Deadline

15

Johnson and Virgil sat drinking on the cabin porch, Johnson a bottle of lemonade — he’d brought three quarts with him — Virgil a beer. Johnson said, “You’re a cruel man, Flowers. Taunting an ex-alkie like me.”

“It’s a test, which I fervently hope that you pass,” Virgil said. “Besides, everybody you know will be doing this. You gotta get used to it. Anyway, if I squeeze this Henry Hetfield’s nuts, will he talk?”

“Don’t know him that well, but from what I’ve seen, I’d say, probably,” Johnson said. “He’s one of those bureaucrats who thinks about everything in terms of deals and arrangements. With a couple murders in the mix, though, you’d have to be pretty convincing. He’d have to know that even if he makes a deal, he’s gonna spend a few years in jail, at best.”

“I can be convincing, if I have just a piece of evidence,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a little bit, but it’s all sort of hearsay — a dead reporter’s notes. I’ve got the name of a school bus driver who might talk. I’m afraid if I go to her too soon, she’ll let the cat out of the bag. And she might be worried about keeping her job. If I can get a piece of something to stick up Hetfield’s ass, and he points me at the right computer files, I can get a state auditor down here and hang all of them at once.”

“Gonna have to do something. Time to fish or cut bait,” Johnson said.

Virgil dreamed of Frankie and sex, and dogs in caves, and late at night, of a fire in Frankie’s barn. He tried to keep the barn from burning down, but when he ran for the hose, the hose was all tangled in knots; it took forever to undo the knots, and when he did, no water was running, and Frankie was screaming something about the circuit breakers for the pump, and he ran down to the basement but couldn’t find the breaker box in twenty minutes of running from one basement room to another; the rooms were endless. Virgil had a certain ability to edit his dreams, and he finally forced himself to find the circuit-breaker box, but when he did, there were about a thousand breakers, none of them marked. And all the time, the barn was burning, and Frankie was running buckets from a stock tank and screaming to him to start the pump, and he was failing… failing.

He woke then, and sleepily wondered for a few seconds exactly what tangled psychological meanings the dream could possibly have. Then he heard the sirens.

For a moment he thought he’d somehow slipped back into the dream, then realized that the sirens were real, but far away, and had probably caused the dream. At the last moment before tipping back over into a deep sleep, he thought that if it were another killing, that Johnson would be calling, because Johnson never in his life could resist a siren.

What seemed like a quarter-second later, but was probably a couple of hours, Johnson called.

Virgil fumbled the phone off the nightstand and asked, “What?”

“You know that idea about getting the state auditor down here to seize the school books?”

“Johnson…”

“Yeah, well, you can forget it,” Johnson said. “They had an untimely fire at the school district offices that apparently took out every computer in the place.”

“What!”

“I’m told the first firemen in the place backed right out, because the gasoline fumes were so thick. The fire was so hot the desks melted like a bunch of marshmallows.”

“The desks melted? You’ve seen them?” Virgil dropped his feet to the cool floorboards.

“I talked to Henry Hetfield. He knows me because I’m rounding up votes for the sports arena bond issue. Anyway, he said he suspected arson, kids who want to delay the beginning of the school year. He said the firemen say that it looks like a door was pried open.”

“I’m coming,” Virgil said.

Nothing like a fire to get you out of bed. Virgil had been to more than one of them, when he was a cop in St. Paul, and once when investigating a series of murders in western Minnesota. In the early morning, the stink of burning insulation and burned wet boards hangs all around the fire site, and people talk in hushed voices and firemen hustle around and red emergency lights flick off all the surrounding windows and car chrome.

Johnson was standing by himself with his hands in his jean-jacket pockets when Virgil arrived, and he walked over and said, “They wouldn’t let me in, but I talked to Greg Jones, he’s the assistant chief, he says there’s nothing left in the office except a big hole. Henry Hetfield said he had a scrapbook with pictures of his late wife, most of what he had of her, and it apparently burned up.”

“Let’s go look,” Virgil said. “Point me at the chief.”

Virgil talked to the assistant chief, and showed him his ID, and explained that the fire might be entangled with an investigation he was conducting. Jones led him into the building — he allowed Johnson to come along, when Virgil said Johnson was working as a consultant for him.

