Deadline

19

Every light in the school was on when they got back. Shrake called ahead to say that Virgil had survived, and the sheriff was waiting in the school doorway where Virgil had broken in.

“You sure Bacon’s in here?” he asked.

“I talked to him on the phone. He said he’d jam the door open for me, and go pull a surveillance camera out of the little auditorium. That was maybe eight, ten minutes before I got here. When I got here, the door was locked, the paper he was gonna jam it with was by the door, and he and the camera were gone.”

“Surveillance camera?”

“Yeah. The school board here has been stealing the school system blind — that’s just between you and me and Shrake and Jenkins, for the time being.”

The sheriff looked as though somebody had hit him between the eyes with a plank. “I know the board, I mean… How sure…?”

“I think their security guy is the one who shot Conley and Zorn — Zorn for no other reason than to pull me away from the schools. Conley had cracked the whole thing, and he was planning to publish it. I think he made the mistake of telling Vike Laughton about it.”

“Vike…” The sheriff turned away and stared sightlessly across the parking lot. “Hate to say it, but I can believe Kerns and Vike. I’m having trouble with all the Jennifers. You think the fire…?”

“The fire was set to destroy the district’s financial records. I can guarantee they’re not up in a Cloud, somewhere. They were melted. But Conley got copies of enough of them to hang them all. Now, Sheriff, you’re an okay guy, but this ring has feelers all over town. You’d do best not to mention this to anyone, not until I figure out how to pull them in. Kerns is out there with a rifle, and he did his best to kill me tonight, and we can’t find Bacon. He won’t hesitate to shoot a deputy, or a sheriff.”

“We gotta find that sucker.”

“Yes, we do. But first we’ve got to find Bacon. I keep hoping that he’s locked up somewhere.”

“We’re tearing the place apart.”

“Let me look.”

There were eight cops walking the school. A sergeant who seemed to know what he was doing had them run all the obvious places in a hurry, which had taken twenty minutes or so, he told Virgil.

Then they’d backtracked, and were doing the whole place inch by inch.

“The shooter knows the building,” Virgil said. “He could have stuck him someplace weird.”

With the deputies doing the search better than he could, Virgil took Jenkins, Shrake, and Alewort, the sheriff’s crime-scene guy, up to the attic. Jenkins and Shrake had to bend their necks to walk down to Bacon’s apartment. Virgil spotted the shooter’s blood for Alewort, who began doing his crime-scene routine, and Virgil led Shrake and Jenkins into the apartment.

“Holy shit,” Jenkins said. He was looking at the splintered walls. “You were in here? You’re living right, Virgil — brick walls on the outside, you should have been killed three times by ricochets.”

“Or splintered to death,” Jenkins said. He tipped his finger at the side of one of Bacon’s bookcases, which had three six-inch splinters embedded in the wood, like straws in a telephone pole after a tornado.

Virgil explained how he’d huddled down at the far end of the room, stretched on the floor with the book boxes on the other side. “He couldn’t get the angle on me,” Virgil said. “I got lucky.”

They left Alewort to do his work and went back to the auditorium, where Virgil climbed the ladder to make sure the camera was really gone, although he was sure that it was. When he got to the top, he saw that it was, indeed, gone; and then turned and looked down at the stage, where he saw five bumps arrayed across it, four small and one a bit taller and longer.

A phrase popped into his head: prompter box.

And he thought something he should have thought of sooner: in the small space of ten minutes, Kerns wouldn’t have had time to kill Bacon and carry him all over the school. He would have hidden him quickly, if, in fact, he’d killed him.

And if he knew every nook and cranny…

With a growing dread, he backed down the ladder in a hurry, and then hustled over to the stage, hopped up on it, walked over to the prompter box, and looked down into it. The opening in the box was only a foot high and three feet wide, big enough for perhaps two people. He looked down into it, but couldn’t see anything.

Shrake: “What you got?”

“How do you get down into this?”

Jenkins looked at the outside of the box, down below the stage level, facing the audience, and said, “Nothing on this side. Must go under the stage.”

They found a trapdoor on the left side of the stage, half-covered with a pile of ropes and canvas. “It’s been moved,” Virgil said. “Let’s pull it off.”

“Could be prints and DNA,” Shrake said.

“So don’t touch the pile, push it off with your shoes.”

They did that, and Shrake pulled up the handle set into the trapdoor, and then lifted the trapdoor on its hinges. A set of narrow stairs went to the area under the stage, a space perhaps five feet deep.

Will Bacon’s body was crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.

