Deadline

22

They continued to push and pull on Burk, arguing among themselves, for her benefit, whether they should drop her in jail or take her home, and finally Virgil asked her, “Are you going to find D. Wayne Sharf again and tell him that we’ll be waiting for him Saturday?”

“No. I will not. Cross my heart.” She pulled the Chihuahua off to one side so she could cross her heart with her index finger.

“If you’re lying to us, we won’t be talking about jail — we’ll be talking about the women’s prison up in Shakopee. You stay away from him,” Virgil said. “If he calls, tell him you ran away in the woods and had to walk home. Or hitchhike. Yell at him a little.”

“You don’t have to encourage me,” she said. “D. Wayne left me in a burning house and never looked back.”

“Remember that, if he calls,” Virgil said.

CarryTown turned out to be a cluster of aging mobile homes built in no particular place south of Trippton, around a convenience store called the Cash ’n Carry. Burk pointed out her trailer and Shrake pulled up next to it, and Burk said, “Let me ask you all something, before you blame me for hanging out with D. Wayne.”

“Ask,” Virgil said.

“When you were eighteen years old, wearing your blue graduation robe, sitting in a folding chair with your funny hat, listening to some old guy telling you about Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, did you ever think you’d wind up being forty-eight years old and living in a shithole like this one?”

She got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked up to her concrete-block stoop, and Jenkins said, “Well, that sort of pisses on the evening’s festivities.”

Shrake backed the Crown Vic in a circle, and they drove back to Trippton. On the way, Virgil asked Shrake, “How bad do you feel about punkin’ Judy Burk? Bein’ the good cop?”

Shrake said, “Oh… you know. She was hanging out with a guy who sells crank to kids. She’s sort of sad on her own, but she knew what he was doing, and she helped him out. Maybe I’ll reincarnate as a termite, but I don’t feel that bad.”

As they rolled through town, Virgil called Gomez, who said, “Honest to God, do you ever call anyone during business hours? You didn’t find another meth mill, did you?”

“No. I just wanted to tell you that D. Wayne Sharf burned that house to the ground,” Virgil said. “You won’t have to come back for any further processing.”

“Great. I assume you grabbed him?”

“No, not exactly,” Virgil said. “But — I know where he’ll be on Saturday.”

“Grab him, then. We’ll come and take him off your hands,” Gomez said.

Jenkins and Shrake dropped Virgil at Johnson’s cabin, and went off to their motel, with plans to play golf in the morning, to make up for the evening’s overtime.

Virgil got a good night’s sleep, and the next morning took a call from Dave at the attorney general’s office. “We’ve been conferencing on the Buchanan County matter, and I’m going down to Winona this morning, with my assistant, to talk to Masilla. I’m calling you more as a courtesy than anything — happy to have you, but it’s not required.”

“I’ll hang down here,” Virgil said. “I got enough information from Masilla to go around and knock on some doors. I’ll stay in touch with what I get — you might want to plan to come down here tomorrow or the next day, depending on what breaks.”

“Call me when life gets serious,” the lawyer said, and hung up.

Virgil ate breakfast, blocking out his day on a yellow pad. When he was done, he called the attorney back: “I’m going to interview a guy name Russell Ross, who runs a wholesale diesel business, then I’m going to see the guy who runs the school’s motor pool. His name is Dick Brown. If I’m found floating facedown in the river, he’ll be the one to talk to about it.”

“If you’re found floating in the river, I’ll return to my comfortable middle-class home in St. Paul, barricade myself in the TV room, and let somebody else investigate. You take it easy down there.”

TriPoint Fuel was named after the river landmark used by the old steamboats, when Trippton had been a refueling stop. Four well-used tank trucks were parked in the dirt lot when Virgil arrived, and another was just leaving. The place looked like an environmental nightmare, Virgil thought: it was backed against the levee and the ground was soaked with oil drippings.

Rusty Ross — his name was on a slightly rusty plaque above the only office door in the building — looked like a golfer, wearing tan slacks and a red golf shirt, with a pencil pushed behind one ear. He wore aviator glasses of the kind that changed shades in sunlight, and that gave his brown eyes a vaguely overcast look.

“What can I do you for?” he asked Virgil, when Virgil stuck his head in the office.

