Deadline

8

Virgil was sitting on the screened porch at Johnson’s cabin just before dark when Johnson stopped by: “Me’n Clarice are going down to Friday’s, you wanna come along?”

“Thanks anyway, Johnson. I need to do some reading.”

“Clarice said you stopped by the office to look down her cleavage, and had some photographs of a spreadsheet. You want me to take a look?”

Johnson bore a slight resemblance to a bear, but had made a lot of money in a variety of businesses, and despite the jean jackets, tattoos, and boating, automobile, truck, airplane, and motorcycle accidents, was occasionally referred to as a “prominent businessman.”

“Might as well,” Virgil said. “It’s all a bunch of gobbledygook to me.”

He dug the pack of paper out of his briefcase and handed it over. Johnson carried it inside, to the dining table, put on his reading glasses, and started paging through it.

Virgil’s phone rang, and he looked at the screen: Sandy, his hacker.

“Why are you still at work?” he asked.

“I took the afternoon off to do some apartment shopping, if you must know. Anyway, I have some information on this Clancy Conley person, and also on Laughton.”

Virgil put a legal pad on his knee, took out a pen, and said, “Give it to me.”

“Conley was a drug addict, has five arrests, all as a user, never as a seller, always for amphetamine. The arrests were in Missouri, Iowa, two in Nebraska, and one in Minnesota. I’ll put the details in an e-mail. As far as income goes, he shows a little over eighteen thousand last year, most of it from a newspaper called the Republican-River, and three thousand dollars from Minnia Marketing, which is an Internet phone-sales operation. He worked there for four months.”

“Selling what?”

“As far as I can tell, almost everything. It appears that Minnia Marketing — the name comes from ‘Minn,’ as in Minnesota, and ‘Ia,’ as in Iowa — basically owns nothing except some telephones. What it does is advertise on the Internet for all kinds of things, from manufacturers where they’ve qualified for wholesale prices, and then when somebody orders from them, they contact the manufacturer and have the product drop-shipped to the buyer.”

“They’re a boiler room.”

“Yup. Not a very good one,” Sandy said. “They reported earnings last year of twenty-six thousand and change, after expenses and taxes.”

“What else?”

“Okay, this is kind of interesting. I talked to the executive editor at the Omaha World-Herald, who said that when Conley wasn’t high, he was a terrific police reporter, and showed signs of becoming a good investigator. Had very good instincts and big balls. But he couldn’t stay away from the drugs, and finally they had to fire him. I found it interesting that he was supposedly really good… which could bear on your case.”

“Yes, it could,” Virgil said, thinking of the photos. Through the porch window, he could see Johnson bent over the spreadsheets. “Send everything you’ve got by e-mail. This is all good. Now, what about Laughton?”

“Another interesting case,” she said. “Last year he reported income of thirty-one thousand and change. So maybe he got a sweetheart deal on the truck? I wouldn’t know. I do know his income tax returns don’t show either gains or losses from investments, which should mean that he doesn’t have any. What’s more interesting is this guy, who doesn’t make any money, showed a real-estate tax deduction for four thousand dollars for a house in Tucson, Arizona. I checked on a real-estate site, and he apparently bought it two years ago, and probably for cash, for three hundred and ninety-eight thousand dollars — I can’t find a mortgage document anywhere.”

“Send me all that. And, Sandy — you’re a genius.”

“I know. Unfortunately, a low-ranking, outstate investigator whose most often used first name is Fuckin’ is the only one who recognizes that.”

That fuckin’ Flowers took his notes back inside, where Johnson looked up and said, “Well, this is boring. Lots of these whatchamacallits. Numbers.”

“You see anything?”

“A few things,” Johnson said. “It looks like a purchase list from some big nonprofit organization, though I can’t tell you which. County government, maybe, although it seems too big for that.”

“How do you get nonprofit?”

“Because there’s an entry column for taxes, but whoever it is doesn’t allot money for taxes, which means it’s either public or nonprofit.”

“Could be the schools — schools are big.”

