7
THE SCHOOL BOARD MET that night at Jennifer Barns’s house, after Jennifer Gedney called and asked for an emergency meeting. She recounted Virgil’s sudden appearance at her house and said, “I spent an hour after supper looking this man up on the Internet. I am telling you, he is dangerous. He is the man who caught those Vietnamese spies a few years ago, and remember those three teenagers who were driving around killing people? He had that case, too, and those people who were trying to buy that sacred stone from Israel? That was him. He says he has several leads, and I believe him, else how did he get to our door? He is a killer, and I’m scared to death.”
Vike Laughton told them about Virgil’s visit to his office. He was less impressed: “Here’s the thing, folks. From what I could tell, he’s got almost nothing. What he’ll do is run around town and tell everybody that he’s breaking the case, when what he’s trying to do is play us off each other.”
“You think he knows that there’s more than one person involved?” asked Jennifer Barns.
“There’s no way he could know that, and nothing he said to me suggested that he did,” Laughton said.
Randy Kerns, the shooter, said, “I’ll tell you up front, I made a mistake with the gun. I used one of Buster’s burst kits, and I’ll bet that’s how he got to Buster—they figured out the shot pattern, and asked themselves, ‘Where could you get a burst kit?’ and they remembered about him making those suppressors. But if everybody keeps their mouths shut, we’ll be okay.”
They all looked at each other, and Larry Parsons asked, “What’s a burst kit?”
“Mechanical gizmo that lets you fire off three shots with one pull of the trigger,” Kerns said.
Jennifer Barns: “So everybody just stay calm. Don’t talk about it, don’t ask about it.”
Jennifer Gedney said, “Buster’s worried. He thinks Flowers might send him to prison for making the burst kits. If Flowers digs around enough, he’ll find out that Buster made some of them. I don’t know what Buster would do, then.”
Again, a quick, silent exchange of faces, then Kerns said, “You’ve got to keep track of Buster, then. If he gets too weird about it . . .”
Jennifer Gedney said, “What? You’re going to kill him, too? That’s absurd.”
Delbert Cray, the financial officer, said, “It’s not logically absurd, though I have to admit that it would probably cause this Flowers to focus on Buster’s various links.”
“None of the links would point to us—they’d point to people who bought the burst kits,” Jennifer Barns said. “Randy bought one, but nobody knows that, except Buster, and if something happened to Buster before he could give Flowers a list . . . the threat is sealed off.”
“Could figure out a way to make it look like an accident, or a suicide,” Kerns said. “Buster’s kinda old, and not in that good a shape. Two of us guys could get him out in his workshop, grab him and hang him without bruising him up. . . . I’d want to do some reading about it, and about DNA, before we did it. But it could be done.”
Jennifer Barns said, “You want to put that in the form of a motion?”
“So moved,” Kerns said.
Bob Owens, the senior board member, said, “Two murders are way worse than one. It makes it clear that something is going on. Right now, as far as Flowers knows, Conley was shot by some crazy, out looking to kill somebody.”
“That’s true,” said Jennifer Houser. “I think we should hold in reserve the whole idea of killing Buster. It’s too drastic a measure, for what we know right now.”
Jennifer Gedney asked, “What if something happened to Flowers?”
“Another possibility,” Kerns said. “The rumor around town is that he came here to investigate some dognappings, and the victims are telling him that the dognappers live up Orly’s Creek. If he was to get shot, the BCA would send somebody else down, and maybe a whole bunch of people, but if there was something that pointed at the dognappers . . .”
“Like what?” Owens asked. “I can’t think of what it would be.”
“Maybe because you only had one second to think about it,” Kerns suggested. “With a little more time, we could come up with something. He hangs out with Johnson Johnson. Maybe Johnson could get an anonymous tip about the dogs that takes them out somewhere, looking for dogs, and Flowers gets killed. That links it to the dogs, and not to Conley.”
“So moved,” said Jennifer Gedney.
“I’m sorry, but that sounds way, way too complicated. We have to have something better than that,” said Jennifer Houser. “But I’ve got a question for Jen Three. If we voted to kill Buster . . . would that be a problem?”
“Well, yes,” Jennifer Gedney said. “Not an emotional problem, or anything like that, it’s just that I think it would only focus attention. I’d vote against killing him because it seems too extreme right now. Later? Maybe not.”
Laughton grinned and said, “The marriage is maybe not as solid as it could be?”
“Just looking at him makes me tired,” Jennifer Gedney said. “All those wrenches. And he’s covered with oil most of the time.”
“All right,” said Henry Hetfield, the superintendent of schools, looking down over his steel-rimmed glasses. “We’ve got a lot on our plates right now. Here is what I’d suggest: we table the motions to kill Buster and Flowers, with the understanding that they could be brought back before the board if Buster gets too shaky—Jen Three, you’ll have to monitor that—or Flowers gets too close. But we also instruct Randy to do what he can to monitor Flowers, and to make plans to remove one or both of them if the situation worsens.”
Jennifer Barns said, “So moved.”
“I think we have two motions already on the floor,” Owens said.
“Oh, fuck that,” Jennifer Barns said. “Let’s have a show of hands on Henry’s proposal. All in favor, raise your hands.”
All nine hands went up.
“So that’s settled,” she said. “We watch and wait, but Randy is ready to move if we need to. My personal view is, we don’t have much to fear at the moment.”
“As long as Flowers doesn’t find out about the story that Clancy was working on,” Jennifer Gedney said.
“If we even get a sniff of that . . .” She looked at Kerns, who nodded.
Vike Laughton spoke up: “Flowers originally came here to investigate dogs, and he thinks they might be up Orly’s Creek. I have heard, and I’d suspect a couple more of you have, that those people are cooking some meth up there. Anybody else hear that?”
Jennifer Barns said, “Where’d you hear that?”
“Well, from Conley, actually. He was a pill-popper, as you all know,” Laughton said.
Jennifer Houser said, “I heard that. Just a rumor, but I heard it.”
Jennifer Barns asked, “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I was just wondering if there is any way we might tie Conley’s death to the Orly’s Creek people. Drug users. A drug shooting. Something going on there . . .”
“How’d we do that?” Owens asked.
“I don’t know. We could think of something,” Laughton said. “I don’t think it’s healthy, though, to have Flowers focused on Conley and his job, or what he might have been looking into.”
“Well, if you think of something, let us know,” Owens said.
“I will do that,” Laughton said.
Barns said, “All right. Let’s go on home, folks. And Jen Three—keep an eye on Buster.”
—
AS THEY WERE going out the door, Laughton asked Kerns, “How difficult would it be to, mmm, take a look at one of those Orly’s Creek hillbillies?”
“You mean, shoot one? It’s pretty dark there, houses are up from the road. Lots of pullouts along the creek. It’d be ideal for an ambush, except for one thing—there’s only one way out. That could be handl
ed . . .”
“One of the people up there, he’s a gangster who used to ride with the Bad Seed. Roy Zorn. You see him around town. If something should happen to him that was . . . consonant . . . with what happened to Clancy, Flowers would have to take that connection pretty seriously, I would think.”
“You don’t want to talk to the board about it?” Kerns asked.
“No. They’re too shook up right now. Making motions, calling for votes,” Laughton said. “Like Jen Three. She swings from ‘No killing’ to ‘Let’s kill Flowers.’ Killing Flowers would be insane, except for the most desperate circumstances. No—what we need is Flowers alive and well, and pointed in totally the wrong direction.”
“Let me do some research,” Kerns said.
“Things are moving fast . . .”
“Won’t take long.”
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.”