21
Virgil used his flashers going back to Wheatfield, not that there was much traffic, but he could run at ninety miles an hour without worrying about a sheriff’s speed trap. Running that fast, he arrived back in Wheatfield almost exactly three hours after he left. Jenkins was waiting at Skinner & Holland, and said, “You look a little haggard.”
“Anybody would be haggard, working this fuckin’ disaster. Are we wasting our time?”
“I suspect we are, but we don’t have a choice,” Jenkins said. “If it turned out these idiots actually know something, and we didn’t follow up, there’d be hell to pay. Besides, I already learned something very worthwhile.”
“About the killings?”
“No, about clothing. I bought some black jeans and a long-sleeved black polo shirt. Black really is slimming. I give off this terrific artist vibe. When I get back to the Cities, I’m gonna head go over the Art Institute. Horny art women are stacked up like cordwood over there.”
“What happens when they find out the truth, that you’re nothing but a sexual predator?” Virgil asked.
“By that time, they’ll have gotten a dose of Dr. Jenkins’s female cure and they won’t care.”
“Yeah, they’ll probably have gotten a dose of something,” Virgil said.
“Hey! Is that kind? You gotta try harder to be kind, man. We’re all trapped on this earth together.”
Holland came in, and asked, “What are we doing?”
“You’re delivering the envelope and a game-trail camera in my Tahoe, wearing my cowboy hat so they think it’s me.” The camera was sitting on the table, and Virgil turned it toward him. “The camera’s got an infrared flash and a five-second delay. You’ll get flashed a few times when you plant it, but, since it’s IR, you won’t see it. You need to set it up about fifteen feet from where you put the envelope. You don’t want it facing anything that might move. You don’t want any swaying tree branches, or anything. Point it at the bridge, if you can. You’re gonna have to be fast so they don’t get suspicious.”
“I can handle that,” Holland said. “While you were gone, I drove over the bridge. I can put it down in some weeds; it’ll point right back to where he’ll be coming down the bank.”
“Hope you didn’t spook anybody,” Jenkins said.
“I borrowed my girlfriend’s car. She dropped it out back. Nobody saw me.”
Virgil said, “Good. I’ll have the camera all set, all you have to do is turn it on and make sure there’s no grass or weeds in front of the lens. When it senses movement, it’ll start flashing, and it’ll keep going until the movement stops. The flashes are five seconds apart.”
“Cool,” Holland said. “Where will you guys be?”
“We’ll take Jenkins’s car, head north to I-90, make sure nobody is following us. Then we’ll cut south, around the west side of the East Chain, to a farmhouse—it’s only about a half mile from the bridge, and we can walk through the farmer’s fields all the way up to 18. If we do it right, we’ll only be a couple of hundred feet from the bridge. From there, we ought to be able to ease down real close.”
“Does the farmer know you’re coming?”
“Not yet . . . just in case he might want to chat about it. We’ll tell him when we get there.”
“I have only one objection,” Jenkins said.
Virgil: “Yeah?”
“The bow hunter tried to kill you last night. What if he set this up? What if he’s going to try again? What if it’s an ambush?”
“That hadn’t occurred to me,” Virgil said. He gave it a moment’s thought, then said, “That’s unlikely. First of all, Wardell said the caller was a woman. That’d mean there’d be two people involved in the murders, and I don’t see that. This is a loner. Another thing: he would have had to think this up and deliver the letter to Wardell a couple of hours after we chased him all over the neighborhood.”
“I’m with Virgil,” Holland said. “I’m not worried about an ambush. I’m more worried about falling in that fuckin’ creek.”
“When you get killed, don’t come complaining to me,” Jenkins said.
Virgil checked the time. “We got a couple of hours. I didn’t have a chance to eat, and I . . . Man, those potpies.”
“Why don’t we all run over to Fairmont and get something decent?” Holland said.
“Good. I made it down there in, like, eighteen minutes last night,” Virgil said. “We’ll take my truck, use the lights and siren, see if we can beat the time.”