“Huh. You’re right. I never think of schools as being much… but they are, aren’t they? Not from here, though, not from Buchanan County. Maybe across the river, in Wisconsin or something. Can’t tell from this.”

“Where do you get that?”

“Clarice said she thought some of it might be diesel fuel, and I think she’s right — but the costs are too high. They’re paying close to retail. With an operation this big, and with no gas taxes, I mean, they should be paying fifty cents a gallon less than this shows.”

“Really.”

“Really.”

Virgil rubbed his nose. “If it was the local school district, and they were paying too much for gas, how would anybody know?”

Johnson said, “Well, they could be doing it two ways. They could be buying fuel from a dealer, paying too much, and getting a kickback. Fifty cents a gallon… I mean, holy buckets, Batman! Give me your pen.”

He scribbled on some paper for a moment, adding up numbers, and when he was done, said, “I had to make some guesses, here. We got six elementary schools in the county system, a middle school, and a high school, and they all use buses. I’d guess… maybe fifty buses. I’d guess maybe fifteen gallons a day per bus, for two trips, one morning, one afternoon… say two hundred days a year…”

“I don’t think it’s that many days—”

“Not too much less, though, plus they use the buses for extracurricular activities. Virgil, if they were somehow clipping money off the fuel, that’d be… maybe seventy thousand dollars a year.”

“If they were taking kickbacks, that means I’d have to find out who was selling diesel to them, and put that guy’s ass in a crack.”

“Who wouldn’t want to talk about it, ’cause he’d go to jail,” Johnson said.

“I could fix it so he wouldn’t go to jail, but everybody else would,” Virgil said. And after a few seconds, “You said there were two ways they could be doing it.”

“Sure. They just cook the books. They take a bid from the diesel dealer straight up, for, say, $2.80 a gallon, then they write down in the books that they paid $3.30. That way, there’s no kickback, and no outsider to know about it. You’d have to see their books to figure it out. You’d have to have an audit and so on — somebody to talk to the diesel dealer, get his records, and match them against the district’s.”

“Okay. Listen, Johnson, we could be on to something here,” Virgil said. “This could be Conley’s big story. I want you to put on your thinking pants and figure out other ways you could clip the district.”

“Don’t know it’s the district, for sure. Not yet, anyway,” Johnson said. “I’ll tell you what you could do, though… you got all these numbers. Get somebody to look at the school budget — it’s public, it’s probably online — and see if you can make any of the expenditures line up. They can’t be clipping everything.”

“I got somebody who can do that,” Virgil said.

And Johnson said, “I’ll think about it: but I’ll tell you, just from reading the newspaper, the big money wouldn’t be in clipping the diesel. It’d be figuring out a way to clip the teachers’ salaries and maybe the state’s pupil payments. Both of those gotta be in the millions of dollars a year. Suppose they had five ghost employees…”

“Bless me,” Virgil said. “If that’s the case, there’d have to be several people in on it.”

“Yes, there would. You know ol’ Buster Gedney? His wife’s on the school board.”

“Do tell. I talked to her, and she didn’t mention it,” Virgil said. He waved at his laptop. “According to my research, he has a fifty-thousand-dollar machine shop in his garage, which he apparently paid for by selling turkey fryers out the back door.”

“That’s a lot of turkey fryers,” Johnson said. “But these spreadsheets… I wonder why there’s no identification on them? They just start, on page 128, and they go on for a while, and then they end. But the end is not the end of the spreadsheet.”

“I suspect it’s because he had several batches of photos, and I only found the last batch,” Virgil said. “Maybe he could only spend a certain amount of time shooting. If that’s what happened, he’d go back home and unload the photos into his laptop. Which nobody can find.”

“I’d semi-buy that,” Johnson said. He added, “If this story was really that important to the guy, a kind of redemption, you’d think he’d make a backup of all his computer files. The story so far. You know, in case his hard drive croaked, or his laptop got stolen.”

“If he backed it up on a flash drive or a Time Capsule, it probably went with the computer,” Virgil said.

