20
As Virgil was driving Shrake through the night to the hospital in Fairmont, the woman who had swastikas tattooed on her earlobes was sitting in Jim Button’s Nazi kitchen with her hair pulled up over the top of her head in two horns, held in place by two fat, blue rubber bands. She said, “Ow! . . . Ow! . . . Ouch! . . . Goddamnit, ow! . . . Hey! . . . Ouch! . . .”
Another woman was working on her with a sewing machine needle and a puddle of black ballpoint pen ink, converting the two tiny swastikas to black squares. The Nazi earlobe woman, Marie York, had been offered a waitress job in an Albert Lea bowling alley. She’d worn big, gold-plated earrings to the job interview to hide the swastikas but knew the truth would come out sooner or later, so she was having them obliterated.
When Button accused her of anti–National Socialist treachery, she’d said, “I’ve got to eat. I’m not giving up this career opportunity.”
When the tattoo lady had shown up, Button retreated to the dining area to sulk: the fact was, the wheels were coming off Minnesota’s National Socialist wagon. Nobody would hire them, and they didn’t have a whole lot of salable skills, other than the ability to lift heavy weights and/or make methamphetamine out of Energizer lithium batteries, Sudafed, and farm fertilizer.
Recently, they couldn’t afford either the batteries or the Sudafed, and when they’d tried to steal anhydrous ammonia from a farmer’s wheeled fertilizer tank, they’d managed to break the handle off the spout, and the ammonia had run down the farmer’s driveway and stunk up the whole neighborhood. Also, they’d damn near gassed themselves to death, suffered some spotty burns on their hands and arms, and, in the end, had only come away with one two-liter Pepsi bottle of the stuff.
At this point, they were living off their individual SNAP cards, which would not allow them to buy either alcohol or tobacco, and which, realistically, could have been a good thing, because if SNAP did allow it, that’s probably all they’d buy. The cards also wouldn’t allow them to buy any hot food or food that could be eaten at the store.
The only thing left was nutritious crap like hamburger and noodles that they had to cook themselves, and if they hadn’t found a convenience store that would take their SNAP card in return for nothing, giving them half back in cash, they’d probably all be kicking the nicotine habit right now.
Button lit up one of his last five Marlboros and put on his thinking cap, and as the tattoo lady was finishing up with Marie, and he finished up a half sack of Cheez-Its, he went back in the kitchen, and said, “I’ve had my thinking cap on.”
The tattoo lady said, “That can’t be good.”
“Listen, that state cop Flowers is still here, and he hasn’t figured out a goddamn thing. There’s three people dead and two more shot. They gotta be desperate. The other thing is, Skinner and Holland were making a fortune in that store until the priest closed the church, right? Am I right about that?”
The tattoo lady said to Marie, “Put that Neosporin on your lobes every two hours, and keep doing it until you run out. I’m gonna get out of here before Jim tells you his plan. I want nothing to do with it.”
“You don’t even know what it is,” Button said.
“And I plan to keep it that way,” the tattoo lady said. “I don’t want to be no accomplice.”
She left, and Marie asked, “You want Sylvia to hear this, whatever it is?”
“Yeah, because she knows how to write good. We’ll have to tell Raleigh, too, because it could get complicated, and I might need his help. But it’s gonna bail us out, babe. We’ll be in tall fuckin’ clover when we pull this off, and there’s not a fuckin’ thing illegal about it.”
“That’s a change,” Marie said. “Am I right thinking that even if it’s legal, it’s still stupid?”
Button bared his teeth at her. “We don’t need that kind of defeatist thinking.”
“Ah, fuck it, I should’ve joined the SHARPs.”
“Never! They’re not even real skinheads . . .”
“They’re better skinheads, Jim . . . You know, you’re making me tired,” Marie said.
Button took the chair vacated by the tattoo lady and leaned toward Marie, who was dabbing the ointment on her earlobes. “You’re not listening, Marie. If we pull this off, we could all move to Texas, where, you know, they’d treat us right.”
“So tell me what you thought up,” she said. And then: “Hey! Hey! Did you eat all the Cheez-Its? Goddamnit, those were mine. I was saving them . . .”
The sound of wheels coming off.
Twelve hours later, Wardell Holland pushed through the curtain into the back room at Skinner & Holland, where he found Virgil, Jenkins, and Skinner sitting around the card table, Virgil and Jenkins finishing off potpies.
He held up the letter, and said, “You guys won’t believe this.”