They spent ten minutes with Shrake at the hospital, ate, and made it back to Skinner & Holland, where Virgil parked the Tahoe out front. Sundown was about 8:40, and it was fully dark by 9:15. Virgil had worn his pale straw cowboy hat getting out of the truck, and Holland would wear it going back out.
As soon as it was dark enough, Virgil and Jenkins snuck out the back and down to Jenkins’s rented Toyota and left for the East Chain. Virgil called Zimmer, who said his patrol cars were all set. “We hid them. Nobody’s going to see them unless they go looking off-road.”
“We’ll call your nine-one-one line if we need help,” Virgil told him.
The farm they’d targeted was owned by Don and Donna White. Zimmer knew them—not well, but well enough that they would recognize his voice. He would call them a few minutes before Virgil and Jenkins arrived at their farm to avoid scaring them and to vouch for the state cops. When they pulled into the farmyard, the Whites were waiting at the side door.
“The sheriff told us not to turn on the porch light,” Don White said. “I got some stuff to show you.”
They followed the couple inside, where Don had sketched a map of his farm buildings, the waterways behind them, and the best way through the fields.
When her husband finished, Donna White said, “We have to warn you, there might be one tiny problem with this idea.”
Jenkins: “Uh-oh. What is it?”
“We don’t have much traffic through here at night. A little while after dark . . . maybe ten after nine, a car went past while I was doing the dishes. I couldn’t see it, but I could see its headlights on the trees, and it looked to me like it stopped a little way up the highway. Like it might have been dropping somebody off.”
Virgil and Jenkins looked at each other, and Virgil said, “We might all be wandering around the same field?”
“I thought I should mention it,” Donna White said.
They got the Whites to turn off all the lights on the north end of the house before they slipped outside. They were both wearing dark blue armored vests over their night clothing, and Virgil was carrying the thermonuclear flash. They both carried Glocks, and Jenkins had his shotgun. They’d memorized angles and distances on White’s map, but Holland had been correct: it was dark.
The farm did have a bright pole light by the barn, and so they were able to barely see the line of a fence that separated the farm yard from a cornfield, and they crossed the fence without a problem. White had told them that if they walked toward the lights of the KFMC radio tower in Fairmont, they would come to Highway 81, but a couple of hundred yards farther down the road than they wanted.
They decided that was okay: they were walking less than half a mile total, before sneaking back toward the bridge. They should make it well before 10 o’clock.
The field was open enough, but walking was tough: it had been plowed that spring, and they were walking across the rows of furrows. One minute out, the mosquitoes showed up. They paused to pull the nets over their heads and gloves on their hands. The nets made it even harder to see, but they stumbled on. Ten minutes into the trek, Jenkins, who was a couple of yards behind Virgil, caught up, touched Virgil’s arm, and, when Virgil stopped, he whispered, “Look at the stars.”
Virgil said, “Shhhh,” but looked: the stars were good, though he’d seen better in the desert Southwest, he thought. Still, they craned their necks upward for a minute, the Milky Way looking like a rainbow, only it was in black and white, before they moved again. They were about a hundred yards from the highway when a car went past, which helped. They no longer had to navigate by the radio tower lights, but turned straight toward the highway. There’d be another fence to cross when they got close to the road. They were nearly there when Jenkins caught up again, touched Virgil’s arm, and whispered, “Look.”
Virgil looked. He wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing, but he thought it might be the flashlight beam from a cell phone, maybe a hundred yards away toward the bridge. Jenkins breathed, “I think the idiot’s tangled up in the fence. You want to light him up?”
“Not until we’re a lot closer,” Virgil whispered back. “If he gets outside the flash coverage, we might not see him again. He could hide, and warn off the car picking him up . . .”
They continued on to the fence. There were three strands of barbed wire, which they managed to cross without incident, but then Virgil went knee-deep in muck in the roadside ditch. Jenkins whispered, “What happened?” and stepped into the same muddy hole.