“Flash drives are so last year,” Johnson said. “I wonder what the chances are that he stuck them up in the Cloud?”

“Hmm. Maybe Sandy could find out for me,” Virgil said. “I knew there was some reason I hung out with you.”

“You mean, besides attracting women that you can make a run at?”

“Yeah. Besides that.”

A truck rolled into the yard, and they both looked out the window. “It’s Clarice,” Johnson said. “I called her and told her to meet me here.”

Clarice came in a moment later and said, “Goddamnit, Johnson, you been reading again, without your Chapstick.” She looked at Virgil, who was looking down her cleavage again. Clarice was on her way to Friday’s, and looked, Virgil thought… nice. “His lips get chapped when he reads too much.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Virgil said. “You look… nice.”

“Especially with her tits out to here,” Johnson said.

Clarice’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t have tits, if you’ll just excuse the shit out of me, Johnson. I have breasts.”

Johnson agreed that she did, indeed, and Virgil nodded in agreement, and she and Johnson went out the door. “Don’t let those pictures get out of sight,” Johnson said. “They are something.”

When they were gone, Virgil called Sandy back and asked her to start working on the Cloud concept. “Gonna need subpoenas and all that,” she said.

“I’ll leave that to all you large brains back at HQ,” Virgil said. “Let me know what happens.”

Virgil went back to his computer and read the e-mails that Sandy had sent earlier, the details on Conley and Laughton. When he was done, he got a Leinenkugel’s from the refrigerator, kicked back on the glider, and thought about it. Was it really possible that Conley had discovered a case of public corruption, and had been killed to cover it up? If so, how big would the conspiracy have to be? How many people would have had to know about the planned killing? Had it been one guy, panicked, who decided to solve the problem? Or had it been several people?

As soon as Johnson mentioned the possibility of a big public organization, Virgil had thought of Bill Don Fuller, who’d seen Conley getting into his car in the predawn darkness, right there by the high school.…

He was still thinking about it when Frankie called and spent a half hour keeping him up on the happenings around the farm, and her architectural salvage business. Her second-oldest boy had taken his girlfriend up the Minnesota River to an island where he knew there were lots of raspberries, and he and his girlfriend had picked four quarts, and in the process, had gotten two of the worst cases of poison ivy in the history of poison ivy.

“They had to go into the clinic to get special stuff. Tall Bear is bad enough, but poor old Tricia went back in the bushes to pee.…”

“Ah, God…”

“Yup. Won’t have to worry about Tall Bear knockin’ her up for a month or so. Anyway, the Bronsons are over cutting hay, be nice if you could be home when we’re doing this sometime. You missed all of last year and the first cut this year when you had to go out to Windom.”

“We weren’t seeing each other last year,” Virgil said. “And you know how much I love baling hay. I’d give anything to be there with you.”

“I’m beginning to suspect you’re not telling the whole truth about that.”

“Aw, Frankie…”

If Virgil were given a choice between following a hay wagon around a field, throwing bales, on a hot summer day, or dropping his testicles into a bear trap, he’d have to think about it. They were still talking when another call chirped in. Gomez.

“Gotta go, Frankie. Gomez is on the line. We could be moving on the meth—”

“You be careful! Take your gun!”

“Yep. Call you back.” He clicked off and answered Gomez’s call. “What’s up?”

“They’re cooking,” Gomez said. “We’re moving in on them. If you want to come along, get down by that bridge in the next fifteen minutes.”

“I’m coming. Wait for me.”

Virgil ran out to his truck, missing a porch step and nearly falling on his face. Night had settled in since he’d started talking with Johnson. On his way north, he called Frankie back and said, “Yeah, the feds are going in. I won’t be on the front line, though.”

“Call me back and tell me what happened. I won’t sleep until you call.”

“Could be late.”

“Call me.”

Kind of an odd feeling, he thought, having a woman who wanted to know where you were, and what you were doing, and wanted daily updates. Virgil had been married, very briefly, three times, and he couldn’t actually remember any of the other three worrying about where he was; he could remember wondering where the hell they were.

