Storm Front

Chapter 21

Virgil got up the next morning with quite a few thoughts. The first was, if Tal Zahavi was with Bauer, he could bust her and take her up to the Ramsey County Jail in St. Paul and let Davenport worry about it.

After a fast cleanup, he was out in his truck, where he dug out the tracker, found the signal from Bauer’s Range Rover, which was parked in a residential neighborhood on the west side of town. Virgil drove over… and couldn’t find the Range Rover.

Eventually, with a little fast triangulation, he determined that the Range Rover was parked in exactly the same residential driveway occupied by an orange Mini Cooper convertible. He stared at it for a moment, wishing it away, then parked, walked up to the house where the Mini was parked, and rang the doorbell. A moment later, a tall bony fortyish woman wearing a pince-nez on her tall bony nose came to the door, carrying an open New York Times and a coffee cup, peered at him and asked, “What?” as though he were peddling cable-TV connections.

“I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” He held up his ID so she could inspect it through the screen door. “Is this your Mini?”

“Yes, is there a problem?”

“I was tracking a man using an electronic tracker, and this morning it led me to your car… I think. I need to look at your car to see if he found the tracker on his, and moved it to yours.”

“When would he have done that?” she asked, interested now.

“I don’t know. Sometime last night, probably.”

“Around nine o’clock at the Apache Mall?”

“Did you notice something there?” Virgil asked.

“When I came out from shopping, there was a big white SUV of some sort parked next to me,” she said. “The man said he was looking at his tire, he said it felt soft, but I had the impression he’d done something to my car. But he didn’t try to stop me from driving away, or anything. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it.”

“Driver’s side, or passenger side?”

“Passenger side — right by the door.”

Virgil went out to the Mini and found the tracker in ten seconds, taped to the Mini’s frame.

“That goddamned Zahavi,” he said. He was lying on his back in the driveway, looking at the tracking unit, and thinking that a spy would check.

“Fooled you, huh?” the woman said. She seemed amused.

“Fooled me, fooled himself,” Virgil said. “It’s a regular fools’ paradise around here.”

The woman said, “If ye should lead her into a fool’s paradise, as they say, it were a very gross kind of behavior.”

Virgil got to his feet and said, “Really? Shakespeare?”

“Romeo and Juliet,” the woman said. “I’m surprised you recognized it at all.”

“Not that many people say, ‘it were,’” Virgil said. He dusted off the seat of his pants and added, “And I can tell you, just between us, there’s about to be some seriously gross behavior.”

When he went back to his truck, he called Davenport, who said, “You got lucky: I’ve been up for ten minutes.”

“You know, Lucas, I don’t really give a shit about that. I got all kinds of trouble, here. I need to borrow Jenkins and Shrake. I’m on my way up to the Twin Cities, and somebody needs to look up a limo driver named Max Car.”

“Max Car, the limo driver?”

“That’s what I said. Call me when Jenkins and Shrake are awake, and find Max Car.”

“I’m far too important to do that, but I’ll have it done,” Davenport said. “You okay?”

“No. I’ll be up there in an hour and a half.”

An hour later, Virgil was coming up to I-494, the interstate loop highway around the Twin Cities, when he got a call from Davenport’s researcher, Sandy.

“Max Car, C-a-r, is actually Maxamed Ali Kaar, K-a-a-r, and it would have been a lot easier to find him if we’d known that.”

“If I’d known that, I would have told you,” Virgil snapped.

“Don’t get shirty with me, Flowers,” she said. They’d once had an extremely brief fling — four hours and nine minutes, by Virgil’s cell phone clock — and she was less patient with him than other people might have been.

Virgil backed away: “He’s a limo driver, right?”

“With Polaris Service, out of south Minneapolis.”

“Text me a screen shot of his driver’s license,” Virgil said. “Have you heard from Jenkins and Shrake?”

“Yes. They’re up and complaining.”

“Good. Tell them to meet me at Kaar’s address.”