Virgil got out, but Jenkins said, “I think I’m losing my fuckin’ shoe . . . Wait, wait . . .”
He had to reach, elbow-deep, into the sulfurous muck to get hold of the shoe and then managed to stagger out onto the dry ground of the roadside bank. “I lost my fuckin’ sock,” he said. He sat down on the highway and tried to clean out his shoe, to get it back on.
From not too far away, they heard somebody talking; couldn’t make it out, but it sounded like somebody had said “Motherfucker.”
“I think he fell in the ditch,” Jenkins whispered.
Virgil wanted to laugh at both of them but stuffed his knuckles into his mouth and managed to smother the impulse.
As they waited on the highway, they saw the cell phone light again, blinking off and on, as the person ahead of them walked toward the bridge. Virgil turned to block the light of his own phone, and looked at the time. Eight minutes to 10. “Wardell’s gotta be close,” he whispered to Jenkins. “We gotta move.”
Jenkins got on his feet, and they walked toward the bridge, Jenkins’s foot squeaking in its wet shoe. It was dark enough that they could stay on the road, and the road was quieter than walking on the gravel shoulders. They were fifty yards away from the mystery walker when the cell phone flash came on, and they saw it move down into the ditch.
“He’s hiding. Waiting for the drop.”
The cell phone light came on again, and they could see the other man’s arms windmilling in the night, and they could hear some more squealing.
“Mosquitoes,” Jenkins said, and Virgil could hear him trying not to laugh.
“Sneak up another few steps and sit down,” Virgil suggested.
They did that, and waited. The night was not quite silent: they could hear a bird, up in a tree, chirping like an old man muttering in the night; and also the sound of flowing water. The man up ahead coughed once, and then again.
A minute before 10 o’clock, a set of headlights turned onto Highway 18 from Highway 53, which was about a mile and a half away. Virgil nudged Jenkins, and they duckwalked onto the shoulder of the road. The headlights got closer, bright enough that Virgil couldn’t see the truck behind them, but he was sure it was Holland in the Tahoe.
The truck stopped on the bridge, the driver hopped out, walked around the abutment, was out of sight for a minute, and then was back in the truck. When the Tahoe passed them, Holland’s hand was pressed to the driver’s-side window glass: he must’ve caught them in the headlights, crouched on the side of the road. Another minute, and the truck turned north and was out of sight.
Ten minutes, then the cell phone flash came up, moved across the bridge, down under the abutment. A moment later, it was back, and whoever was holding it was jogging toward them. Virgil whispered, “I’m going to light him up.”
Frankie had referred to the flashlight as “thermonuclear.” Virgil had been given it by a DEA agent and was fairly sure that it could be seen on the moon. The man coming toward them was in the middle of the highway, and when he was thirty feet away, Virgil hit him in the face with the light, and Jenkins yelled, “Stop! Stop there!”
The man—Virgil recognized him as Jim Button—screeched to a stop, looked wildly around, as if for a place to run, dropped the brown manila envelope full of magazine pages cut to dollar-bill size, and said, “Ah, shit. There’s no money, is there?”
“How you doin’, Jim?” Virgil asked. And, “My friend here has a twelve-gauge pointed at you. It’d cut a hole the size of a softball in your chest . . . if you have a gun or knife, or whatever.”
“I don’t,” Button said. “Goddamnit.”
“So who’s the shooter?” Virgil asked.
Button stared at him for a few seconds, then said, “Well, it’s gotta be Barry Osborne.”
Jenkins asked, “Who is this guy?”
“One of the Nazis,” Virgil said. To Button: “Barry Osborne, is what you’ve got? That’s all? That’s it? I hate to tell you this, pal, but we’ve already eliminated him as a suspect.”
“Well, that’s dumb,” Button said.
Virgil said to Jenkins, “Get your Glock out and point it at his head. I’m gonna cuff him.”