“The fire itself was mostly restricted to the district offices. There’s quite a bit of smoke damage down the second floor, into the high school. There’ll have to be a lot of cleanup.”

Johnson said, “Henry Hetfield said you suspect arson.”

“Yeah, unfortunately. The door down at the end of the first-floor hallway, at the back of the school, was forced with a crowbar, and so was the door into the offices. The inside of the door is badly burned, but the outside still shows splinters around the lock. Henry thinks it was some kids trying to delay the school year.”

“Then why did they set fire to the district office, instead of the school?” Virgil asked.

The chief shrugged: “Because they’re kids?”

“Some of the guys said they could smell gasoline,” Johnson said.

“The first guys in said so. Not so much anymore, everything’s wrapped in foam. But it was a fast-burning fire. The wall clock there is stopped at three fifty-two, and we were here a couple minutes after four — there’s an automatic alarm system — and we knocked it down in a hurry, but… it was fully engaged. It was a flash fire, and it was hot.”

The offices were a mess. Everything was charred, and soundproofing tiles were either burned or hung from the ceiling like dead black bats. Virgil could see fire-blacked wires and pipes in the ceiling, and water and foam had wrecked anything the fire hadn’t gotten to. A half-dozen computers were literally melted on the burned desks, as though somebody had poured acid on a bunch of oversized mushrooms.

“Nothing to do about this,” Virgil said. “I’m going to get the sheriff’s crime-scene guy up here, see if there are any prints on that door downstairs. See if you can tape it off or something, keep people away.”

“You think it might not be kids?”

“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “What do you think?”

The chief said, “We’ve had vandalism here a few times, and a small fire once, you know, over the years. Usually they come during the school year — a kid freaks out because he’s going to fail, or get kicked out of school, or whatever. Never had one in August.”

It was too early in the morning to start ringing doorbells, so Virgil said good-bye to Johnson, who said, “I hope they had good insurance. I hope they don’t try to take some of the stadium money to fix up the offices,” and went back to the cabin and fell into bed.

No dreams this time, and when Virgil woke up again, it was after nine o’clock. He cleaned up, ate a couple pieces of peanut butter toast, and dug out Conley’s notes. The school bus driver was named Jamie Nelson, but the notes didn’t say whether that was a man or a woman, because, Virgil thought, Conley would know that, and wouldn’t have to write it down.

Jamie Nelson was a woman. He found her at her tiny house, set well up the hill past the school; Virgil lived in a small house himself, but Nelson’s house couldn’t have enclosed more than a few hundred square feet: a living-room-sitting-room-kitchen, a small bedroom, a bath. Maybe some storage up under a pitched roof.

She came to the door carrying a cup of herbal tea. She was in her fifties, Virgil thought, and had once had red hair, now mostly gray, with a few vagrant strands of red threaded through it. She had blue eyes, a long straight nose, a million freckles, and lips as thin as a No. 2 pencil, straight and grim. When she opened the door, she said, “What now?”

Virgil held up his ID and said, “You talked to Clancy Conley about some ideas you had about the price of the school’s diesel. I’d like to talk to you about that.”

She said, “Nope. I’m not talking anymore to nobody.”

“I’m investigating a couple of murders, Miz Nelson, or I wouldn’t be bothering you.”

“Think about that, and you’ll know why I’m not talking to nobody,” she said. She began to ease the door shut. Through the diminishing crack, she said, “If you come back, you better bring a judge or court papers or something.”

“Miz…” But the door was shut.

Virgil called Johnson: “You know I don’t entirely trust Sheriff Purdy, and I don’t know the local county attorney at all. If I go to see him about compelling Nelson to talk, is there any chance I’ll get that done, without everybody in town knowing about it?”

“No, not really,” Johnson said. “But tell you what. Let me see what I can do.”

Virgil sat in his truck and ran over the possibilities. Eventually, he turned around and headed back downtown, to Viking Laughton’s storefront newspaper. Laughton was in, banging on a computer.

When Virgil came through the door, he turned and said, “Shit. I was hoping it was an advertiser.”

“Doing a story on the fire?”

Laughton frowned: “What fire?”