“I don’t believe I ate another potpie, so that’ll be two things I don’t believe,” Jenkins said.
Virgil: “What is it?”
“You might want to handle it carefully in case there are fingerprints,” Holland said. He handed Virgil the envelope, and Virgil opened it, shook out a sheet of wide-lined notebook paper, and used a clean paper napkin to unfold it. A message was written in purple ink:
To who it may concern (Agent Flowers):
We know who the killer is. We were talking to Lawrance Van Den Berg about the killer before Lawrance (Larry) was killed and he told us who it was. We didn’t believe him (because you would never think of that name), but when he got killed, that proved it. We are afraid but we will tell you who it is if you give us the reward (up front). Put $10,000 in a secure envelope (not a letter envelope like this one) and wait for our phone call to tell you where to leave the money ($10,000 in Small Bills like 20s). We don’t know how to call Agent Flowers, so we will call Wardell at the store and he can tell Agent Flowers. We will call soon.
Virgil looked at the envelope, and said, “No stamp.”
“Somebody left it in my mailbox last night,” Holland said. “I heard a car stop outside, but then it drove away. Maybe . . . two o’clock? I didn’t look at what time it was.”
Jenkins and Skinner had read the letter over Virgil’s shoulder, and Skinner said, “Sounds like the Nazis.”
“That’s what I thought,” Holland said.
“Do they have anything to do with Van Den Berg?” Virgil asked.
“Not as far as I know,” Holland said, and Skinner shook his head, and said, “Don’t think so.”
Virgil turned the letter over, but there was nothing else except a small yellow smudge at the bottom of the page. “Looks like whoever it is, they were eating Cheetos.”
“Cheez-Its,” Skinner said. “There’s a subtle difference in the yellow grease, as you’d know if you worked in the store.”
“What do you think?” Jenkins asked Virgil.
“I’ll bag the letter, but they’d have to be dumber than the Nazis to have left any fingerprints on it,” Virgil said. “I suppose we could drive out and ask them if they’re the ones behind it, but I doubt they’d admit it.”
“There’s always the chance that they’re not the guilty ones,” Skinner said.
“There’s that,” Virgil said.
He carefully slipped the letter back into the envelope, and said to Wardell, “Let us know the minute they call. If they’re on a cell phone, we can probably track the call.”
Virgil and Jenkins went out to Virgil’s Tahoe, and Jenkins said, “I’m going to suggest something you might not want to hear.”
“Lay it on me. I’m hurting for help.”
“Wardell Holland and J. J. Skinner. Holland’s a combat vet. Probable history of killing people. Claims to have been in the store for one of the shootings, but do we know that for sure? He’d only have to sneak out for a minute.”
“He was with a woman when Van Den Berg . . .”
Jenkins shook a finger at him. “He told you he was with the woman until about midnight. Van Den Berg was moving a little after eleven o’clock. Suppose he set his clock forward an hour, the woman thinks she left around midnight. It’s hard to keep track of time when you’re getting your brains banged loose.”
Virgil: “Wardell was in the store talking to me when Osborne was shot.”
“But where was Skinner?”
“Thin,” Virgil said. “Very, very slender.”
“Maybe, but consider this: they’re huge beneficiaries of the apparitions.”
“Which is where you lose the motive,” Virgil said. “Why would he want to shut down the church?”
“Wait, let me finish. He’s not closing down the church permanently, he’s only closed it down temporarily,” Jenkins said. “Suppose Margery Osborne was going to close it permanently?”
“Like . . . how?”
“From what everybody says, she went to church all the time. She was on the church council, came back from Florida after the apparitions, stayed all winter. Now, I gotta confess, I don’t go for all this Virgin Mary magic show horse manure. I think it’s a shuck. What if Holland, or Holland and Skinner together, set up the whole thing somehow?”
“I might have visited Janet Fischer’s home when she wasn’t there,” Virgil said. “And . . . You’ll keep this strictly confidential . . .”
“Of course. I’d never rat out a colleague on a righteous burglary,” Jenkins said.
“I think I found the Virgin Mary costume under her mattress.”
“Think?”
“Ninety-five percent anyway.”
