Deadline

24

Near the end of every successful investigation in the history of the world, the suits show up to take the credit. Both Virgil and his boss, Lucas Davenport, were friendly with the governor, who’d helped find a new boat for Virgil, after his first boat had been blown up by a mad bomber. The governor, however, was planning to vacate the office, perhaps to make a run at the vice presidency.

So, one way or another, there’d be a new suit in town.

The current attorney general had already hinted that he was going to run for the governor’s office, and between now and then, would not be averse to favorable publicity that portrayed him as a protector of the people, a defender of freedom, but also a sincere, heartfelt, and honest spokesman for the larger and richer special interests.

As it happened, the Buchanan County school district presented a perfect chance to protect the public: it largely voted Republican, so, since the AG was a Democrat, a vigorous prosecution wouldn’t piss off anybody critical, and would generally show up the Republicans as the pack of thieving, money-gouging, scheming hyenas that all true-blue Americans knew them to be.

That was the general idea; the actual words would be repackaged into something much softer and much, much more hypocritical.

Which was why Dave, the assistant AG, slapped Virgil on the back before he slipped into the booth at Ma & Pa’s Kettle, then ordered a pitcher of Bloody Marys—“I can’t drink bourbon at breakfast”—and began the debriefing. When Virgil outlined what he had, a slender line appeared in Dave’s forehead. “What you’re telling me is, it’s gonna be easy to nail down, but at this very moment, it’s not quite nailed down.”

“That’s about right,” Virgil said. “I gotta emphasize, it will be. The whole pack of rats is coming apart. Two of them have run. I assume you got decent stuff from Masilla.”

“I did — but you’re telling me it’s the whole school board, and this Viking guy and Masilla have really only handed over the heads of the superintendent and his money guy. Even that will take a little further nailing, since all those records went up in smoke.”

“Not all of them,” Virgil said. He slid the folder of Clancy Conley’s photos across the table. Dave left the folder closed as the waitress delivered two plates of French toast with link sausage, and the pitcher of Bloody Marys for Dave, and Virgil’s Diet Coke. When she was gone, Dave opened the folder, as he sipped the first of his drinks, slowly thumbed through the photos, then said, “My, my.”

“I’ve got some supporting documents for that stuff. They were uncovered by the reporter who got murdered, and he put a bunch of notes in a flash drive file, explaining what it all was… and naming a suspect in his own murder.”

Virgil dug the flash drive out of his pocket and slid it across to Dave. “I’m gonna want a receipt for that, you know, chain of evidence and so on.”

“Who was the reporter’s suspect?” Dave asked.

“A guy named Randolph Kerns, who was murdered night before last.”

“Ain’t that a pisser,” Dave said.

“For Randy, anyway. He’s the guy who tried to shoot me up at the high school, and frankly, I wasn’t all that sad to see him go. I mean, if the bell’s gotta toll, might as well be for an asshole.”

“Who killed Randy?”

“You got the list — one of the school board members, one of the others,” Virgil said. “I’ve got my eye on the newspaper editor, there. He has a nice sociopathic edge on him.”

“Any possible way of getting the killer out in the open? Or do we just start busting people?”

“What I’d do, if I were you, is start taking the school board members aside,” Virgil said. “Be a jerk — I know you can do that. One of them will crack. You only need one, with Masilla already on your side, and those photos.”

“If we go to court, we like to have things pretty well wrapped up.”

“Dave, I’ve been doing this for quite a while,” Virgil said. “You don’t want them wrapped up, you want a goddamned gold-plated guarantee, because otherwise you’re afraid you’ll screw up your conviction stats. Well, by the time you get finished fucking with them all, it oughta be at least silver-plated. Dopey, Sneezy, and Grumpy could get a conviction.”

“Unfortunately, Dopey, Sneezy, and Grumpy aren’t licensed to practice law in Minnesota,” Dave said. “The boss is thinking of handling the prosecution himself.”

