’ve talked about it — I think it’s time.”

“That’ll attract a lot of attention,” Hetfield said.

“We’ve worked all through that,” Parsons said. “Leave behind something that makes it look like kids did it. Vandals. The thing is, Flowers can believe anything he wants. He can know anything he wants. But to charge us with anything, he’s going to need proof. Burn the office, where’s the proof?”

They all considered that for a while. There were a few places here and there where they might be vulnerable — places where they’d had to take kickbacks, rather than simply cook the books — but if those people kept their mouths shut…

Jennifer Barns said, “Larry’s right. It’s time. How many people vote for a fire?”

“Who’ll do it?” Hetfield asked.

They all looked at Kerns, who said, “I’ve done some reading up on it. The office is in the middle of the building, so nobody’ll actually see the fire until it breaks through the roof. I’ll pull the battery in the smoke alarm.…”

He walked them through the details. Five gallons of gas for flames and heat, a quart of motor oil to give it some substance; evidence of an amateurish break-in…

“When do we do it?” Hetfield asked. He was nervous, polishing his glasses with the tail of his shirt.

“Soon as possible.”

“I got a couple things I’d like to get out of there.”

Kerns shook his head. “No. Leave them. The cops and fire people will want to talk to you. We want you kinda messed up about the fire. Talking about what you lost. When I was doing my research, the one thing arson investigators always look at is whether anything was taken out in the days before a fire. If something was, that’s the guy they always look at.”

Owens, the senior board member, shook his head. “My God, where have we gotten?”

Gedney said, “Buster is still the loose cannon. I’m really worried about him.”

Laughton said, “If we can find him…”

Barns said, “Everybody — if Flowers manages to dig something up, to turn somebody on us, we shut up and we lawyer up. Instantly. Nobody talks. If anybody turns, we’ll all go down, and frankly, with two killings, the state’s not going to let anybody go free. The best you could probably hope for is twenty years, instead of thirty. We’re all old enough that we wouldn’t see daylight until it hardly mattered anymore. So: if push comes to shove… don’t give it up.”

Gedney looked around the room: “Everybody understand that?”

“I think we all do,” Laughton said. “And what Jen One said is exactly right. We won’t be able to buy our way out of this. The only way out is straight ahead.”

Barns said, “The fire. We were talking about a fire. We all know the plan, and Randy suggests we go ahead with it. Let’s see a show of hands, all in favor…”

They were unanimous: burn it.