Virgil 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.”
Virgil 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.”
Moderately 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.”
Virgil 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.
So Johnson 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.”
At 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.
At 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.
He 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.”
At 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.”
They 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.
At 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.”
The auditorium was small — no more than a hundred or so seats arranged in eight curved rows, each row eight inches or so higher than the one in front of it.
Bacon had left a ladder in the auditorium earlier in the day. Together, they extended it up to a light rack along the ceiling. “Got tape?”
“Yeah.” Virgil threw the bag over his shoulder and climbed to the rack. There were lots of crossbars — the rack was made to hold lights and other equipment — and he turned the camera on, adjusted the volume to “8,” placed it on a crossbar, aimed it toward the stage, and checked the monitor. When he had it aimed right, he started taping, and when he was satisfied, turned the camera off and on with the remote. Everything worked.
“Go on down to the stage and say something,” Virgil said to Bacon.
Bacon went down to the stage, looked up, and said, “Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”
“Forrest Gump,” Virgil said.
“My favorite movie,” Bacon said. “Is that enough?”
Virgil plugged in the earphones, listened to the recording. Good and clear. He turned the camera off and backed down the ladder.
“We’re good,” he said. “Let me show you how the remote works. When you turn it on, you’ll see just a tiny green LED come on.…”
Virgil gave him a demonstration, and Bacon was sure he could handle it.
“Just be careful you don’t re-push it. Just push it once, and look for the light,” Virgil said. “We’ve got four hours of recording time, which should be plenty.”
Bacon nodded: “I’ll call you when everybody’s cleared out.”
“Do not take any chances,” Virgil said. “We’ve got a killer on our hands.”
Virgil helped him get the ladder down. He’d put it in a storage area behind the stage, he said. Then he frowned, and cocked his head, and Virgil asked, “What?”
“There’s somebody else in the school.… Can you feel that?”
Virgil couldn’t feel anything. “What?”
“It’s like a vibration… people make it when they walk…”
“I don’t feel anything.”
“Shhh…”
They listened for another minute, then Bacon said, “Gone now. Listen, there’s somebody around. I’m going to stash the ladder, make a little noise doing it. You go on out that hallway, and at the main hall, turn left instead of right. That’ll take you to the door that goes out to the baseball diamond. You’ll have to walk around the school to your right to get back to your car. You won’t be in the school so much that way.”
“You be careful,” Virgil said.
“You, too,” Bacon said.
Virgil was out of the school in a minute, stayed close to the outer wall as he walked around the building, beneath the windows that looked out over the playing fields. He saw nobody as he crossed the parking lot to his car, and drove away. He’d turned off his phone to go into the school, and when he turned it back on, he found a message from Johnson: “I got your dog posse. We’re ready to roll.”
Was that good? Virgil wasn’t sure.