Another interesting thing about Frankie, Virgil thought, was that she had no problem with him going face-to-face with people who carried guns. Unlike some cops’ wives and girlfriends, she didn’t pay much attention to possible negative consequences. She herself liked excitement, and she liked guys who liked excitement, and she thought his job was exciting.

Which it was, at times. Knowing that his job wasn’t a burden on her lifted a burden off him; left him free to feel the rush.

When he got to the bridge on Highway NN, he was last in the line of five SUVs. He got a vest, gun, and camo jacket out of the back and hustled down to the bridge, where he found three DEA agents waiting for him. Gomez was not one of them. The three were dressed in black-and-tan night camo and were wearing vests and helmets with night-vision glasses, and had M16s dangling from their hands. They also had headsets with earbuds and microphones.

“Where’s Gomez?”

“He’s already up the hill,” said the shortest of the three. “We’ve got four guys spaced around the place already, in case we get runners. Four more are going in now, with Gomez and Jackson behind them. We’re the backstop. You got night-vision gear?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Gomez thought you might not. We don’t have a spare set, but I’ve got some glow tape. I’ll stick a couple inches on the back of my helmet — stay close and you shouldn’t bump into any trees. If there’s trouble, I’ll pull the tape off, and you get behind something solid, and wait. We’ve got an audio link for you, so you can hear what’s happening, and talk to us if you have to. There shouldn’t be too much trouble. We expect to be right on top of them before they can move. After we leave here, try not to talk unless you have to. Voices carry in the night.”

“I’ve got a Godzilla-rated flashlight in the truck,” Virgil said.

“You might want to get it. Just make sure you don’t accidentally turn it on.”

Virgil went back and got a 2800-lumen flashlight, of the kind that poachers used to jacklight deer; in fact, he’d gotten it from a game warden. He slung the carry bag over his shoulder and went back to the DEA guys. One of them gave Virgil an earbud and a microphone that attached around his neck, with a microphone that looked like a stick and pointed at his mouth. It was hand-activated by a button set at the base of his throat. When he’d figured it out, which took about eighteen seconds, they set off across the first field, and Virgil wondered, What if the assholes have a lookout up on that ridge? Of course, if they did, they’d have already started running.

Staying with the guy with the glow tape wasn’t a problem, and while there wasn’t much moon, there was enough to light up the overall landscape. The biggest problem was stepping into holes or onto bumps, and he stumbled a few times as they crossed the field.

The leader stopped at the far fence, held the top strands of barbed wire as Virgil climbed over it, and then they were in the trees and climbing. The climbing was actually easier than walking through the field, because it was slower, and he was only a couple feet behind the guy in front of him, and could sense what the other man was doing. The biggest sensory input was olfactory: he could smell the damp earth beneath the matted oak leaves, and the brush they were passing through, and thought of Tricia and the poison ivy.…

At the crest of the hill they turned down the game path to the notch in the bluff. A voice in his ear said, “I’m going to give you the rope. You’ve been down here once before, so you know — just use the rope to keep your balance. Don’t try to hang from it, or anything. Stick your hand out.”

Virgil did, and a nearly invisible shape put a rope in his hand. He turned and backed down through the notch in the bluff, feeling his way. At the bottom, a man’s hand clapped him on the back and whispered, “You’re good.”

Two minutes later a new voice, which might have been Gomez, spoke through the earbud. “We’re cocked. Everybody set? We go in five. Four. Three…”

At “Go!” a half-dozen lights exploded through the forest and the screaming started and then a calm Gomez said, “We’ve got two runners. Danny, one of them’s coming right at you. The other one’s coming right at Raleigh.”

Another new voice: “Raleigh here. He’s gone up the hill. You guys in the notch, spread out, I’m looking for him.”