Virgil said, “I’m an investigator for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, out of St. Paul. I was wondering if you’ve been kicking money back to Dick Brown, for buying the school’s fuel from you.”

Ross’s Adam’s apple bobbed once before he said, “Well… no.”

Virgil tried to stay cheerful: “I hope you’re telling the truth there, Mr. Ross, because this has become a rather serious matter, involving murder.”

Ross pointed at one of the two orange-plastic chairs that faced his desk, and Virgil nodded and took one.

“I have never kicked anything back to Dick Brown — aside from a bottle of Jim Beam I pass out to my customers at Christmas — because I don’t have to. As far as the schools are concerned, I’m the only game in town.”

“I don’t know much about your business,” Virgil confessed, “but I know that there are other fuel places around. Up in Winona, over in La Crosse…”

“And sayin’ that proves you don’t know anything about my business,” Ross said. “You know what the number one, two, and three costs in this business are?”

“No, I don’t,” Virgil said.

“It’s trucks, drivers, and fuel.” Ross leaned forward, over his desk, his face interested and intent. “The stuff we sell, the diesel, is the same price for every wholesaler. That’s why the business is so good, if you’ve already got it — and why nobody else can get into it. To compete with me, somebody would have to buy at least a million dollars’ worth of trucks, and then hire a bunch of drivers who are making thirty thousand a year, and then… they couldn’t sell the fuel for a penny a gallon more than I do. Or say a guy already runs a business up in Winona, and he wants to compete with me. He has to drive the diesel down here, and put that mileage and wear and tear on his trucks to do it, and pay the drivers for their time, and keep a salesman down here. That pushes the cost of every gallon he sells. He can’t underbid me, because we pay exactly the same amount for the wholesale diesel. So you see, I’m the only game in town. And that won’t change. That means that I don’t have to kickback to anyone — they take my diesel, or they find some other fuel. And I already supply the gas to the cut-rate stations in town.”

Virgil said, “That sounded like a prepared speech.”

“I think about it a lot. I once thought about buying a golf course, but a guy said, ‘Rusty, you don’t know shit about golf courses. Stick to what you know.’ He was right. But: I gotta say, I’ve heard you were sniffing around that whole school bus situation. I don’t want to know what’s going on there, because the schools are my biggest single customer, other than the three gas stations I service. I do suspect something’s going on. I’ve heard that their reported costs seemed to be a little out of line.”

“Really. You heard that?”

“A big-city guy like you probably doesn’t understand this—”

“I was born and raised in Marshall, and I live in Mankato.”

“Then maybe you do. In towns like this, you hear everything, sooner or later. Everybody in town knows you’ve been sniffing around the schools, and a lot of people are beginning to talk about why that might be,” Ross said. “A couple of those school board members have been known to spend more money than they really have. And everybody knows how much they have, since we all live in one big pile down here — the bankers, the lawyers, the loan company people, the lady who runs the Edward Jones franchise… everybody.”

Virgil wiggled once to get comfortable in his chair, and asked, “Let me give you a hypothetical. Hypothetically, if something is going on with the school buses, if somebody’s creaming off some money there… then Dick Brown must know about it.”

Ross leaned back in his office chair and put his heels up on his desk, looked up at the ceiling. “Well, I don’t know. The school could just put down one number for fuel costs, and pay me a different one. A different number. Nobody really compares them. I’ve never had a single person come here and ask how much the schools pay me for fuel. I’ve kinda wondered about that, too. Shouldn’t an auditor be coming by every few years?”

“Did Clancy Conley ever ask?”

“Nope. I knew the man, he used to try to sell me ads, but I told him the same thing I just told you: Why in the hell would I buy an ad, when everybody knows I’m the only guy who delivers fuel oil? Diesel? Anyway, you sayin’ that’s why he was killed, because of the fuel numbers?”

“Because of all the numbers,” Virgil said.

“How much are they stealing?” Ross asked.

“Don’t know yet. A lot. They’re buying houses in Tucson.”

Ross whistled: “You gotta expect a little leakage, but that’s more like a mountain stream. No taxes, either.”

Virgil asked, “You have records of all your deliveries and the amounts?”

“Going back six years. In case the IRS asks.”

“Hang on to them,” Virgil said. “Somebody’s gonna want to take a look.”