He rang off, and a minute later the phone vibrated, with a message: Kaar’s address and cell phone number, and a note from Sandy: she’d taken a quick look at Google Maps, which showed his address as a small detached house not far from the car service, and adjacent to an industrial area in south Minneapolis.

“Careful going in,” she’d texted. “Looks like a bear trap.”

Five minutes after that, a screen shot of his driver’s license came in. Kaar was a thin, dark-haired, dark-eyed, bewildered-looking man who wore a gray work shirt for his photo.

Virgil was at the address forty minutes later. Kaar’s house was an old shaky white clapboard place with a tiny porch and a surprisingly green lawn, which, at the moment, was being mowed by a heavy white man in red tank top and cargo shorts. The mower was a manual reel-type.

Neither Shrake nor Jenkins was around, so Virgil called Shrake, who said they were in separate cars, maybe five minutes away. Five minutes later, they pulled in beside Virgil’s truck, a half-block and around the corner from Kaar’s house. They all got out to talk.

“I need to talk to a guy name Maxamed Ali Kaar, who’s a driver here. He’s supposedly in Mankato, but I was thinking about it last night, and I somewhat doubt it.”

“But not entirely doubt it?” Jenkins asked.

“Not entirely. Anyway, his house is right down the street, and the lawn is being mowed by a fat guy in an undershirt, who doesn’t look like the lawn service, but who also doesn’t look like a Maxamed Ali anything. So, there’s a question. Maybe Kaar doesn’t live there at all. But if he does, and if he’s here, we can’t let him see us — but if he does see us, we need to grab him before he can make a phone call. That’s critical.”

“So let’s one of us brace the fat guy, while the other two wait,” Shrake said. “Find out what’s up, and if he’s there, we rush him.”

Virgil nodded. “Can’t let him make a phone call.”

“So who talks to the fat guy?” Shrake asked.

Virgil ambled around the corner to Kaar’s house. Jenkins and Shrake, now in Jenkins’s personal Crown Vic, hovered at the corner where they could both see Virgil, but nobody in the house could see them. They could be at the house, Jenkins swore, in four seconds.

The fat guy was sweating heavily, and as Virgil came up, took off his Twins hat and wiped his face with a hairy forearm. Virgil could smell him from ten feet away: not dirt, just hot sweat. As Virgil came up, the man asked, “How you doin’?”

“Okay,” Virgil said. He stopped, and pivoted, which put his back to the house. “I’m a cop. Does Max Kaar live here?”

“Thought you might be a cop,” the man said. “What’d Max do?”

“Is he here?” Virgil repeated.

“He was fifteen minutes ago, and still is, unless he went out through the back fence. He lives in the casita out back.”

“Casita?”

“The guesthouse.”

Virgil stepped back and looked down the narrow driveway. “You mean the garage?”

“I converted it,” the man said. “It’s really pretty… okay… inside.”

“What’s your name?” Virgil asked.

“Larry Swanson.”

Virgil waved at Jenkins and Shrake, and gestured past himself, so they’d roll on by the driveway where they couldn’t be seen from the garage. They did, and got out, and Virgil explained the situation, and introduced Swanson.

“You’re sure the man you saw fifteen minutes ago was Max Kaar?”

“Well, yeah. I’ve been renting to him for two years.”

“Was he here yesterday?”

“Yeah, he said he had a couple of days off. I mean really, is this some kind of terrorist thing? ’Cause he seems like a nice enough guy.”

Virgil said, “Listen, you guys hang here for a minute, I need to make a phone call.”

He went back to his car to make it, wound up on hold for a moment, then was put through to an assistant attorney general named Pat Golden, who said, “They tell me it’s that fuckin’ Flowers, lookin’ to get me in trouble.”

“Pat, I’m really pushed, and I don’t have time to explain it all to you, but I will later, or someday, if I’m allowed to….”

Virgil was back out of the car a couple of minutes later and Jenkins said, “There’s no window on the front of the garage, but there’s one down the right side where the main entry door is.”

Virgil waved him off and asked, “Mr. Swanson, are you married? Is there anyone else in your house?”

