“Five or six minutes,” she said. “Swanson is a little way south of the airport.”
“Good deal,” Virgil said. “I’ll follow you up there.”
“And I’ll probably see you up in Grand Rapids,” Windrow said. “How far is it?”
“Nine hours by car, probably. You can fly in, commercial, but there aren’t many flights. Bar is called the Wild Goose.”
“I fly a little Cessna. Love to do it, don’t do it enough,” Windrow said. “If the weather’s good, I’ll head up there in the morning, maybe.”
OUT IN THE PARKING LOT, Sedlacek and Virgil shook hands, and Sedlacek said, “Prudence is okay. A little dry, but she’s smart, like her sister.”
“Seems okay,” Virgil said.
“I was worried that she might seem a little crazy, going on about the Lord this and the Lord that, that he wouldn’t allow Constance to be murdered at random.”
“Who can tell about that,” Virgil said, looking over at the woman as she got into a Ford Taurus. “She might even be right.”
11
JANELLE WASHINGTON WENT TO WORK in a candy store to pick up extra cash when her husband, a greenskeeper, hopped down off a tractor and tore his ACL. He was out of work for weeks, and they were living on worker’s comp payments, and something had to be done.
The candy store barely paid minimum wage, but that was fine. The work wasn’t onerous, and they were only bridging the gap between worker’s comp and what they needed, so they didn’t need a lot. Then, after he got back on the tractor, she decided she liked the contact with other people during the day, and she stayed on with the candy store.
There was a problem, though. Janelle couldn’t stay out of the chocolate. She’d always prided herself on her figure, which wasn’t perfect, but her husband, James, seemed to like it a lot, and when she gained two pounds in the first week, and another in the second week, then two more . . . something had to be done.
First, she resolved to eat only two pieces of fudge a day: five hundred calories. Then, during the summer, at least, she’d ride her bike from her house, out in the countryside, all the way into town, eight miles each way, which took her about forty-five minutes each way, and burned, according to an Internet calculator, about five hundred calories. Also, she learned, she’d be building muscles, and more muscles also meant more calories burned.
Now the question was, should she use the extra calories for another piece of fudge? Or really turn herself into a raging piece of super-fit muscle? Staying at two pieces a day was hard, with the owner in the back cooking up all that chocolate. . . .
On this day, she’d finished up, cleaning off the counters, had said good-bye to Dan, the owner, and took off. The first few blocks were stop-and-go, getting out of town, watching the traffic; but once she was on the other side of the river, the traffic disappeared and she started to pump; started to sweat.
She’d never been an athlete, but the bicycle had turned something on, and she was getting addicted to the flow of the thing. . . .
McDILL’S KILLER SAT in a copse of trees that grew on a natural mound at the intersection of the county road and a trail that led back to a canoe-landing on the Mississippi. From a nest at the top of the mound, both the landing and the road were visible. No canoeists had come along in an hour, and none were visible in a half-mile stretch of the river above the landing.
Washington should be coming around the corner at any minute. Shooting her would do two good things. First, it’d confuse the issue. The killer would carefully leave behind a shell, so they’d know that McDill’s killer also shot Washington. But since Washington had no connection to lesbians or Wendy’s band or the Eagle Nest, maybe they’d go for the idea that the killings were random. Maybe; but if not, it’d at least be confusing.
The other thing the killing would do is get rid of Washington. Nobody would remember it after she was dead, the killer thought, but Washington knew a little too much about Slibe Ashbach Jr. and his father. . . .
WASHINGTON CAME AROUND the corner a mile away, not pedaling hard, but moving right along. The road was smooth blacktop, and she was clear and steady in the four-power scope. She was wearing a scarf, as a babushka, to keep her hair neat. Her face was clear in the glass . . . four hundred yards, three-fifty, three hundred, and closing . . .
A truck came around the corner behind her. Not moving fast, sort of idling along, and the killer took the gun down, forehead beaded with sweat, breathing hard from a sudden shot of adrenaline. Not good. Not good.
