Storm Front

Chapter 16

Virgil watched the evening news, and it was effective: Zahavi was now the most well-known young Israeli in America. Of course, if he was wrong about the kidnappers, she might wind up being the richest young Israeli in America, after the lawsuits.

He went to dinner at Applebee’s, where he got a large slab of ribs, french fries, and coleslaw, and had managed to smear a substantial amount of deep orange barbeque sauce around his mouth when Ma walked in with Bauer.

They saw him instantly. Ma walked over and asked, “That sauce around your lips. You storin’ that for later?”

Virgil wiped his face with a napkin and said to Bauer, “You asked her out, and took her to Applebee’s? On a first date?”

Ma didn’t let the man answer. Instead, she jumped in with a question. “Jones got away again?”

“Yeah. He’s like a ghost.”

“Well, something else for you to think about,” Ma said. “Try not to burn your brain out. You need everything you got.”

“Go eat your dinner,” Virgil said. “Looking at you two, it annoys me.”

Virgil thought about Ma’s comment anyway, as he worked through the remaining ribs. So, he just thought about it all. About Jones, about his daughter, about Ma, about who was hiding Jones and where he might be hiding the rock… about who had Ellen, and whether Ellen and Jones could be faking the kidnapping to throw him off… and that was a disquieting idea.

Then he thought, why would any normal, sane person hide Jones, knowing that he or she would be complicit in several felonies, including aggravated assault and now kidnapping? And that while Jones would never pay, because he’d be dead soon, his little helper could go to prison for quite some time.

Virgil came to a conclusion: nobody would do that. Not if they were sane.

But somebody obviously was.

It took him a while, and a hot fudge sundae, eventually he got around to another thought: unless the person helping him didn’t know he (or she) was actually doing that.

Hmm. He finished the ribs, then used all four of the chemical hand-cleaning cloths provided by Applebee’s, took out his phone, went to a world time clock, and found out that it was 4:47 a.m. in Israel. Annabelle Johnson had said that they got on the bus every morning at five o’clock, to go out to the dig — so she’d be up. And if not, well, this was more important than sleep.

He found his previous call to her in the cell phone registry and punched it up again. After involving several ground stations and a couple of satellites, the call rang the phone in Johnson’s backpack as she ate breakfast in a dormitory in northern Israel.

Johnson answered, sounding bright and cheerful. “Ken?”

“No, this is Virgil. Flowers. From the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

“Officer Flowers. Have you found Elijah?”

“No, no. Could you tell me what kind of car you drive?”

“Why?”

“Just curious.”

“Well, it’s a Volvo,” she said.

“Like a red Volvo station wagon?”

“Yes, exactly. Has something happened?”

They talked for another minute, and Johnson said that Elijah Jones certainly was not authorized to drive her car, or to sleep in her bed; but the keys to her car would have been easy to find, for anyone inside her house. They were in the top drawer of her bedroom dresser.

“Do you have your house key with you?” Virgil asked.

“Well, in my purse, somewhere.”

“Could you check and see if it’s still there?”

“Yes, of course.” He heard her rummaging around, and a moment later, she was back on the phone. “It’s not there. I can’t believe this.”

Virgil took down her address in the town of St. Peter, and she said that her next-door neighbors, the Jensens, had an emergency key to the house. Virgil gave her the phone number for the duty officer at the BCA in St. Paul, asked her to call and have him record her saying that it was all right for Virgil Flowers to enter her home. “Then have him call me and tell me he has it.”

“Okay. Do you want me to call the Jensens and tell them to give you the key?”

“Not right now,” Virgil said. “I’ll go there and call you from there.”

On the way out the door, he paused at Ma’s table, where she and Bauer were both eating shrimp platters, which Virgil had considered and rejected, feeling that Red Lobster would have given him a better quality seafood entrée. Ma looked up as Virgil approached and said, “What?” and Virgil bent over the booth and kissed her on the forehead.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“I thought about it. Like you said.”

Johnson lived in the northern part of St. Peter, on Inverness Lane, a pleasant enough neighborhood probably three minutes from where she worked at the college.

Virgil found the address and made a pass: no car was visible, nor were there any lights on. He made another pass. Nothing. He finally pulled into the driveway of Johnson’s next-door neighbor, where there were lights, and rang the doorbell.

A man came to the door, holding a magazine, looked out at Virgil, and opened the door. “Yes?”

Virgil identified himself. “Are you Mr. Jensen?”

“What’d I do?”

“You live next to Annabelle Johnson,” Virgil said. He said he was interested in activity at Johnson’s house; the coming and going of her car, the red Volvo station wagon.