“No, I’m divorced, there’s nobody else here.”

“Good. I’d like you to put away your lawn mower, get a shirt, and lock your door, right now. Quickly as possible. You’re not being arrested at the moment, but I will arrest you if I need to. Either way, you’re coming with us.”

“What’d I do? What’d I do?”

“I’ll explain on the way. Now hurry. Hurry!”

Jenkins and Shrake were as confused as Swanson, but they asked no questions, just hurried the fat man through a quick armpit-wash and clean shirt, and out the door and into the back of Jenkins’s car. Virgil said, “I’ll see you guys at the BCA. Fifteen minutes.”

“What’d I do?”

Virgil and Shrake walked all the way around the block to get back to their cars, taking no chance of being seen should Kaar step out in the yard.

When Virgil was back in the truck, he did a U-turn and drove north toward I-94, then took the double-secret phone out from under his seat and poked “1.”

Lincoln answered. “What?”

“I think we need to confer,” Virgil said. “As you undoubtedly know by now, the stele exchange takes place sometime around nine o’clock tonight.”

“We’re all over it.”

“Are you watching the Hatchet and the driver, both?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I had a very bad night, and spent a lot of time thinking it all over, and so this morning I came up to the Cities and talked to Max Kaar’s landlord, who said he saw Max about fifteen minutes ago. Here, at his house. He said Kaar was here all day yesterday. What I’m saying is, after due consideration, I suspect that the driver is the Hatchet, and the man in the backseat is a decoy.”

After a long silence, Lincoln said, “I will call you back in two minutes.”

Five minutes later, she called back and said, “You’re on a speaker here, so speak clearly. Please, please tell me that you didn’t arrest Kaar.”

“Of course not,” Virgil said. “I was afraid he’d tip off the Hatchet, one way or another.”

“Thank God. Now, we need to make sure that the landlord is okay, that he doesn’t somehow tip off Kaar that people were looking at him.”

“I put the landlord in a cop’s car and he’s being transported back to the BCA right now. I’ve been told by an assistant attorney general that I can bust him on suspicion of sheltering a foreign terrorist and hold him incommunicado for a few days under the Patriot Act, but then he’d sue us, and every taxpayer in the State of Minnesota would have to send him money. What I’m hoping to do is to send him back home, with some coaching about how to handle Max the next time he sees him.”

There was a rustle of voices in the background, and a name popped out: Morganthaler. Then there was more rustling, and finally Lincoln said, “A man named Joe Morganthaler will be at the BCA this afternoon. He will coach the landlord. All you need do is hold him until then.”

“Good,” Virgil said.

“I asked you to stay out of this, and now I’m ordering you: stay out of it. Stay out of it!”

“You didn’t know that the Hatchet was the driver, did you? You would have trailed some chump to North Dakota or something while the real Hatchet was on his way back.”

She clicked off. Virgil smiled at the phone, and put it back under the seat.

At the BCA, Virgil walked Swanson up the stairs and half-explained the situation to him. “We don’t want to arrest you, because you haven’t done anything wrong. On the other hand, we can arrest you, if we needed to, though you’d probably beat the charges. What we really want to do is put you back in your house, after you get some coaching on behavior.”

“That’s good, I’ll do whatever you want,” Swanson said. “But my behavior—”

“It’s not bad or good behavior, it’s how you react to Kaar the next time you see him, knowing that he might be cooperating with some really bad people. A guy is flying in just to talk to you, to give you a few moves.”

“So what do I do now?”

“Well, you just kind of sit around, I’ll get somebody to take you out to lunch, get you a tour of the crime lab upstairs…” Virgil outlined a few other entertainment possibilities as he walked Swanson to Davenport’s office. Davenport was banging on a computer when Virgil arrived and knocked on his office doorjamb.

“Lucas, I’d like you to meet Larry Swanson.”

After Swanson was settled under the watchful eye of Davenport’s secretary, Virgil, Jenkins, Shrake, and Davenport gathered in Davenport’s office to decide what to do about the evening’s festivities.