Virgil got up to leave, but as he was scuffing out the door, Ross said, “Something occurs to me…”

“Yeah?”

“Of course Dick would know. He knows how much I deliver, and how much the buses burn. And sitting where he does, he’s gotta know what the schools report on fuel prices. No matter how they do it, he’d know.”

Although Virgil didn’t necessarily have to believe what Ross said, he did — he’d been reasonably convinced by the no-option argument that Ross had made, and also by the fact that he had six years’ worth of records. It was likely that Ross gave away more than a few bottles of booze at Christmas, but it probably wouldn’t be much more… because he didn’t have to. He didn’t look like a guy who would pay a bill he didn’t have to pay.

Dick Brown was sitting at a greasy-looking desk in the school motor pool, working over some greasy-looking paper. He took one look at Virgil and said, “Ah, shit.”

“You knew I was coming,” Virgil said.

“I gotta talk to a lawyer. I haven’t done anything illegal, I just did what I was told,” Brown said.

“You shared in some embezzled money. I think any jury—”

“No, I didn’t,” Brown said. “Not the way you think. I never took a penny from any of those weasels.”

“Then why would you do it?”

“I gotta talk to a lawyer, but I never took a penny.”

Virgil looked at him with deep curiosity, working through it. Then, “Dick, what was your salary last year? You might as well tell me, there’s a public record.”

Brown shrugged. “Seventy thousand.”

Virgil nodded, and then laughed. “Seventy thousand. Not too many other seventy-thousand-dollar jobs in Trippton.”

“Not for grease monkeys,” Brown said. “But it’s all right there in the records, all legal and straight-up, voted on by the board. Paid taxes on every nickel of it, too.”

Virgil said, “Listen, Dick: if we can’t track the money back to you, then you’ve got a chance to stay out of prison. Not much of a chance, but some. Your chances would be a lot better if you, and your attorney if you have one, had a talk with our attorney — a prosecutor for the attorney general’s office. I could work out an appointment for you in Winona this afternoon. Nobody down here would have to know.”

They talked around it until Virgil got a phone call from the sheriff’s office: “You probably want to get over to Jennifer Houser’s house,” the dispatcher said. “Sheriff Purdy’s on his way there now.”

“She’s the school board member,” Virgil said.

“Is, or was,” the dispatcher said. “They think they found blood on her kitchen floor.”

Virgil got the address and then rang off and said to Brown, “If I were you, I’d get in your car and drive to Winona as fast as I possibly could, and try to get a deal. They found blood on the floor at Jennifer Houser’s house. If she’s dead, that’d be the fifth murder. You guys are about to go big-time on the nightly news.”

“Look, I got a salary—”

“Tell that to the grand jury,” Virgil said. “I’ve given you an option. Kidnap your lawyer, force him to drive to Winona.”

Virgil gave him Dave’s name and phone number, and took off for Houser’s place, leaving Brown standing in the garage with his wrench in his hand.

Jennifer Houser lived, or had lived, in a plain-vanilla fifties house with a tuck-under garage, three bedrooms — one had been converted to an office devoted to school board business — and no obvious expensive decoration or furniture that would indicate extra money. The best that could be said was that the house was nicely painted, and Houser’s best friend, Janet Serna, said that Houser had painted it herself.

“She did it every five years, like clockwork,” Serna told Virgil. “The landlord took it off the rent.”

“She doesn’t own it?”

“She was funny that way — she hardly owned anything. Even leased her car.”

Alewort, the sheriff’s crime-scene guy, was looking at blood on the tan kitchen tile. “It’s blood, all right,” he’d said, when Virgil showed up. “Can’t tell you if it’s human blood, and if it is, if it’s Jen’s blood. But it’s blood.”

Purdy said, “This is out of control. You gotta do something, Virgil.”

“I’m hurrying as fast as I can, Jeff,” Virgil said. “I think we’ll wrap things up in a day or so.”

Purdy said, “Hey — I’ll buy Kerns as the killer of Conley and Zorn and poor old Bacon, but who killed Kerns? And who killed Jen? I mean, maybe it isn’t a homicide, but I’ve got to believe that blood is hers.”

“Probably,” Virgil said. “Kinda weird, though. It looks like a footprint.”