TOM MORRIS SAW JANELLE pedaling along and thought about what might have been if he’d moved a little faster after high school. They might have hooked up. The possibility was out there, for a while. He knew it, and she knew it, and that made them like each other all their lives, even if nothing happened, and they both wound up happily married to other people.
He slowed, ran the window down, grinned at her, and called, “Still pedaling your ass around town . . .”
“You shut up!” she said.
“No, I think it’s a good thing,” he said. “I saw James downtown yesterday. He said you guys were going out to Moitrie’s on Friday. We might be out there, we’re thinking about seven.”
She stopped, straddling the bike, moved it over to the truck, and said, “I’ll call Patsy. Maybe we can get a table together.”
They talked for a minute about a snowmobile club that wanted to take out some unused field crossings, and the culverts that went with them, and if that would put too many snowmobilers on their road, and about the growing flock of crows that were hanging around, and how Morris had hired an exterminator to get the squirrels out of his attic—routine neighbor stuff—and then he said good-bye: “Talk to Patsy. See you out there.”
THE PICKUP MOVED ON, slowly, paced by the bike for a hundred yards or so, and then pulled away. By this time, Washington was opposite the killer, then passing, and the truck was still there, moving slow as white paste down the highway, and Washington was farther and farther down, the crosshairs first on her head, but then the head shot became uncertain, and then on her back, on her white blouse . . .
The truck went over a low rise and disappeared. The killer glanced back: nothing from the other direction. But this wasn’t as clean as the other killings, there could be somebody . . .
“Ah . . .”
White blouse in the scope, squeeze . . .
The shot was almost a surprise.
WASHINGTON FELT AS THOUGH she’d been hit by a meteor. She was down, and bleeding, in the ditch, her bicycle on top of her, and looked down and found blood gushing from her rib cage, and she began to crawl up the side of the ditch, not thinking, not knowing what happened, wondering if she’d been hit by a car. She began to grow weak, understood that she was going to die if something didn’t happen.
One last push and she was on the shoulder, and she tried to hold herself together, tried to think, still not understanding, rolling up, blood on her hands, blood on her blouse, no car, what happened? She could hear herself making a growling noise, and felt the gravel on her face and under her hands, sticky with blood. . . .
Some time passed, and she was mostly aware of the blue of the sky above her, and then the wheel of a car was right there by her head, and she heard the crunch of gravel. A face appeared in her field of vision, and she heard the man’s voice:
“Jeez! Janelle! What happened, oh, my God,” and she focused on Tom Morris’s face and he was on his cell phone screaming, “We’ve got a woman hurt bad . . . bleeding bad . . . Get some help out here, my God, we need an ambulance, we need an ambulance. . . .”
12
PRUDENCE BAUER HAD FIFTEEN or twenty sealed cardboard moving boxes full of her sister’s life, consolidated in a back bedroom, and when Virgil opened the first one, he was hit in the face by a dusty lilac-scented perfume that smelled more like death than death itself. Two of the boxes contained papers taken from Connie’s desk within a couple days of her death, including a diary, and an appointment book from
the Louvre.
“Was she an art enthusiast?” Virgil asked Bauer, thinking of the museum membership cards he’d seen in McDill’s wallet.
“No, not especially—she used to get those from the Barnes and Noble store up in Cedar Rapids. There’s another one around, but I think it was on the theme of cats.”
She left him sitting in a rocking chair, in the bedroom, on a braided rag rug, flipping through the paper and getting nowhere. She came back fifteen minutes later with a Diet Coke: “Found anything?”
He took the Coke. “Not so far. But it all helps: even if I don’t see anything now, maybe something relevant will pop up later. It’s a matter of getting the most information that you can, into your head.”
“You know, you should look at the phone receipts, to see who she was talking to at the time. They’re in here somewhere. . . .”