“So, there we are,” Jenkins said. “She also works at the store, making the big bucks. Big bucks for this town. Skinner, Holland, and Fischer set up the shuck. Osborne finds out about it. Thinks she’s figured out how it was done and lets it slip to one of those three. Holland knows where he can get the gun he needs and he kills to get it. He then shoots two innocent people to set up the real target, Margery Osborne. Then Van Den Berg gets some semblance of the truth out of Fischer and threatens to expose them. Holland kills him. Then he goes after you with a bow . . . wearing combat gear and showing some real nighttime combat mojo. Cold as ice, nails Shrake—who has a gun, for Christ’s sakes.”
After a moment, Virgil said, “That’s well thought out, but I don’t believe it.”
“Why?”
“Because Wardell’s a good guy, and I like him,” Virgil said. “So’s Skinner.”
Jenkins nodded. “That’s a problem, and that’s why I said you might not want to hear it.”
“Holland’s working all day,” Virgil said.
“True.”
“His trailer’s out on the edge of town . . . You could drop me,” Virgil said.
“It’s a risk. And you don’t have a key.”
“There’s no trailer on the face of the earth that I can’t get into with my butter knife,” Virgil said. “Even if I got caught, if I explained it right, I don’t think he’d turn me in.”
“I could watch him, tell you if he’s leaving the store.”
They cruised the trailer once and decided on a diversion. Jenkins would drive and would stop close to the front of the trailer. Virgil would get out of the backseat on the same side. Jenkins would go to the front door while Virgil slipped around the side to the back door. There were no other houses looking at that side, or the back, either. Jenkins would get in the truck and drive away when there was no answer at the front door.
Should work.
Jenkins dropped him, and Virgil tried to stay in the shadows until he got around to the side. He didn’t need his butter knife to get into the trailer because the back door wasn’t locked. He was inside ten seconds after Jenkins drove off.
The trailer smelled like microwaved everything—tacos, burritos, pasta, pizza, oatmeal—anything you could jam in a microwave. Even a few potpies. Holland was not the neatest man, nor the messiest.
The good thing about a trailer was that it was a metal box: a capsule. There weren’t a lot of innovative places to hide things. Virgil started with the bedroom, worked toward the kitchen, and took the place apart. He found a pellet gun in a closet, but Skinner had told him about Holland shooting flies. He glanced at a TV, apparently hooked to the satellite dish on the roof, and an old laptop computer.
The key find was in the bedroom, in a cardboard box; in it, a small Epson projector, the kind used for business presentations. Sitting on top of the projector, loosely wrapped to avoid wrinkles, he found a piece of fabric, the sheerest he’d ever seen—something that you might use to make nylon stockings.
The material was two feet wide and six and a half or seven feet long, with a thin Plexiglas rod glued to the top of it. Transparent nylon fishing line was attached to each end of the rod so that the material would dangle from the rod like a transparent banner. And finally, in the box itself, a CD.
He called Jenkins, “How are we doing?”
“I’m in the back room, with a Coke. Wardell’s behind the counter. You done?”
“Come get me in ten.”
He carried the CD to the MacBook, plugged the computer in, loaded the CD, and brought it up. There was only one thing on it: a two-minute movie of Janet Fischer—he was sure it was she—dressed as the Virgin Mary, lifting a hand to bless the crowd, and speaking—“Bienaventurados los mansos, porque ellos heredaran la tierra”—in her best Minnesota Spanish.
He put everything back, then did a six-minute review of the whole place, opening doors and drawers. No .223. rifle, no shells. If Holland had a .223, he could be hiding it somewhere off the premises, simply as a basic precaution.
But Virgil didn’t believe it. Holland was too nice a guy.
One oddity, though: nowhere in the trailer did Virgil see anything to indicate that Holland had ever been in the military—no photos, no memorabilia, no letters from the Veterans Administration.
Jenkins was outside the door eleven minutes after they spoke on the phone. Virgil climbed into the truck, and they headed back downtown. “We were right about one thing—it was Holland and Fischer who pulled off the Virgin Mary thing. It’s gotta be illegal, somehow, but hell if I know the exact statute.”
Jenkins said, “How about Skinner?”
“I’m sure Skinner was in there, too. Anyway, all three of them now have anti-motives for shooting somebody. Shooting anybody. Right from the start, they’ve seemed sort of panic-stricken by the shootings. They’ll lose their asses if the shootings continue . . . By the way, Holland doesn’t have a bow. Neither does Fischer.”
“Then what the fuck are we gonna do, man? We still got nothing.”
Then Holland called on Virgil’s cell, and Virgil took it on the truck’s Bluetooth connection.
“I got the call,” Holland said. “Woman’s voice. I got instructions for the drop spot.”