Jensen’s wife had come up behind him, to listen to the conversation, and she said, “I saw the car come and go a couple of times yesterday, but I assumed it was Roger.”

“Roger?”

“Her son. He’s supposed to be keeping an eye on the place while she’s in Israel. He lives up in the Cities. Haven’t actually seen him, though.”

“She was on that dig with this Jones guy,” the man said. “You think he’s been using the car?”

Guy was no dummy, Virgil thought. He said, “We’re just checking possibilities. Johnson said you have the emergency key to the house. I’d like to call her in Israel — she’s waiting for me to call — so she can tell you to give it to me.”

“Cool,” said Jensen.

Virgil made the call, Johnson asked Jensen to give Virgil the key, and then Mrs. Jensen and Johnson talked for ten minutes on Virgil’s dime, about what was happening in the neighborhood, whether Roger had been around, about a faculty dispute over an LGBT issue, and whether Johnson’s lawn sprinklers had been on; and then Virgil got his phone back, and the key.

He told the Jensens to close the door and stay inside, at least for a few minutes.

He moved his truck well down the block, got a flashlight and, as an afterthought, his gun, and walked back to the house. The house was single-storied, a ranch style, and he could see narrow basement windows set into the foundation. He went in through the back — the locks were single-keyed. Using the flashlight, he first cleared the top floor, and checked the garage, which was empty.

One-third of the basement held the mechanicals for the house, along with the laundry. The other two-thirds had been converted into an office, a small theater area with a large TV and a music system, with some exercise equipment in another corner. Two windows looked down into the office area, and both had been blocked with pillows — so Jones could hole up and watch TV, Virgil thought.

He looked at the couch facing the TV. A white garbage bag lay on the floor beside the couch, and showed what may have been a bloodstain. Jones, he thought, was trying not to bleed on his friend’s couch.

Finished with the basement, he went back upstairs and looked at the rooms in detail. The bedcovers were badly rumpled, and when he pulled them back, he found two small patches of dried blood on the sheets below. He’d been careful in the basement, not so careful in the bedroom.

Nothing else. No stone, no clothes. The refrigerator was stocked with beer and sandwich meat, and a loaf of bread sat on the kitchen counter. When Virgil squeezed it, it felt like it might be a couple of days old.

Would Jones be back?

No way to tell. But Virgil wasn’t doing anything, anyway, and Johnson’s house seemed like the best bet to find him. He called the BCA duty officer, got him to look up the phone number for the Jensens next door, and called them.

“I’m going to lie down on the couch here. I may be here overnight. Just carry on like you usually would,” he said.

They said they would.

Virgil sat in the living room for a while, realized that he wouldn’t make it, sitting in the dark all night. He eventually went back to the basement, turned on a light long enough to browse Johnson’s stock of movies, selected Kick-Ass, loaded it, turned the sound down as low as he could and still hear it, and turned off the lights.

He watched the movie, and nothing happened upstairs.

Then he watched two-thirds of Watchmen, and something happened. The phone rang, and when he answered it, Mrs. Jensen identified herself. “We worried about you sitting over there in the dark. I wondered, if I snuck over to the back door, would you like a slice of cherry pie?”

“Well, yeah. I would.”

“Heated up?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ice cream?”

“That’d be great.”

“I’ll be over in five minutes. Back door.”

Virgil really did like most people, because most people were pretty likable.

The pie was excellent. So was the movie, but he couldn’t deal with a third one. At eleven o’clock, he raided the refrigerator for a beer, then curled up on the couch, placing his cell phone next to his ear.

He thought for a while about the whole ridiculous situation, and what he might do about it. Every cop in the south half of the state was looking for Ellen Case, but the only link to her was the phone in Elijah Jones’s car.

Virgil often did his best thinking in a half-slumber. As he was about to go to sleep, he started thinking about the fact that Yael-1, or Tal or whatever her name was, had been able to track Jones’s car, but they hadn’t been able to spot the tracker from the air. Not only had Yael-1 been able to track it, but she’d been able to track it over several miles, and several turns… so had they placed a bug on the car? But how’d they known which car to bug?

“Huh.” He woke up, picked up his cell phone, and called the duty officer again.

“When you lose your iPhone, can’t you call up somebody and have them track it for you? Like, on a map?”

“I believe so,” the duty officer said.

“This is what I need,” Virgil said. “I need you to get in touch with Apple or whoever. They have this service where you can track your stolen iPhone on an iPad, I think, or maybe even another phone. Find out if somebody called them and asked them to track an iPhone through southern Minnesota today.”

“I don’t know exactly how I’d do that,” the duty officer said.

“Well, figure it out. You’re a smart guy. Look it up on the Net. When you do get hold of them, ask what number was calling, and ask where that phone is now located.”