Button said, “Aw, we gotta do that?”
“Yeah, we do, Jim. You tried to defraud the state government out of ten thousand dollars.”
Button refused to say where he would have been picked up, but Virgil suspected it would be the same place he was dropped off. He called Holland, who’d pulled off the highway a couple of miles away, and he came back to pick them up.
They retrieved the camera, though they didn’t need the pictures anymore. Virgil got Button’s phone out of his jacket pocket, and they drove back to the Whites’ farmyard, Jenkins and Button in the backseat. Button’s hands were cuffed, and one ankle was locked to the steel ring in the floor of the Tahoe.
Fifteen minutes after they got to the Whites’ place, Button’s phone rang, and Virgil answered it.
“You got it?” Male voice.
Virgil whispered, “Got the envelope. But I’m in this field, I’m lost . . . Get me where you left me. Maybe ten minutes . . .”
“You okay?”
More whispering. “Yeah, but I can’t talk. I think there might be some cops up on 18.”
“I’m coming . . .”
Virgil hung up. “He’s coming.”
They brought in a sheriff’s car, hidden on a side road, and when Raleigh Good rolled past the Whites’ house and down the highway in Woody Garrett’s black Camaro, the cop pulled out across the highway and turned on his flashers. Virgil pulled out in the Tahoe, behind the camera, and turned on his own flashers. Good pulled the Camaro over, and when Virgil walked up and shouted, “Get out of the car!” Good got out, and asked, “What are you guys doing here?”
“Collecting you, and Jim,” Virgil said. “Jim’s already in my truck.”
“Was that you on the phone?”
“Yes, it was.”
“That goddamn Button. I will never, ever . . .”
Jenkins patted him down. “Get in the truck,” Virgil said.
They headed back to Wheatfield, trailed by Jenkins and the sheriff’s patrol car. Holland, looking over the seat back, asked Button, “What the hell were you thinking? Or did you think at all?”
“You’re the guys who’re gonna look like stupes when it turns out we’re right,” Button said. “Running around like your asses are on fire, gettin’ nowhere, and all you had to do was listen.”
“Why’d you think it was Osborne? Shooting his own mom?”
“For the money,” Button said.
Virgil said, “Aw, Jesus. Everybody keeps saying money, and there isn’t any.”
Button asked, “What?”
“There’s no money, Jim,” Holland said. “Barry owns the house. Margery was living there for free.”
“Well, yeah,” Button said. “But what about the Florida house?”
Virgil: “What Florida house?”
Button said to Good, “They don’t know about the Florida house.”
Good said, “What a bunch of stupes.”
Virgil looked over the seat back. “What are you talking about?”
“Where are we on this fraud thing?” Button asked. And he said to Good, “Keep your mouth shut, Raleigh.”
“We can talk,” Virgil said. “What about the Florida house?”
“You know Rose? You met her at the house, you sicced her on Clay Ford? Chick with the rose tattoo?”
“I remember,” Virgil said. “What about this house?”
“Rose cleaned house for Marge once a week when she was in Wheatfield. And she watched over Barry’s house when he drove Marge down to Florida. Marge wouldn’t fly,” Button said. “When they were packing up last fall, she heard Barry telling Marge that she ought to sell the place and move back to Wheatfield, where her friends were. They had an argument about it.”
Holland asked, “How much is it worth? The house?”
Button said, “I don’t know. Rose might. Rose is a snoop. But I bet it’s worth a lot.”
“Is Rose still at your place?” Virgil asked.
Raleigh said, “When you told her that Clay Ford might be interested, she hotfooted it right over there, and they been fuckin’ up a storm ever since. She’s moved in with him.”
“That didn’t take long,” Virgil said.
“She’s the restless sort,” Button said. “So . . . we got a deal? I solved your case. I wasn’t trying to fraud you.”
“This better not be Nazi bullshit,” Virgil said.
“Cross my heart,” Button said. “Go ask Rose.”