“Ah, shit!” Virgil went down the stairs, clumsily stepping over the body. “We need a light, get a light.”

Jenkins shouted at a deputy, and a minute later Jenkins dropped down the stairs with a Maglite.

Bacon was dead. His head looked like he’d been beaten with a baseball bat, or a fat pipe of some kind, his shiny broken teeth grinning up at them through a mass of pulped flesh, bone, and blood.

Virgil looked down at him, locked his hands on top of his head, and started rocking back and forth, unbelieving, and Jenkins was saying, Virgil-Virgil-Virgil, and then Jenkins said, “Shrake, get him out of here, he’s fucked up.”

Virgil was locked up for a while, sitting in a chair in the auditorium, remembering and replaying his meeting with Bacon, thinking that Bacon was a good guy making a tough way in the world, and that he’d been killed because Virgil hadn’t taken enough care. Because Virgil worked alone, he tended sometimes to lean on civilians; other cops had thought that was weird, but that was because they fundamentally didn’t trust civilians, it wasn’t because they’d get the civilians killed.

Virgil was somewhat aware of the arrival of a doctor, who went down the stairs and said what everybody already knew, that Bacon was dead. Alewort then kicked everybody out of the space around the trapdoor.

But Virgil didn’t pay much attention for a while, just sat and rocked back and forth, and then Jenkins came over and slapped him on the back and asked, “How you doin’, buddy?”

Virgil nodded, more of a body-humping than a real nod, and said, “I am kinda fucked up. I killed that guy, and he was a good guy. Jesus. I just—”

“We got shit to do, so pucker up,” Jenkins said. “The sheriff’s department has a deal with the medical examiner over in Rochester. We’re thinking that might be the way to go—”

“Whatever. We gotta find Kerns.”

“The whole sheriff’s department is looking for him. We’ve got the highway patrol looking for his truck. They been over to his house, but it’s dark. Don’t know if we have enough to get a warrant, since you never saw him.”

“I gotta think,” Virgil said. “I gotta go somewhere and think.”

“The cabin,” Jenkins said. “Shrake went over there with a couple of deputies. We thought that crazy as he is, he might have been making a last run at you, but there’s nobody there. We’re going to keep a couple of cops there overnight, just to make sure. And we’re putting a couple cars on Kerns’s place until we get a warrant figured out, and I’ve called back to St. Paul for a crime-scene crew. They can be here in three hours, but that’s about as good as they can do.”

When they were sure that the sheriff had everything handled, Virgil and Jenkins drove over to the cabin in Virgil’s truck. A cop car was sitting on the entrance road, Jenkins’s Crown Vic was parked beside the house, blocking the driveway, and Johnson’s travel vehicle, an enormous GMC Tahoe XL, was parked on the front lawn, between the water and the porch. Virgil parked behind the Crown Vic, and he and Jenkins walked around the collection of vehicles and up on the porch, where Shrake and Johnson were waiting.

“You’re better protected than the fuckin’ president,” Johnson said. He gestured at his truck and said, “We thought he might come up by boat and take a potshot from the water, so we’re blocking out the door with the truck.”

Virgil nodded and said, “Thanks,” and they all went inside and sat on a long couch and a couple of chairs and Shrake asked, “You okay?”

“Pretty unhappy,” Virgil said. “But I’m not gonna start chewing on the rug.”

“Good thing, too, when you think about what’s been on that rug,” Johnson said. “We’d like to know that you’re functioning again.”

“Yeah, I’m good.”

The side window lit up, with headlights bouncing down the rough road, and Johnson asked, “Who’re we expecting?”

“Don’t know,” Jenkins said.

The approaching car stopped, and a second later the door slammed, and Virgil said, “That sounds like Frankie’s truck door.”

Shrake and Jenkins both had weapons in their hands when Frankie came through the front door carrying a backpack and a well-used Remington pump shotgun. She looked at them and said, “I give up.”

Everybody had something to say, but Frankie ignored them and came to Virgil and said, “Sit down and let me look at your head.”

“Ah, my head’s okay,” Virgil said.

“Sit the fuck down, and let me look at your head. What’d they do, take a bullet out?”

“Splinter,” Virgil said. “Not too bad. Besides, I got a lot bigger problem.”

Virgil hadn’t had a chance since the shooting to tell everything that had happened in one coherent story. He did it now, starting with his talk with the bus driver, the connection with Will Bacon and the secret apartment, the delivery of the camera and microphone, and finally, the call from Bacon before he was killed.