“I’ll give it a shot.”

“Don’t call me back before seven in the morning,” Virgil said. “I need the sleep.”

When the phone rang at six o’clock, he groaned and rolled over. The couch hadn’t been quite long enough, and he had a kink in the middle of his back, and his feet had gone to sleep, from being jammed between a seat pillow and the arm of the couch.

He picked up the phone and looked at the screen, which showed a 507 area code, an unfamiliar number, and “Rochester, MN.”

“Hello?”

“Viiirrrrgilll…”

She was blubbering incoherently, but it was Ellen Case. “I’m walking down this road toward this gas station, I’m in the ditch.”

Virgil sat up, his mind suddenly crystal clear: “Get to the gas station. Can you run? How far are you from the gas station? Is the station open?”

“The sign is on.”

“What kind of sign?” Virgil asked.

“It’s a Kwik Trip.”

“How far away are you?”

“I don’t know, not very far. I’m out in the country,” she said.

“Could you run?”

“No, I’m all… I’m all… I’m so tired…”

“Just stay with me, stay on the phone,” Virgil said. He was getting his boots on as he talked.

Virgil got her to the Kwik Trip, talked to the counterman, got the location, and then got the Rochester cops started.

When Ellen got back on the line, he said, “Just hang on, honey, every cop in the world is on the way.”

Mankato, Minnesota, is about eighty-five miles from Rochester, and driving it takes no less than an hour and a half under normal conditions. Virgil made it in a bit less than an hour from the time he hit the street. On the way, he called the Rochester cops back and told them to press Ellen on exactly how and when she was dropped and anything she might be able to give them on where her kidnappers might be.

And he said he would be right there.

He’d just crossed I-35 south of Owatonna when it occurred to him that he should let Davenport know that Ellen had been found. Davenport was a bear if you woke him before eight o’clock in the morning, but he recovered.

So Virgil called and Davenport said, “You better not be in that fuckin’ boat,” and Virgil said, “No, no. I just got a call from Ellen Case. They cut her loose in Rochester.”

“Aw, man. That’s terrific. I was scared to death you’d stepped on your dick with that TV thing,” Davenport said. “I was getting ready to tell people I didn’t even know you. Where are you? You’re going, of course.”

“Yeah. The sonic boom that just woke up Owatonna was me going past. I’ve got the Rochester cops talking to Ellen, trying to see what she might give them on the kidnappers.”

“You know what? I bet that Mossad chick is on her way to the East Coast, and I bet they’ve got a private plane to get them out of the country. They saw the TV show, freaked out, cut Case loose, and took off. You won’t see her ass again, not this side of Jerusalem.”

“You’re probably right,” Virgil said. “I hope I put a dent in her rep. Pisses me off.”

“Call me again when you’ve talked to Case.”

By the time Virgil got to Rochester, the cops had moved Ellen to the St. Mary’s emergency room. A cluster of six uniforms and two detectives were loitering in the waiting area, when he hustled inside. One of the detectives recognized him, said, “Virgil,” and Virgil said, “Donny,” and “Where is she?”

“She’s sitting on a bed. She says she’s okay, and the doc says she’s tired and probably could use a Xanax or something.”

“I need to talk to her. Did she give you anything?”

“She’s got no idea where she was,” Donny Hall said. “They had her in a gunnysack from the time they grabbed her until the time they turned her loose. One man, one woman, they were in a motel somewhere. C’mon this way.”

Ellen was lying on a hospital bed, her shoes off, but otherwise fully clothed. She opened her eyes when Virgil came in and sat up, tears leaking down her cheeks. “I just, I just…”

“Easy,” Virgil said. “Can you talk to me? I don’t want to upset you any more than you already are.”

“I can talk, I’m not hurt. But I’m so tired. I thought they’d kill me. I’m never going to forgive Dad. This is so far over the top.”

“Did you see the woman?”

“Only for a half-second, just from the side of my eye. They just, they just…”

She started to freak, and Virgil patted her leg. “Easy, easy.”

“I was in my garage. I was wondering if I had anything good to eat in the refrigerator, and I never saw them coming. They threw this bag over me. It smelled like telephone poles smell. Then they threw me on the floor and the woman, I think this was the woman, she hit me, she slapped me, and I couldn’t even scream. Then they started with the tape and then they threw me in the van, I’m sure it was a van….”

The first ride in the van, the night of the kidnapping, had been a long one, but that morning, a short one. She’d never had any trouble breathing, because even though she couldn’t see out of the sack, it was loosely woven. “Smelly, but I could breathe.”