She started digging through boxes of records, looking for the phone receipts, as he paged through the diary, which was fairly bland: who did what to whom, in Swanson, and none of the things done were dramatic, except that a man named Don left his wife, Marilyn, and moved to Marion, wherever that was, to be around a woman named Doris.
“Whatever happened to Don and Doris?” Virgil asked Bauer.
She looked up, her eyes distant, for a moment, and then she said, “I think they moved to Oklahoma. Lake Eufaula.”
“So Don never got back with Marilyn?”
“No. Marilyn’s still alone. Sometimes I see her standing in her window, looking out. She lives just down the street and around the corner,” she said.
“Maybe she’s looking for Don coming back,” Virgil suggested.
Bauer looked at him and smiled: “That’s going to be a long wait. Don and Doris are in love.”
HE’D FOUND NOTHING at all when Bauer handed him a stack of phone bills: “There are four calls to northern Minnesota right before she died. Three to one number, one to another.”
He took the bills, checked through them, copied the numbers into his notebook, held up the bills, and said, “I’d like to take these. I’ll give you a receipt.”
“I don’t really need—”
“Legal niceties,” Virgil said.
He was curious about the numbers, though, got on his phone, called the office in St. Paul, read the numbers off to Davenport’s secretary, and said, “Get somebody to run those down. They’re two years old.”
“How soon do you need them?”
“I’ll be back tonight. You could leave them on your desk, if you get them.”
When he’d finished with the paper, he called Doug Wayne, the pilot, arranged to meet him at the airport. Bauer walked him out to the rental car, touched his elbow, and said, “I think you’ll find him, whoever he is. When you asked about Don and Doris, that gave me confidence that you’re interested in things.”
Virgil nodded. “I will find him. I will run him down.”
“And if you kill the sonofabitch, I would shed no tears at all.”
“Why, Prudie,” Virgil began, intending to shine the light of his third-best smile on her, but his phone rang and he fumbled it out, looked at the phone number, unknown, but from northern Minnesota. Like a cool breeze down his shirt: he punched up the phone and said, “Yeah?”
“Hey, this is Mapes . . .”
“I was gonna call you, man, but I’m down in Iowa. What happened with that shell?”
“The shell came from a .223 bolt action, but hey, Virgil, shut up for a minute. Listen: a woman got shot, an hour and a half ago. Named Jan Washington. Was she part of your investigation?”
“No, never heard of her,” Virgil said. “Where was she shot?”
“In the back, the bullet exited outa her—”
“No, no, where in Minnesota?”
“Oh—right outside town. Outside Grand Rapids. The thing is, since we were still working here, the sheriff asked us to go out and take a look. We came up with one, single .223 shell, fired from a sniper’s nest. And I’ll tell you what, Virgil—it’s going to take the lab to tell us for sure, but I will kiss your ass in Macy’s front window if it didn’t come out of the same gun as killed McDill.”
Virgil didn’t react immediately; let it percolate down through the lobes of his prefrontal cortex. Then he said, “Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Is the woman dead?” Virgil asked.
“No, she isn’t. She’s hanging on,” Mapes said. “Not talking, but hanging on, and they say that she’s got a good possibility of making it, though she’s lost most of one kidney and her spleen.”
“I gotta get up there.”
“See ya,” Mapes said.
HE TOLD BAUER ABOUT IT, and she asked, “What does this mean?”
“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “I’ll call you and tell you, when I find out.”
HE GOT TO THE AIRPORT before Wayne, and called Sanders, the sheriff, who was driving back toward Grand Rapids from Bigfork, where he’d been looking for Little Linda, and asked, “How is Washington connected to the Eagle Nest?”
“As far as I can tell, she’s not,” Sanders said. “Her husband said neither one of them has ever been there.”
“Her husband—so she’s not gay?” Virgil asked.
“Not gay or bi, either one,” Sanders said. “At least, that’s what I believe, from knowing each other all our lives.”
“Does she know Wendy?”
“Probably. Most people do. I asked James—he’s the husband—and he said they don’t know her well. Know her to see her on the street. They don’t go to the Goose.”