“Ah, Jesus, why do I even bother to arrest people?”

If the AG had been a lightbulb instead of a lawyer, he would have been about a twenty-watt.

“He’ll have good advisers,” Dave said. “Like me. But any other little bits and pieces you can find would be welcome.”

Virgil walked him through the records, pointing out the prices for fuel as shown in the fake books, and the discrepancies reported by the garage manager and the bus driver. “Dick, the garage guy, thinks he can walk away, because he got a legal salary, though the salary is way out of line. I told him he ought to call you, and come up and see you—”

“He didn’t.”

“Probably talking to his lawyer. But if you want to give him a little consideration, he’s another straw on the camel’s back.”

“Another log on the fire.”

“Another piss into the wind.”

Dave frowned at his second Bloody Mary and said, “This tastes kinda strange. Wonder what kind of vodka they use?”

Virgil was impatient: “Dave, you’re eating at Ma & Pa’s Kettle in Trippton. Pa probably made it himself, out of possum squeezin’s.”

In the end, Dave was satisfied that the investigation warranted a call for legal assistance. “I’ll have a couple more guys down here tomorrow, and we’ll go see the county attorney about it — courtesy call. You don’t have any reason to think that he might… mmm… have an interest? I mean, this has gone on under his nose for years.”

“I don’t have any reason to think that,” Virgil said.

“Okay,” Dave said. “We’re good. Now I go make a lot of phone calls, and tomorrow morning, rain, fire, and brimstone on the local Republican hyenas.”

“And I’ll go talk to Vike Laughton,” Virgil said. “As a sociopath, it’s possible that he’ll rat out all the others.”

“Don’t get your ass shot,” Dave said.

When Virgil showed up at the newspaper office, Laughton was working on a story about the murders of Bacon and Kerns; he had an old-fashioned telephone receiver pinned between his shoulder and his ear, held a finger up to Virgil, telling him to wait, and two minutes later when he hung up, he said, “You know the problem with cell phones? They won’t stay between your shoulder and your ear.”

“You put them on speakerphone,” Virgil said.

“Then, if it’s a confidential call, like that one, everybody who wandered in would hear what was said.”

“Well, it’s not my problem. When do you put the newspaper to sleep, or whatever you call it?”

“‘Put it to bed’ is the phrase, though in the case of the Republican-River, ‘put it to sleep’ is probably more accurate,” Laughton said. “Anyway — tomorrow. Finish around six in the evening, haul it over to the printing plant, pick up the papers in the morning, have them all out by early afternoon. Then start over.”

The advertising lady came in and said, “I got the last of it,” and went back to her desk, and Virgil looked at Laughton and said, “You have time for a walk up to the Dairy Queen?”

“Always got time for a chocolate dip,” Laughton said, heaving himself out of his chair.

The Dairy Queen was at the end of the block, and on the way down, Laughton wanted to know everything about the Kerns and Bacon murders, and was especially curious about Bacon’s apartment up in the high school. When Virgil finished telling him about it, Laughton shook his head, his jowls flapping, and said, “Damn. Wish he hadn’t been killed, that’d be a hell of a story. The AP would want that one.”

“The AP will want the Bacon-Kerns killings, won’t they?”

“Yeah, but people get murdered all the time. I mean, they just get popped off like… like popcorn. Pop, pop, pop. People don’t want to read it, unless it’s their next-door neighbor. But a guy living for years, secretly, the high school attic… people would read that.”

At the Dairy Queen they both got chocolate dip cones — Laughton was correct in his choice — and they sat on a bench outside and Laughton asked, “Was this a social visit?”

“Not entirely. I’ll tell you what, Vike, you’ve been covering the school board for years now, and you had a reporter who dug up some pretty amazing stuff on those guys. So you’re saying he didn’t tell you about it?”