“It does,” said Alewort. “I’ve seen a bloody footprint before, in a training film. They’re not uncommon, I’m told.”

“They’re really uncommon if there’s not a puddle of blood to track through,” Virgil said. “Look around — where’s the puddle?”

“Well, say he caught her in the bathroom, killed her there, cleaned up the blood with toilet paper, flushed it, but missed some…”

“How come there aren’t any tracks to the kitchen?” Virgil asked.

Alewort considered that for a few seconds then said, “All right, he whacks her in the kitchen, cleans up the blood, hauls her out to his car, doesn’t see the one track—”

“The track is pretty big,” Virgil said. To Serna: “You saw it as soon as you came in, right?”

“Oh, yeah, right away,” she said. “I mean… it’s pretty obvious.”

Serna said that Houser was supposed to come to her house the night before to play canasta. “She never missed. When she didn’t call, didn’t come by… I thought maybe there was some new emergency with the school board, and she was distracted. But we have coffee every morning, and when she didn’t come over… We both have each other’s keys, so I came over, and knocked on the door, and when she didn’t answer, I came in and saw the footprint and called the sheriff.”

The first cops had noticed that her car was gone, the garage was empty.

“Just like Kerns,” Purdy said, “transported in his own vehicle. I’ve got to get some guys looking down by the river, and out on the back roads, walking distance to town.”

“That’s an idea,” Virgil said, and Purdy went to get a search started.

Virgil sat Serna on a living room couch and asked about Houser: money, boyfriends, or girlfriends—“Well, she’s certainly not a lesbian, I would have noticed that, I think”—or anybody she might have been visiting.

Serna said not only did she not have any ideas about that, she’d talked to Houser the morning before, and Houser had been planning to come to the card game, and apparently planned to go about her usual routine.

Houser had married young and had two children right away, back in her twenties, Serna said. Her husband, Vernon, had fallen off a rented houseboat fifteen years earlier and drowned in the Mississippi. He’d left enough money behind to finish raising the children, and to send them to college: they were both now working in the Twin Cities. Vernon Houser’s insurance had not been enough to provide a decent lifestyle for Jennifer, and so she’d gone to work for a real-estate dealer, and had been good at it. “She liked being busy, and being in the public eye, and when an open seat came up on the school board, she ran for it, and she won. She was the public watchdog on spending issues.”

Houser got a small salary for serving on the school board, Serna said, “but very little, really, for the time she put in. Something like five hundred dollars a month.”

“Did she say anything to you about trouble at the schools? About being frightened of anybody?”

“No, nothing like that — although everybody knew that you were sniffing around.”

“That’s the second time today that somebody said I was sniffing,” Virgil said.

“Well, the idea that Jen would take anything from the schools… that’s simply ridiculous. If you’re sniffing, you’re sniffing up the wrong tree.”

Virgil left Serna sitting on a couch, and did a quick tour of the house, peering in closets, finding clothes, looking in drawers, finding socks and underwear, probing medicine cabinets, finding a high blood pressure prescription, partly used. A desk in the converted bedroom yielded a checkbook, showing a neatly entered balance of one thousand, six hundred and eighty-four dollars.

The hall leading from the short flight of stairs across the upper floor to the office was decorated with two dozen family photos; most prominent was a fleshy man wearing large plastic-rimmed glasses, and, Virgil thought, a bad brown toupee. Vernon? He thought so.

Back in the living room, Virgil asked Serna, “Was Miz Houser close to her children?”

“Oh… I guess. They didn’t really… visit back and forth much. Why?”

“I noticed that most of the family photos were older. Kids were small in all of the pictures.”

“Yeah, she wasn’t much for photography, I guess. Not sentimental that way, except for that little picture of her with her mom, when she was a toddler.”

“Where’s that?”

“Right there in the hallway. It’s the little black-and-white one,” Serna said.

“There aren’t any black-and-white ones,” Virgil said.

“Yes, it’s right there in the center, down from that awful picture of Vernon.”

“Show me,” Virgil said.

There was no photo of Jennifer Houser and her mother. Serna put her fingers to her mouth, puzzled: “Jeez. It’s always been right there. Forever. It was the centerpiece.”

Virgil relaxed.

There was no murder: Houser was running.

And she’d had to take just one little memento.