“Gotta be something there,” Virgil said. “This shooting is different enough that if we can see the connection, we’ll know who did it.”
“We’ll ask her when she wakes up,” Sanders said. “The thing I thought was, if she was shot because she knows something about all this, and she lived, maybe the guy’ll try again. So I got three people around her. They’ll stay long as it takes.”
“Good idea, man. Listen, I’m heading that way. Talk to you in the morning,” Virgil said.
HE GOT UP IN THE AIR with Wayne, called Davenport, filled him in, and took a call from Zoe: “Have you heard?” she asked.
“Yeah, I heard. How did you hear?”
“Everybody in town knows,” Zoe said. “There were only about ten deputies out there, and they’re blabbing all over the place. They say your crime-scene crew said it’s the same guy who shot Erica.”
“Could be. Damnit. You know anything about this woman?”
“Works in a candy store. She’s more Sig’s age than mine, but she seemed nice enough. Her husband works at the golf course, and they organized a deal to put some cross-country ski tracks around the course in the winter, and Jan raised the money for a tracking machine. She just seems . . . nice.”
“Is she part of the gay community up there?”
“Oh, God, no. And I’d know. Nope. She was not—is not,” Zoe said.
“Maybe I’ll stop by Sig’s when I get up there. Think she’d know any more?” Virgil asked.
“No, but I wouldn’t doubt that she’d like to tell you what she knows.”
She said it with a little snap, and Virgil thought, Uh-oh. And didn’t pursue it. “Okay. Well, see you up there. Probably coming in late.”
THEY WERE BACK in St. Paul before dark, landing into the setting sun, the prop beating through the pulsing orange starfire as they touched down. Virgil thanked Wayne, threw his bag in his truck, and drove over to the BCA headquarters on Maryland Avenue, climbed the stairs and walked back to Davenport’s office, checked his secretary’s desk. A file folder sat squarely in the middle of the work space, and Virgil was scrawled across the folder with a Sharpie.
He opened it and found a single piece of paper, with a name, Barbara Carson, and an address in Grand Rapids, attached to the number that had been called once. The other number, which Constance had called three times, was for the Eagle Nest.
On the way out the door, he ran into the BCA’s resident th
ugs, Jenkins and Shrake, coming through the door. They were both big guys, in sharp suits and thick-soled shoes, whose faces had been broken a few times. Jenkins said, “It’s that fuckin’ Flowers.”
Shrake asked, “Has he got on one of those fruity musical shirts?”
Jenkins looked at it and said, “Hard to tell. It says, ‘Breeders.’ ”
Shrake: “Christ, if he’s breeding, now, we gotta find a way to stop it.”
Jenkins: “I read your stories in The New York Times, and I was wondering, could I have your autograph?”
“Envy is a sad thing to see,” Virgil said. “But I suppose my proximity might bring a little joy into your humble lives.”
“Weren’t you dating a little Joy a couple of years ago? Played sandlot beach-ball bingo or some shit?” Jenkins asked.
“She was a professional beach volleyball player and was highly skilled,” Virgil said. “And her name was June, not Joy.”
“I believe the skilled part,” Jenkins said. “She looked like she had all sorts of skills.”
“A maestro on the skin flute,” Shrake said.
“The old pink piccolo,” Jenkins added.
Shrake asked, “So what’s happening up north? You figure it out?”
“It’s a little nuts,” Virgil said. He gave them a quick outline of the situation, and they all drifted over to a snack machine behind the atrium and rattled some coins through it, dropping out bags of corn chips. Virgil realized he hadn’t eaten since lunch, and was close to starvation.
When he finished telling them about the two shootings, Shrake said, “You know, you’re right. It is nuts. You’ve got a nut. One of your problems is, none of this other stuff—the lesbians, the resort, the band, Wendy—might have anything to do with it. Even the murder down in Iowa. It might just be some weird high school kid with a rifle, getting his rocks off.”