“The school’s district offices burned at the high school. I thought you’d be all over it.”

Laughton looked at his watch: “Too late for this week’s newspaper, anyway. I’ll catch it next week. How bad was it?”

“Not much left in the office,” Virgil said. “Somebody poured a lot of gasoline in it, and touched it off.”

“Goddamn kids,” Laughton said.

“Don’t think it was kids,” Virgil said. “I think it was somebody trying to cover up two murders. Which is why I’m here to talk to you. I need to talk to you confidentially, not as a reporter or editor or whatever. Can you keep your mouth shut?”

“For a while, anyway,” Laughton said, twisting around in his office chair. He pointed Virgil at another chair. “Murder? You mean Clancy? What’s going on?”

“You cover the school board, right? What I need to find is, the weakest person on the board,” Virgil said. “I suspect the whole bunch of them are running a huge embezzlement scheme. I’ve got some details, but I need somebody to talk to me. I thought you might have some ideas about who the weak sister might be. I need to squeeze him, or her. I’ve already talked to the attorney general’s office about an immunity deal, but I have to find somebody who’d cave.”

Laughton rubbed his chin. “I’ve known a lot of the school people most of my life.… I can’t really see the whole bunch of them being involved in a big embezzlement. Most of them aren’t smart enough, for one thing. For another thing, they’re mostly pretty honest folks. I mean, I could see some of the professionals, the hired people, dipping into the cash if they saw the chance, but even then, it wouldn’t be huge.”

“Well, it is huge, take my word for it,” Virgil said. “I think Conley was killed to cover it up, and then Zorn was killed to pull us away from the real reason Conley was shot.”

Laughton shook his head. “Jeez, Virgil, I hope you’ve got something substantial to back that up. It just doesn’t sound like us. Not in Trippton.”

Virgil, who’d taken the chair, now stood up. “I do have something substantial. My problem is, I don’t understand all of it. A bunch of numbers. But I’ll figure it out.”

“Let me know when you do,” Laughton said. “Sounds like a hell of a story… if there’s any truth to it.”

“You’ll be the first to know,” Virgil said.

He left, satisfied that the cat was now among the pigeons, if it hadn’t been earlier, and drove north to La Crescent, across the bridge to La Crosse, Wisconsin, and pulled into the Holiday Inn in time for lunch.

Inside, he found two large men eating pizza. Virgil nudged the marginally smaller one and said, “Move over, Shrake.”

Shrake’s partner, Jenkins, said, “This is really inconvenient. We’re shutting down one of the biggest cases in recent history, involving two thousand elderly people who were swindled of their life savings, and we get shifted down the river to fix that fuckin’ Flowers’s problems with a bunch of rednecks.”

“Got some nice golf courses in La Crosse,” Virgil said. Jenkins’s eyes shifted away, and Virgil asked, “You didn’t bring your clubs, by any chance?”

Shrake said, “Maybe.”

“Probably never get a chance to use them,” Jenkins said.

They both brightened up when Virgil told them what he wanted. “So basically, a body-guarding job,” Jenkins said. “Early in the morning, late in the afternoon.”

“Right.”

“Which, by pure mathematics,” Jenkins said, “would leave the midday wide open for other pursuits.”

“It would.”

“We can do that,” Jenkins said. “Probably have to buy some specialty clothing on the government dime, but we can do that, too. Have some wood-fired pizza.”

Virgil told them about the situation, and they agreed to meet him at Johnson’s cabin at five o’clock. When they finished the pizza, Virgil headed back down the highway to Trippton, and on the way, took a call from Johnson.

“Where you at?”

“Up north, probably twenty minutes out, heading that way,” Virgil said.

“Okay, twenty minutes from now, stop back and talk to Jamie Nelson again. I asked around, and one of the dog guys knows her. He called her up and vouched for you, and she says she’ll talk to you. But she’s scared. I got her phone number — call her and tell her when you get there. She wants to get you out of sight real quick.”

“I understand her being scared. Thank you, Johnson. I’ll be there in twenty.”

Virgil went into town on the backstreets, circling around to come up to Nelson’s house from the side. When he’d parked, he called, and she said, “I’ll be waiting at the door. Get in here quick. I can’t talk long, I got to get to work.”