A brilliant light down to their right swiveled toward them and burst through the trees like a flight of arrows. Virgil put a hand up to protect his eyes. Gomez said, “Mike, watch the guy by the door, he’s got his hand low, watch his hand, watch his hand…”

Somebody started screaming about hands, and Virgil, able to see again, began drifting down the hillside. The three DEA agents with him were moving forward, to his right, and a voice in his ear said, “Virgil, the trail’s right below you, twenty feet. Stay back and if I tell you, use that flash of yours to illuminate it. You got all that?”

“Five by five,” Virgil said. He pulled the flash out of its bag. It was made of plastic, but was heavy, with an oversized rechargeable battery down in the handle.

Somebody else said, quietly, “Here he comes,” and then somebody else said, “Shit, he’s turned down, I think he saw us—”

“No, no, no… He’s on the trail. He’s on the trail—”

“No, no, there are two of them, two of them, goddamnit…”

Virgil felt the trail underfoot, and now could see well down to his right; to his left he could make out the opening in the overhead above the path, a lighter streak in the dark woods, and somebody said, “Virgil, one of them’s coming at you. The other one’s going sideways down the hill. Stay low. If anybody uses a gun, I’m going to light him up.”

He didn’t mean with a flashlight; he meant with a machine gun.

Virgil crouched by the trail, making himself into a stump, and heard footfalls coming fast. Virgil said into the microphone, “Virgil here. Anybody running up the trail?”

“No, just the one guy. I’m trying to get in front of him, but I don’t think I’m gonna make it, I’m— Ah, shit!” The voice in his ear stopped but the same voice, shouting in the clear, “I fell, I’m down, I fell…”

The man running up the trail was close now. Virgil waited until he thought he could see motion against the background, then hit the runner in the face with all 2800 lumens. The man shouted something unintelligible, and he was right there, right on top of Virgil, about to go by, and Virgil stuck out a leg and the man tripped over it and went down, hard, grunted, tried to get back to his feet just as Virgil was trying to stand up, and their legs got tangled and they went down again, and the man hit Virgil in the shoulder with what felt like a gun — fuck that, it was a gun — and Virgil smashed him in the face with the end of the flashlight.

The man dropped and stopped moving, and Virgil pointed the flash at him. He was on his back with a wicked cut across his forehead, his eyes full of blood; but he was breathing, and Virgil didn’t see any brains leaking out.

A gun lay by his side, and Virgil used the toe of his boot to edge it off the trail. Somebody was screaming in the clear about somebody running down the hill, and Virgil turned the thermonuclear flash that way, the light smashing between the tree trunks. He picked up a thin figure, moving fast, and what might have been a hint of red hair, and then the man was gone.

Virgil pressed the button at his throat and said, “I got one down here, he was armed, another’s heading out toward the mouth of the valley. I think it might be Zorn. Watch for guns…”

One of the DEA agents ran into the lighted area of the trail and called, “Where?” and Virgil pointed with the flash, and the agent went crashing off through the brush, and a few seconds later, was followed by a second man.

The man with Virgil groaned and tried to sit up, but Virgil pushed him back down. Virgil said, “Lay back. You’re hurt. We need to get you to a doctor.”

“What happened?” the man asked. “Did I wreck the truck?”

“More like assault with battery,” Virgil said.

One of the DEA agents came up, looked at the man, and asked, “How bad?”

“Might have a concussion. I hit him with the flashlight. Gun’s right there by the side of the trail.”

“Okay. Let’s get some cuffs on him. We got an ambulance one minute out.”

“That was quick,” Virgil said.

“No, we had it waiting, just in case. It’s on its way up the valley now.”

When Virgil got down to the sheds, five men were sitting on the ground, hands cuffed behind them, looking like prisoners of war. “We lost one of them,” Gomez said. “We saw two runners, but there were three. Bricks and Mortar are down at Zorn’s place, his old lady says he’s up in the Cities. We said, ‘So what’s his cell phone number, we need to call him.’ She said he doesn’t have one. We said, ‘Everybody has a cell phone.’ She pulls out a wooden kitchen match, scratches it on the screen door, fires up a Camel, and says, ‘Fuck you.’”