Laughton bobbed his head. “That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know why. Maybe because he knew all the board members were my friends, and he just wanted to present me with a whole package. I can only tell you what I believe, Virgil — if there’s trouble with the school finances, the school board didn’t know anything about it. Neither did I. But I’m not dumb, and I’ve heard about the questions you’ve been asking, and about that camera you put up in the rafters at the meeting room. The auditorium. If there’s any substance to anything you’re chasing, the people who would have to be involved would be Henry Hetfield and Del Cray, the financial officer. And Kerns, I suspect, though I don’t know why they would have let him in on it.”

“What about Jennifer Houser? The sheriff thinks she might have been killed, but I don’t think so. I think she’s running, because she knows the shit is about to hit the fan.”

Laughton shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s a nice lady, but… who knows? Maybe she was in on it, maybe they needed a board member to tip them in case anybody on the board got curious about spending amounts, or something. You know, sometimes the board just throws everybody out… they can do that when they discuss personnel matters… and they talk privately. Maybe Henry and the others were worried about that, and brought Jen into it.”

“I’ve got to think about that. I’d like to tell you something off the record here… you could probably get some official word on it tomorrow, if you inquire around… off the record?”

Laughton nodded. “Sure. Unless I get it from another source.”

“The attorney general’s office is sending down a really hard-nosed hit team — prosecutors. They’re going to start taking the school board apart tomorrow, and then home in on the others. The feeling is, somebody’s going to crack.”

Laughton shook his head. “I’ll be amazed if any of them are involved. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, if you want. The board members are my friends. I’ll call them, one at a time, and see what they have to say — maybe somebody will tell me that they do know something. Or suspect something. Maybe we could work out some kind of arrangement where the board members tell you everything about Henry and Del and Kerns, instead of getting all frozen up. I mean, if they think you’re after them, they’re going to be talking to lawyers and you might not get anything at all.”

Virgil said, “That’s… a possibility. I could tell the AG’s main guy to talk to you first, see what you’ve found out.”

They both took a moment to lick around the sides of their cones, then Laughton said, “Go ahead and tell him. Tell him to give me a call. I’ll do what I can to help.”

“Wish that goddamned Kerns hadn’t been killed,” Virgil said. “I wish I knew the sequence of events when he killed Bacon. I talked to Bacon, on my phone, not ten minutes before he was murdered. And when I get there, he’d already disappeared — dead. And Kerns tries to shoot me. Which I find pretty goddamned interesting.”

“I wouldn’t find it so much interesting, as I would freakin’ horrifying. Somebody shooting at you? No thanks. I’ll stick to keyboards.”

Virgil said, “The question I’d like to ask him is, why? Why shoot at me? There was nobody else in the school. He’d already killed Bacon, he could have snuck out the back, nobody the wiser.”

“I don’t know. Sounds stupid,” Laughton said.

“He might not have been the sharpest knife in the dishwasher, Vike, but I believe he had a reason. That camera took two memory cards — you could either run them sequentially, to make a longer recording, or simultaneously, to make a duplicate. We had it set for a duplicate. I suspect that Kerns caught Bacon putting up the ladder to get the camera down, waited to see what he was doing, and then came in and challenged him. And Bacon knew Kerns was probably a killer, because I told him. So I think old Will Bacon pulled out either one or both of those cards, and hid them. Maybe up on top, in the rafters. I think that’s why he was beaten to death — Kerns was trying to find out where he put them. The crime-scene people will be done in there by the end of the day, so I can get in. I’m going in there tonight and I’m gonna crawl all over that room. Bacon would have left it somewhere I could find it. And I’m going to.”

“Well, good luck with that,” Laughton said. “Some of those memory cards are about the size of my dick.”

That made Virgil chuckle, and they finished the cones, and Laughton sighed and said, “Glad I decided to stick around my little river town, instead of going up to the Cities. Nothing like peace and quiet, and then four or five murders.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe we’ll know more tonight. Whatever, there’s gonna be a genuine North Dakota goat-fuck tomorrow, when the AG’s people hit town. You wouldn’t want to miss that.”