Virgil did as he was told, crossing her side lawn, up the steps and inside, in less than half a minute. She shook her head and said, “I oughta have my goddamned head examined, after what happened to Clancy. I knew that had something to do with the schools. Probably that goddamned Kerns.”

“A couple of people have mentioned his name,” Virgil said, “He must be… out there.”

“He is. He’s gun crazy. He’d like shooting somebody. He likes roughing up the kids. Be surprised if he hadn’t already shot somebody somewhere, just to see what it felt like.”

She sat at her kitchen table, and Virgil took the second chair and crossed his legs, facing her across the checked oilcloth. “How’re they stealing the diesel money?”

“Ah, jeez. Listen, I’m not a hundred percent on this. But I’m ninety-five percent. What I do is, I take my bus out in the morning, and the fuel tank is good for three days, and I refill it. So I know exactly how much fuel I’m using, which is about twenty-eight gallons, give or take. What I did was—”

“Hold on,” Virgil said. “Where’d you get filled up?”

“At the school’s motor pool. They have two pumps there, and buy in bulk. What I did was, last winter I was in the office out there while Dick, he’s the supervisor, Dick Brown, was out. He was filling out the usage reports, and I saw that my bus was down for thirty-three gallons. Well, we have a bunch of drivers, you know, and there isn’t a lot to talk about, and we see each other filling up, and we know about how much diesel we use. So I looked at some more slips, and every one was over. My friend Cory uses about thirty gallons every three days, and his slip was down for thirty-five. He was bumping it up five gallons per bus. You take forty-four buses, that’s a good chunk of change.”

“You told Clancy about all of this.”

“What I did was, I waited until Dick was out again, and I xeroxed a bunch of the usage slips, and then I watched people filling up, and wrote the actual amount on the slips and gave them to him.”

“Wouldn’t the amounts change from day to day?”

“No. Oh, they might change a little from season to season, but not from day to day. That’s because it’s the same people, driving the same bus, exactly the same routes, every day. Never goes more than a gallon, one way or the other. Every one of the slips jacks up the usage.”

“How do you know Dick isn’t just taking the money?”

“Oh, I don’t doubt old Dicky gets paid to do it, but I don’t know by who. Because, see, he just runs the garage and makes out the slips. He never touches the money. There are only two ways Dick could get paid. The wholesaler delivers us short, and Dick overstates the use, and the wholesaler pays him. Or Dick overstates the use, but only orders from the wholesaler when the tank gets empty, and Dick collects from the school. Either way would work, but I think it’s from the school.”

“Did anybody ever ask about it?”

“Davey Page did — and that’s why I think it came out of the school, because Kerns—”

“The school’s hired gun…”

“Because Kerns came around and whispered in Davey’s ear, and Davey came to me that night and said, ‘We don’t talk about this anymore.’ He was scared. He said, ‘You want to keep your job, you stop snooping, and keep your mouth shut.’ I need the job. I don’t have this job, I don’t eat.”

“Your job is okay,” Virgil said. “Your job isn’t going anywhere.”

“That’s fine, but I just as soon you don’t tell anybody about me until they’re all in jail. Especially Kerns.”

“I’ll see to it,” Virgil said. “Now, tell me about these usage slips. What do they look like? Where does Dick keep them? And tell me about Dick.…”

She told him about Dick, and then she added, “Something else. I really, really shouldn’t tell you about this… but you seem like a good guy. I mean, for a policeman.” She put a twist on the word “seem,” a little extra skepticism.

“I try to be a good guy,” Virgil said, as earnestly as he could manage.

“The dog boys said you seemed okay. I’ll tell you this last thing, and you can see where it gets you. The school janitor’s name is Will Bacon. I suspect he lives at the school. I suspect he was probably there last night when the fire started.”

“What do you mean, he lives at the school? You mean, he lives at the school? Secretly?”

“That’s what I think. He’s supposed to come to work around two in the afternoon, and leave around ten o’clock at night,” she said. “But I’ve seen him there before the school opens — and I once thought I saw him there at midnight, when I got back from a basketball trip. I know where he used to live, but he doesn’t live there anymore. Usually, in a town this size, you know where everybody lives, everybody that you know. I don’t know anybody who knows where Will lives.”