“How stupid is it?” Virgil asked.
“Surprisingly not stupid, if you’re stupid enough to do this in the first place,” Holland said. “There’s this place west of town, called the East Chain . . .”
“I know it,” Virgil said. “We’ll be at the store in two minutes. We’ll talk then.”
On the way to the store, Virgil called the phone guy at BCA headquarters to tell him the call had come in on Holland’s cell phone. The guy was ready for it, and he said he’d have the caller’s number in five minutes.
“What’s the East Chain?” Jenkins asked, when Virgil was off the phone.
The East Chain was a series of swamps, bogs, marshes, and shallow lakes west of Wheatfield, linked together by a creek. Years earlier, Virgil had done some wildlife photography in the area, hired by a painter who wanted authentic scenes of red foxes and their offspring as models for a painting for a wildlife stamp contest. As Virgil remembered it, East Chain was ten or twelve miles long from north to south, and would be an easy place to run and hide.
At Skinner & Holland, Virgil and Jenkins went straight to the back room, where Holland was waiting with a legal pad and Skinner’s laptop.
“They want you to leave the money on the edge of a bridge abutment on Highway 18 . . . right here . . . at ten o’clock. Exactly ten o’clock. No earlier, no later.”
Holland had a Google map up on the laptop and touched a pencil point to the screen. The satellite image showed an elongated lake coming down from the north, dwindling to a stream, which opened into another shallow lake, or marsh, a couple of hundred yards to the south. The bridge crossed the stream between the two lakes.
Jenkins: “Did they say if we didn’t leave it, the chick is gonna get it?”
Holland frowned. “No, they . . . What?”
“Jenkins humor,” Virgil said. “Ignore it.”
Virgil’s cell phone rang. He looked at it, answered. The phone guy in St. Paul said, “I got the number okay, but you won’t like it. It’s a pay phone at a bowling alley in Albert Lea.”
“They got a pay phone?”
“Yeah, they’re still out there. Sorry about that.”
Virgil rang off, told the others about the phone. “So it looks like we’ve got a stakeout tonight.”
“It’s gonna be way dark out there,” Holland said. “I suspect they’ll get out there early, on foot, to watch for somebody doing surveillance. If they don’t see anybody, they’ll snatch the envelope and sneak off, up or down the creek, to somewhere else, where somebody will pick them up. If it is the Nazis, they’ve lived here all their lives, they probably know the area pretty well.”
Virgil looked at the map for a minute, and Jenkins asked, “Well?” and Virgil said, “I’m gonna run home and get some stuff. Be back in three hours.”
“What are you going to get?” Jenkins asked. “What am I doing?”
“I need my wildlife gear,” Virgil said. “There’s a sporting goods store at the mall in Albert Lea. You need to buy some camo or dark sweatpants and a dark sweatshirt and some cheap gym shoes. It’ll be muddy out there, you could ruin a pair of good shoes.”
“I’d like to help, if I can,” Holland said.
“You can,” Virgil said. “You’ll make the drop. You’re gonna be Virgil Flowers for an hour.”
On the way home, Virgil called Sheriff Zimmer and told him about the letter. “What we’d like is, at ten o’clock, we’d like some patrol cars well out away from the site, maybe five miles and moving, so if these people see them it’ll look like a routine patrol. I don’t want them parked someplace unless they can hide. When they try to make the pickup, and if we don’t get them, we might need your guys to run them down.”
“We can do that,” Zimmer said, after Virgil gave him the details. “Sounds like those Nazis.”
“That’s the general impression,” Virgil said. “I thought about driving out there, but they’d just deny it. Grabbing them and squeezing them, is the thing to do.”
When he was off the phone with Zimmer, he called Frankie and told her he was heading north. “I’ll see you there,” she said.
When he got home, she met him at the back door, and said, “I put all your stuff in your big duffel: your camo, the trail game camera, the thermonuclear flashlight, and those Nikes you were supposed to throw away. Plus, I added your mosquito nets. The mosquitoes were thick at the farm last night, and you’re gonna need them.”
“Great. This’ll be a quick trip.”
She grabbed the front of his shirt. “Not so fast, buster. It’s been a while, and my stomach has finally settled down.”
“I don’t have time. We’ve got three dead . . . Okay, maybe I’ve got a little time, but no more than fifteen minutes. Okay, no more than half an hour. Forty minutes at the outside . . . There are people depending on me . . .”
“Yes. I’m one of them.”