When she had to use the bathroom, the kidnappers pulled the tape off at the waist and led her to the toilet. The woman stayed with her in the bathroom. To give her food or water, they’d untape the sack again and pass the food or bottles of water under the edge. The sack never came off her head. The sack itself, she said, was back in the ditch by the Kwik Trip.

Virgil walked her through the whole story, and at the end, was ninety-nine percent certain that he’d made the right call on Zahavi.

When Virgil pressed her to identify the woman as Yael-1, or Tal, she couldn’t — no names had ever been used — but she thought that yes, they may have been Israeli.

“Why?” Virgil asked.

“For breakfast… I had toast, cream cheese, and lots of vegetables and fruit. I went to Israel three times with Dad, and that’s what Israelis mostly eat for breakfast.”

There were a few details: a minivan, the first floor of a motel, but not a very good motel — the rooms had a stale odor about them, as if they permitted smoking, and were poorly cleaned. The rooms were not particularly soundproof, because she’d heard cars going by on gravel, and once, somebody calling to somebody else, but she hadn’t heard anyone in an adjacent room.

In the morning, when she was released, she tried to keep track of where she was being taken, and thought she’d been driven only fifteen minutes or so — the motel was not far away.

“You think the motel parking lot was gravel, rather than paved?”

She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. And when I think about it, I think we might have been in an end room.”

Virgil continued pulling details out, and Donny, the detective, said, “I can think of two places she might have been. There might be more, but I’d bet it’s one of those two.”

“Can you send some guys around?”

“You bet.”

He left, and Virgil patted Ellen on the leg and said, “I gotta ask you — can you talk to the media?”

“I… Do I have to?”

“We need to communicate with your father,” Virgil said. “There’s no better way. We’ve now had three people shot and a kidnapping. This is seriously ugly.”

Virgil pushed her on the subject of who’d taken her father out of the hospital, and why. She was adamant: she had nothing to do with it, and didn’t know who might have done it.

“I think, probably, it was Ma Nobles,” Virgil said. “To tell you the truth, Ellen, I suspected that you probably briefed her on the whole thing.”

“We did talk about the stone,” Ellen admitted. “I might’ve… She seems…”

“What?”

“She seemed interested that the sale price on the stone might be, you know, a couple million dollars.”

“So you talked about that?”

“Yes, we did.”

“You knew that Ma had a little bit of a questionable history?”

Ellen said, “Well… she seemed nice enough. I mean, you introduced her to me.”

Virgil winced: “I was trying to give her something legitimate to do.”

“Well… that really didn’t work out very well,” Ellen said. “Do you think she’d know where Dad is?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Your old man is pretty good at hiding out, for a preacher.”

Ellen didn’t want to stay at the hospital. When the doctor said she could go, Virgil drove her to the Rochester Law Enforcement Center to make a complete statement. While she was doing that, he drove over to the Downtown Hilton, talked to the manager and reserved a space for the press conference, called Davenport and told him what he was going to do, and then began calling TV stations.

He was at the Hilton when Hall, the detective, called and said they’d found the motel. “It’s a mom-’n’-pop called Foudray’s out where 54 crosses I-90. Jack Golden’s out there.”

“Are you done with Ellen?”

“Not quite. You need her?”

“Yeah, at the Hilton at eleven o’clock.”

“We’ll be done by then,” Donny said. “I’ll bring her over.”

Virgil drove to the motel, a single-story building with a fifty-yard strip of small rooms fronting on Highway 52. The parking lot was brown gravel, and Jack Golden was looking at the end room, and talking to a shaky, unshaven old man who wore a long-sleeved turquoise cowboy shirt and jeans. Golden and Virgil shook hands, and Golden introduced the old man as Bud Anderson.

“Just saw one man, tall fellow, had a beard and long hair,” Anderson said. “He looked kinda foreign, but he spoke English pretty good. Didn’t sound foreign.”

“There was a woman with him?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah, I saw a woman getting out of that van, one time. Skinny-looking. They had two rooms rented, the tall guy come in and asked for the two end rooms, because they needed some quiet, so, no skin off my butt. I put them down here.”

Golden said, “The guy wrote down a tag number when he checked in. No such number. Signed in as Richard Johnson. Paid cash. Never used the room phone.”

“They’re long gone,” Virgil said. “I don’t even know if it’s worth calling in the crime scene.”

“Might find some fibers from that sack or something,” Golden said. “But there’s a bottle of 409 in the bathroom that doesn’t belong to the motel. I suspect everything’s been wiped.”

“Of course it’s wiped,” Virgil said. “They’re spies. Of course they wiped it.”

Golden said, “Spies. I haven’t actually dealt with spies before.”

“They’re all around us,” Anderson said. “Spies.” Then he looked up at the already hazy sky: “Gonna be another hot one,” he said.