“How would I find him, if he never goes out?”

“You’re the cop. Shouldn’t you be able to figure that out?”

Virgil drove to the high school, parked in the student lot, next to a fire-engine-red Toyota van. The van was fire-engine red because it belonged to the Trippton fire department, and the parking lot entrance to the school was standing open.

Virgil went inside, heard people talking, and followed the noise to the burned-out district offices. Henry Hetfield was there, talking to three people in civilian clothes, and two uniformed firemen, and a deputy sheriff that Virgil didn’t recognize. They all turned when Virgil walked in, and Hetfield said, “Agent Flowers…”

Virgil said, “Hello,” and, “Wanted to check to see if there’s any new information.”

“Pretty much what we thought this morning,” Hetfield said. He added, “People, this is Agent Virgil Flowers from the BCA. He’s investigating the murders of Clancy Conley and that Mr. Zorn, apparently because of some drug tie-in.… Agent Flowers, this is Bob Owens and Jennifer Barns and Jennifer Houser, three of our school board members.”

Virgil said, “Actually, I think Zorn was killed to create an apparent tie between him and Conley that didn’t really exist. After we busted those meth cookers up there, everybody in town knew we were looking at Zorn.”

“If Clancy wasn’t killed because of drugs, why… what happened to him?” one of the Jennifers asked.

“Don’t know yet, but I’m beginning to assemble some pieces,” Virgil said. “When I get enough, I’ll stick them together and call the attorney general’s office. I think this fire could be part of the puzzle.”

“This fire?” Hetfield’s hand went to his throat. “How could this fire be involved?”

“Part of what I’m working on,” Virgil said. “I see the school’s mostly empty — I’d like to walk around it for a while, get a sense of it.”

“I could show you around…” Hetfield began.

“No, that’s okay. I’ll just walk around on my own. You’ve got more important business here, I’m sure.”

He left them looking at each other, and wandered away, hands in his pockets, peering into classrooms and checking open lockers.

The high school was three stories high, built around an open square. Originally the square must have been designed as a park-like area for sitting or eating lunch. Now it was filled in with a one-story later addition that housed the district offices. The offices had a series of pyramid-shaped skylights of hazy glass. The fire had broken all of the skylights at the back of the addition.

Starting from the first floor, Virgil walked most of the way around the square, to get a sense of the building, then took a set of wide steps to the second floor and walked around that, and looked out some windows into the square, and down to the district offices. He could see a guy in yellow fireman’s gear through one of the broken skylights, but couldn’t tell what he was doing.

The second floor showed a lot of soot and smelled of smoke: somebody was going to make a lot of money on the cleanup.

At the next set of stairways, he could hear a hammer working on the third floor, so he went up, and found Will Bacon working in a smoke-stained hallway. He was using a hammer and chisel to knock broken glass and old hard putty out of a big window, one of a line of windows that looked out over the roof of the district offices. A half dozen of them were broken or cracked, apparently from the heat of the fire. Bacon was tall and too thin, but with the hard thinness of a man who worked with heavy tools, and had spent his life lifting and carrying. Virgil thought he was probably in his fifties, his close-cropped hair going gray.

He saw Virgil coming and asked, “You lost?”

“Not if you’re Will Bacon.”

“That’s me. Who are you?”

Virgil identified himself, and asked, “Were you here last night when the fire started?”

Bacon answered with a question, frowning as he did so. The frown was supposed to look bewildered or surprised, but it came out looking guilty. “Here? Why would I be here?”

“Because you live here?”

“You think I live here?”

“Mr. Bacon, I don’t care if you live here,” Virgil said. “And I won’t tell anyone, unless I absolutely have to. Did you see anybody here? Do you know anything about the fire?”

Bacon looked up and down the hall. “Where is everybody?”

“They’re all down in the offices.”

Bacon looked at Virgil for a moment, then said, “You better come along.”

Virgil nodded, and Bacon led the way halfway around the top square to a maintenance room stocked with custodial supplies. At the back of the room, half concealed behind a row of metal HVAC pipes, was a narrow door. Bacon kept his keys on a belt-mounted ring, and used one of them to open the door. Behind the door was a set of stairs.