“Sure would be a lot easier if we could just pick up Jones before he got to the delivery site,” Davenport said.

“It would be, but we don’t know what he’s driving, or where he’s hiding out, or how he plans to do this. I can guarantee it’ll be something tricky. I don’t think we have the time to figure all that out — but we will have the inside information on where it’s going to happen,” Virgil said.

“How much notice will you get?”

“As much as the people delivering the money, so we’ll all probably get there at once, wherever it is.”

“But if they want to do it on a country road somewhere, in the dark, and they see six cars coming instead of two—”

“Jones is a smart guy,” Virgil said. “He won’t want to be alone in the dark with Hezbollah.”

“Take lots of guns,” Davenport said.

“Gives me little goose bumps when you say things like that,” Jenkins said.

Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake went back to Mankato in a caravan of three cars. At Mankato, Jenkins and Shrake dumped their cars in the parking lot of a Happy Chef Restaurant, consolidated in Virgil’s car, and they all drove out in the countryside to visit Ma Nobles.

Virgil had explained how Bauer and Ma had pledged to help him, and how Bauer had apparently already sold him out. “All we want to do with Ma is make sure that Jones isn’t at her place. And he might be. I don’t know what’s going on with those two, but something is.”

“Does she go to church?” Jenkins asked.

“Not so you’d notice. Besides, Jones doesn’t have a church. I don’t know if he ever did. He’s been a professor forever.”

“I bet I know where he is,” Jenkins said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. College professors always go somewhere in the summer. You know, they’ve got to do research in Paris, London, and Rome, and they write it off their taxes. So, he did just what he did with this woman in Israel. He knows another guy who’s out of town right now, and he’s broken in there, and he’s driving that guy’s car.”

Virgil thought about it for two seconds, then said, “Probably. Unless he’s at Ma’s. If we had just a little more time, we could go jack up the people at Gustavus, find out who’s out of town, start going door-to-door.”

“You say we might not do much this afternoon…. Shrake and I could run up there, see what we can see,” Jenkins said.

“It’s a plan,” Virgil said. “Let’s see what Ma has to say.”

They found Rolf, Ma’s oldest boy, unloading salvage lumber from a Ford flatbed truck — dry salvage, that he said came from Elijah Jones’s old farmhouse — into the barn. Ma, he said, had gone out to the creek, but she had her cell phone with her. Another of Ma’s kids came out, a big kid, said his name was Tall Bear, and when Shrake asked him if he had a minister hiding under his bed, Tall Bear said, “No, but Mom said Virgil is busting her balls about him.”

Virgil got Ma on the phone and told her that he was at her house, and if she didn’t mind, he and a couple of other cops were going to look under the beds, in the closets, and out in the barn.

“Pisses me off, but go ahead,” Ma said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Virgil clicked off and said, “She says go ahead, which means we don’t have to.”

“Maybe we ought to, just for form’s sake,” Jenkins said, looking up at the house.

“Go ahead if you want,” Virgil said. “I’ll be out here.”

Jenkins got Tall Bear to show him around, and Shrake and Virgil stood around watching Rolf unload lumber, and then Shrake took off his tie and said, “Well, shit, let’s give him a hand,” and so they did.

When Ma got back, she looked at them unloading lumber, shook her wet head, and said, “Sometimes you people… Virgil…”

Jenkins hadn’t found anything at all in the house, and on the way back to town, said, “Nice boy, that Tall Bear. He said Ma was out swimming in the creek.”

“Boy, I’d bet that’d be a sight,” Shrake said. He looked casually over at Virgil and said, “Wouldn’t that be a sight, Virgie? Those nice little pink tits, she’s floating around on her back… Wait, what am I saying, ‘little’? Anyway, the sight—”

“Yeah, that’d be a sight,” Virgil said.

Shrake said to Jenkins, “Virgil agrees that would be a sight.”

After a minute, Virgil said, “Fuck you,” but he didn’t laugh, though Jenkins and Shrake did. A lot.