They all thought about the story for a few minutes, then Frankie said, “I’m not a cop, but I’m probably the smartest person in the room, and I’ve got some ideas.”

“Let’s hear them,” Shrake said.

“If this killer man, if he knows he left blood behind, then he knows the jig’s up for him. I would expect that he’s either running, or he’s holed up somewhere with a lot of guns. Or maybe he makes a run at Virgil out of revenge, or something crazy, but you’ve got all of that covered. Everybody’s looking for him, and we’ve got guys out in the driveway with guns, and guns in here. Right?”

Virgil nodded. “That’s right.”

“So you can ignore all that — nothing more you can do there. The question is, what can you do?”

Everybody looked at Virgil, and finally he said, “Bust the rest of them. Okay. I need to make a phone call.”

He took his phone out, called directory assistance, got a number for Janice Anderson, the woman who’d given him the school budget, and punched it in. She answered on the third ring, sounding cranky. “Who is this?”

“Virgil Flowers. Something terrible happened at the school tonight. I’ve got to ask, were you at the meeting?”

“Just a minute, let me put the light on, I can’t talk in the dark,” she said. A few seconds later she said, “Yes, I was at the meeting. What happened?”

“After the meeting, somebody killed Will Bacon, the janitor. I need to tell you, you’ve got to keep your head down. Don’t tell anyone you talked to me, don’t even hint that there’s a connection.”

“I’ve kept my mouth shut,” she said.

“Good. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to go on a shopping trip up to the Twin Cities, maybe stay over for a couple of nights.”

“You really think that’s necessary?”

“It would be helpful — I wouldn’t have to worry about you. I think Randall Kerns is the killer, and he’s crazy. We’re looking for him, but he’s out in the wind somewhere. I’d be a lot happier if you were out of sight.”

“Okay. I haven’t been to the Cities for a while, I’ll go first thing in the morning.”

“That would be smart,” Virgil said. “Now, was the auditor, Masilla… was he at the meeting?”

“No. He’s hardly ever there.”

“But Hetfield was.”

“Oh, sure, he had to be, he’s the superintendent, he’s, you know… he runs things, and with the fire… they had their insurance agent there, and all that, figuring out what to do, and whether they’d have to delay the start of school and so on.”

“Okay. I’m going after those two, just like we talked about in your backyard. If you will take care—”

“I’ve got a gun in my nightstand, and I will leave for the Cities as soon as it gets light.”

“Good night, Janice.”

“Good night, Virgil. You take care, too.”

Virgil hung up, and looked at the others: “Here’s the plan: Jenkins, Shrake, and I are going up to Winona tomorrow, and we’re going to scare the living shit out of a guy.”

“I like that plan,” Jenkins said. He interlaced his fingers out in front of himself, and cracked all his knuckles.

Virgil’s head was beginning to hurt again, and they all went off to their various beds, leaving Virgil and Frankie alone in the cabin. Frankie said Virgil was too injured and tired for sex, but that a little bodily warmth never hurt anyone, so they wound up huddled together on an old-fashioned double bed, which was almost large enough for them, Frankie being a small woman.

They’d agreed to meet Jenkins and Shrake at nine-thirty at Ma and Pa’s Kettle for pancakes; they’d gone to bed late, and there was little point in killing themselves by getting up too early. Winona was an hour or so away, straight up the river, so if they left a little after ten, they’d catch Fred Masilla, of Masilla, Oder, Decker and Klandorst, Certified Public Accountants, Auditors and Consultants, shortly before lunch.

If he was available.

Virgil was awakened at eight-thirty by an unexpected stimulus, and he groaned and said, “I thought I was too injured for sex,” and Frankie said, “I wouldn’t want to give you a pounding, but this is okay.”

Virgil agreed that it was okay, and she went back to what she was doing, and after a minute he picked up his cell phone and called Fred Masilla’s office, and when a secretary asked, “Who shall I say is calling?” he hung up.

Frankie asked from under the sheet, “He there?”

“Yup.”

“Don’t think this should take much longer.”

“Nope.”

But then it did, because they wound up in the shower, and he wrestled her back to the bed for Dr. Flowers’s Female Cure, and then they had to get back in the shower again, and they were still damp when they got to the Kettle, running late.

Jenkins and Shrake were in a booth when they arrived, and Shrake patted the seat next to himself for Frankie, and said to Virgil, “You don’t look all that injured anymore.”

“I’ll tell you what I am,” Virgil said, deflecting the insinuation and picking up a menu, “I’m as angry as I’ve ever been in my life. I never in my life really wanted to kill anyone. That has changed. If I had the money, I’d put a bounty on Kerns.”