“That’s a high-class hillbilly, right there,” Virgil said.

“Yes, it is. Anyway, we got the crew, we got the sheds, we got the makings. We’ll make a movie of it all, and package it up for the U.S. Attorney. He’ll find the weak sister, and get him to talk about Zorn. Good job all the way around.”

“What about the drone?”

“Ah, it broke.”

“It broke?”

“Yeah, it broke. Don’t mention it, okay? I mean, if anybody asks. We’ve got some bugs to work out.”

Virgil looked at the group of sitting men and asked, “You mind if I talk to the POWs?”

“They’ve all asked for attorneys, so you won’t get anything usable.”

“I don’t need it for a court. I just need some information.”

Gomez shrugged: “Go ahead.”

Virgil walked over to the prisoners, who were sitting in a shallow semicircle, all dressed in jeans and boots and work shirts, looking more like lumberjacks than dope manufacturers. He squatted down and said, “You all get attorneys, and you don’t have to answer any questions at all, but I’ve got one that doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

They all glanced at each other, then one of them said, “We’re not talking.”

Virgil: “You all look like country people to me, and some of you probably got dogs, and like dogs. Some asshole up this valley has been stealing dogs, including some pretty good hunting dogs. We know what they’re going to do with them — they’re going to sell them off to medical laboratories for experiments. Now, I know you wouldn’t want that to happen to your dogs.… So, you know anything at all about these stolen dogs? Where they might be? We know you don’t have them, but somebody up this valley does.”

After a few seconds one of the men said, “We didn’t have nothing to do with no dogs.”

“I’m not claiming that anybody did,” Virgil said. “You had other business up here. But I’m not DEA, I’m not a fed — I’m just trying to get these dogs back to their owners.”

“There’s some dogs on the other side of the valley, I don’t know where at,” one of the men said.

“Shut up, Eddy,” said another one of them. “You know we’re not supposed to say anything.”

“Fuck you, Dick,” Eddy said. “The man’s asking about dogs. Nothing to do with us.” He turned back to Virgil and said, “They sound like they’re close to the front end of the valley, high up on the other side.”

A third man volunteered, “Something weird about it, though. You won’t hear nothin’ at all, then you’ll hear a lot of dogs, all of a sudden, but the volume is down low, like they’re a long ways off. Then the volume gets turned up, and that goes on for a while, and then it gets turned down. The barking keeps going, but the volume gets turned down, until you can’t hear them at all. It’s like they’re on an amp.”

“That is a strange fuckin’ thing,” Eddy said. “I heard that myself. The barking just fades away, like when you’re listening to an AM radio out on the prairie, in your car, and the radio signal starts to fade out.”

“Huh. Lots of dogs?”

“Lot of them,” said the man called Dick, who’d told Eddy to shut up. “I wondered what the hell was going on over there.”

“Anybody know what a beagle sounds like?”

“They got beagles, I think,” Eddy said. “That’s a sorrowful sound, when an unhappy beagle gets going. Could be bassets, though.”

“Thanks, guys,” Virgil said. He patted Eddy on the shoulder as he stood up.

He walked back to Gomez, who said, “You got a very strange job, Virgil.”

The ambulance had shown up on the road below them, and the paramedics had carried a stretcher up the hill. They loaded up the man Virgil had hit, and then a van showed up down below and a couple of feds got out and looked up at them.

“Crime scene,” Gomez said. “The bureaucracy begins.”

Virgil hung around for a while, as the bureaucracy got going. Gomez asked, “You remember Matt Travers, the regional guy out of Washington?”

“I met him.”

“He said to tell you we’ve still got a job, if you want it.”

“Man, I appreciate it, but I like it here,” Virgil said.

“You could get a whole fuckin’ state if you came with us. Get some guys working for you… It’s kinda fun, if you like that kind of fun.”

“I’ll think about it… but I’m just being polite. You guys are the most interesting feds, no doubt about it, but like I said…”

“You like it here.”

“Yes, I do.”