“Careful. They’re steep.”

Virgil followed him up, his nose almost at the level of Bacon’s heels. At the top he found himself in a low attic-like storage room probably fifty yards long and thirty feet wide, with a low ceiling, of maybe six and a half feet. A few dozen cardboard cartons were stacked along the outside walls, some with notations: World History Texts, Hyram Algebra, and so on. The floor, walls, and boxes were covered with dust. A narrow strip of cheap carpet ran to the end of the room.

Bacon said, “Don’t step on the wooden part of the floor — it’s almost impossible to get that dust right. Stay on the rug.”

The rug ended at another pile of cardboard cartons that had “Band Uniforms, 1985” scribbled on them. In the same line, against the end wall, were boxes that said: “Football equipment, 1988,” and at the far end of the interior wall, five large moving boxes that said: “Algebra, 1962, 1968, 1974.” One of the boxes was broken, and old algebra books were spilling out.

Bacon picked up three of the band-uniform boxes, one at a time, set them aside to reveal another narrow door. He pushed it open, flicked on a light switch, and said, “Come on in.”

Behind the door was a small, tidy one-room apartment — an easy chair with a reading lamp, a television with a cable connection, and a line of bookcases that separated the sitting area from a tiny kitchen. The kitchen had a dining table that might serve two in a pinch, with a wooden chair. A compact refrigerator sat under a food-prep bench, which held a microwave oven and a toaster. A six-drawer bureau divided the kitchen from the sleeping area, which held a single bed, another lamp, a nightstand, and another wooden chair. A variety of jackets and overalls hung from hooks along the inside wall, along with a mop, broom, and dustpan.

One round decorative window looked out over the town.

“No plumbing. If you don’t rat me out, I think I can get some in next year,” Bacon said. He picked up the dining chair and offered it to Virgil, and took a seat himself in the easy chair. “So — the fire.”

Virgil sat down. “Yeah. The fire.”

Bacon sat, gathering his thoughts, and then said, “Okay. See, what happened is that in 2007, I had this little house, wasn’t worth much, but it was okay. I started this business, a side business, doing handyman work. I needed a truck, and I spent too much on it, and tools, and I spent too much on them. I got loans for it all, secured by the house. Then the economy went in the ditch, and nobody was hiring handymen, and I couldn’t make the payments. They said I could keep the house or the truck, and I needed the truck, so they took the house. Sonsofbitches.”

“Doesn’t sound right,” Virgil said.

“Wasn’t right. Did get some good tools out of it, though. Anyway, the school pay is… bad. They pay me twenty-two thousand, eight hundred and eighty dollars a year, but there just aren’t any other jobs around. Jobs I could do, anyway. Walmart pays even less, I’m too old to work the tows. I tried renting a room for a while, but that was a crappy way to live. Then I thought about this place. Put down the carpet, so I could walk back here without disturbing the dust, snuck in lumber for the walls, built the room, brought the pieces of furniture in one at a time, in the truck… and here I am.”

“Not a bad place,” Virgil said. “I could live here… if I had to.”

“Just fine, for me,” Bacon said, looking around the room. “Anyway, here’s what I do. I do my job, and more than my job. If something in the school needs fixing, I fix it. In return, I eat out of the cafeteria. Plenty of food, nobody notices one more mouth. There’s a janitor’s room in the basement with a shower, so I can shower and shave down there. Plus, I can put away money for my retirement — out of the twenty-two thousand, last year I put away more than nineteen, ’cause I really don’t make enough to pay any taxes. And I’ve been living here so long, I know every creak in the building, especially at night. I heard a creak last night. Four in the morning. I knew somebody was inside, but I was a little scared, you know? If it was somebody with a gun… I don’t have a gun.”

“Gotcha,” Virgil said.

“I snuck down there, being real careful. When I figured out that somebody was in the district offices, and the lights were still out, I let myself in a room down there, Mrs. Duncan’s social studies room, so I could duck out of sight if I had to. I was in there when I started to smell the gasoline — I don’t have a cell phone, but there’s a wired phone down in the basement, in my room down there, and I was going to sneak down there and call nine-one-one, when… This is strange…”

“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.

Virgil 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?”