“Then you should stay away from him, wherever he pops up,” Jenkins said. “Leave it to the unbiased professionals.”

Shrake said, “Kerns is safe as long as Flowers is carrying a pistol.”

Virgil: “Fuck you. No wait: fuck you both.”

Shrake said, “No sign of Kerns, anywhere. Crime Scene is here. They’re working the school. You gotta go over there, pretty quick.”

Jenkins and Shrake gave him a rundown of everything that had happened overnight, and when they finished eating, Virgil told Frankie to stay away from the cabin, because Kerns could show up there. She said, “I’m gonna stay away from Trippton — I got hay to put up, and small children to oversee. Besides, I been cured, so I’m going home.”

She’d drive Virgil’s truck back to the cabin and leave it there, and take her own truck home. Virgil would ride with Jenkins and Shrake until he could get back to the cabin.

Virgil kissed Frankie good-bye in the parking lot, and then he, Jenkins, and Shrake drove over to the high school. The state crime-scene truck was parked at the back door closest to the auditorium, along with a couple of sheriff’s cars.

Inside, the crime-scene crew, Beatrice Sawyer and Don Baldwin, were working around the pit where Bacon’s body had been found.

“We’re getting stuff, but we won’t know what it is until we get to a lab,” Sawyer said. She was a middle-aged woman who carried a few extra pounds, with carefully coiffed hair that changed color weekly.

“Let me show you the guy’s blood,” Virgil said.

Sawyer had already been up to Bacon’s secret apartment, but had not begun processing it, waiting for Virgil to show up and tell her what had happened. He pointed out the brass from the shooter’s gun, and his own brass, and his blood, and the shooter’s. The shooter’s had already been sampled by Alewort, but he’d carefully left enough for a second sample.

The blood made Sawyer happy: “With your description, we can nail down precisely what happened, all the technical details, right down to who did the shooting and when. Take a little time, but we can do it. We need to get into Kerns’s house, get some samples off his bed, but there seems to be some problem with that.”

“I’ll talk to the sheriff.”

Virgil talked to Purdy, who said he was working with a judge on the county court, but the judge was reluctant to issue a warrant. “I did my tap dance, and he says he’ll give us a warrant, as soon as we can, quote, Give me one single piece of evidence that he was involved.”

“We’ll get it — I could get it this afternoon,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a guy I can squeeze, I think. If I get it, I’ll call you.”

With the crime-scene crew occupied, Virgil, Shrake, and Jenkins dropped Jenkins’s Crown Vic at the cabin and headed north on Highway 26 to Winona.

Masilla, oder occupied a restored four-story redbrick warehouse-style building on the corner of Walnut and E. Third, between the Merchants bank on one side, and a car repair place across the street; inside it was glass, exposed wooden beams, and hanging stairways. The interior of the building was blocked by thick glass doors; two receptionists sat at a curving Plexiglas desk out front. Virgil, dressed in jeans, a black sport coat, cowboy boots, and a new pumpkin-colored T-shirt from the band Pup, with a pale white bandage on top of his head, led the way in; Jenkins and Shrake, both in overly expensive gray suits with silvery-gray neckties and sunglasses, moved in at his elbows.

Virgil said to the receptionists, “We’re here to see Fred Masilla.” He dropped open his BCA identification. “We’re with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

In the silence that followed, Shrake leaned toward them and said, “Apprehension.”

One of the receptionists said, “Let me see if Mr. Masilla is in.”

“Oh, he’s in,” Shrake said.

The receptionist made a call, then hung up and said, “Somebody will come down to get you.”

A painting hung from the wall on the visitor’s side of the reception desk, an impressionistic oil of a dozen or so colorful river barges parked in an upriver pond, surrounded by red and yellow autumn foliage. Shrake put his nose three inches from it, studied it, then turned to Jenkins and asked, “Where do they get this shit?”

“Well, you know, impressionism has become a technique that you learn about in magazines, rather than an exploration of light,” Jenkins said. “Slap a little pretty paint around a canvas, sell that sucker. I’d call this late Monet. Very late.”

“Yeah. So late he’s dead and buried,” Shrake said.

One of the receptionists, a thin woman with short black hair and tight eyeglasses, said to Virgil, “I really like Pup.”

The other woman, a carefully coiffed blonde with daylight pearls, said, “They somewhat rock, but they’re a little too… out there… for me.”

Virgil didn’t know what to say, but was saved when an elevator dinged, a door opened, and a woman stepped out and asked, “You’re BCA officials?”

Virgil showed her his ID, and they all stepped inside the elevator. When the door closed, Shrake said to Virgil, “You radical rocker, you.”

Fred Masilla worked in a corner office that was veneered in walnut on two sides, and had floor-to-ceiling windows on the other two, the windows carefully shaded by razor-thin venetian blinds. His large walnut veneer desk was covered with a sheet of glass, on which there was a neat stack of papers and a ledger book, which he closed when they walked in. The secretary said, “Mr. Flowers and his associates.”

Masilla was a tall, thin man, with a passing resemblance to the Grant Wood character in the American Gothic painting: old for his age, with a hound-dog face and thin sandy hair, cut short, and steel-rimmed eyeglasses. He was sunburned from the nose down, a weekend boater’s burn. He said, “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

Virgil could see fear in his eyes.

“We need to talk to you about your audits of the Buchanan County school system books.”

The secretary left on clacking sandals, pulling the door closed behind her.

Virgil said, “We believe that you have been falsifying your audits of the Buchanan County school system finances. We think that you don’t know the extent to which your coconspirators have gone off the rails, because you don’t go to their after-meetings, when they make their plans. We want you to tell us what they’ve done. What you’ve done.”

Masilla sat down suddenly, took off his glasses, and said, “Ah, no.”

Virgil didn’t say anything. He was still standing, but Jenkins and Shrake took side chairs and sat, and so Virgil moved to the chair directly in front of Masilla’s desk, and sat.

Masilla finally said, “I should have an attorney.”

“That’s your absolute right,” Virgil said. He turned and looked over his shoulder and said, “Shrake, you wanna recite the chapter and verse?”

Shrake recited the Miranda warning, and when he’d finished, Virgil asked, “Did you understand that?”

Masilla swallowed and said, “Yes. And I want one.”

Virgil said, “So I won’t ask any more questions, but I’m going to make a speech, that you can repeat when you call your lawyer. And you better get one quick, because I’m also going to make you an offer, but the offer is only going to be open for a short time. Like, two hours. Do you understand?”

A weak “Yes.”

Virgil told him about the three murders, and all the blood drained out of Masilla’s face. “How I… I don’t know anything about violence.”

“Well, your coconspirators do. If you’re convicted along with them, you’re going to go to prison… well, for you, forever. This kind of murder is going to be thirty years, no questions asked,” Virgil said. “What you need to do, and right quick, is come to an agreement to provide evidence in return for leniency and reduced charges.”

“But I didn’t… I… I better call my attorney.”

“You call. We’ll come back”—Virgil looked at his cell phone clock—“in an hour.”

“That’s not enough time—”

“Fine. Make it ninety minutes. But if we can’t reach an agreement, Mr. Masilla… you’re toast.”

Jenkins and Shrake stood up, and Virgil nodded at Masilla: “Ninety minutes.”

The secretary saw them to the elevator, but didn’t ride down with them, and inside, Jenkins said, “That worked.”

Virgil, “You think?”

Shrake said, “I got a hundred dollars that says it did. But, come to think of it, if I were you, I’d call up our own attorneys and make sure they’ll support a deal. I mean, you’re sort of out here on your own.”

“That’s called self-reliance,” Virgil said.

“That’s called having your head up your butt,” Jenkins said.

Outside on the sidewalk, they were at loose ends, and Virgil said, “Let’s go look around.”

“Maybe find a gun store, or something,” Shrake suggested.

Jenkins said, “I saw a sign for a museum.…”

They were crossing the street toward the auto repair shop, and Virgil saw a man looking up past their heads. He turned and looked, and on the fourth story of the Masilla, Oder building, Fred Masilla had lifted his venetian blinds and opened one of his tall windows. He was standing there, looking out, almost pensively, and Virgil blurted, “Oh, boy, look at this.”

Jenkins and Shrake turned and looked up, and Masilla looked down at them. Virgil thought, Fifty feet, sixty feet? Really wouldn’t make any difference if he jumped.

Shrake was walking back toward the corner and bellowed: “Fred! Hey, Fred! Shut the window! Shut the fuckin’ window!”

Masilla looked down at them for another beat, then seemed to sigh, nodded, and shut the window. A moment later, the blinds came down.

Jenkins said, “Good going,” and the partners bumped knuckles.

Shrake asked Virgil, “You gonna put me in for a citation? I saved that guy’s life.”

“Quiet,” Virgil said. “I’m listening.”

“For what?”

“The gunshot.”

They all looked up at the window, but Masilla never came back.