Deadline (19 page)

They said they would, and they’d start pulling the school apart. The deputy said he’d roust the rest of the force and have them all there in twenty minutes or so, and that the sheriff was on the way.

“We need to find Randall Kerns—it’s ninety percent that he’s the killer,” Virgil said. “That he’s the shooter. But you gotta be careful. . . .”

Virgil was still talking when an EMT pushed him to the ambulance, and they started down the main drag.

—

T
HERE WAS ONLY ONE
doc on duty at the clinic, and he was trying to remove a fishbone from the throat of a young girl. He stopped doing that for a moment to look at Virgil’s wound, and said, “It’s either not bad at all, or it’s terrible, but either way, it won’t make any difference if I take the bone out of this kid’s throat first.”

Virgil said, “Yeah, go ahead,” and the doc spent two minutes extracting the bone. The girl’s worried father walked back and forth in front of the bay where the work was going on, and every time he passed Virgil, he said, “I’m sorry about this, I’m sorry about this.”

When the bone was out, the doc gave it to the kid as a trophy, and a nurse took them away to get the insurance information, and the doc put Virgil in another bay, said, “Shoot, I thought I might get to do some brain surgery. I guess not.”

“I love medical humor,” Virgil said.

The doc got a needle and some anesthetic, killed the nerves around the wound, made a couple minor skin snips with a pair of surgical scissors, and picked the splinter out, all the time questioning Virgil about the shoot-out. When the wound was clean, the doc killed
three bleeders with a cautery, which smelled like wet burning chicken feathers, and sewed him up. “Fourteen stitches, and very skillfully done for a small-town hospital,” he said. “Who’s gonna pay?”

Virgil called Shrake for a ride back to the school, and was told Bacon hadn’t shown up, either dead or alive, but the school was a nightmare of nooks and crannies. “This could take all night.”

“Then we take all night,” Virgil said.

“Uh, by the way, somebody might have mentioned this to Frankie.”

“Goddamnit, Shrake—”

“Hey, it wasn’t me who called her, but if Jenkins hadn’t, I would have—a guy gets shot, the old lady gets to know about it. I told her it didn’t look too bad, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she showed up—”

“Goddamnit, Shrake—”

“He told her you’d been hit in the head. She said, ‘Thank God, if it’d been in his dick, it would have killed both of us.’”

Virgil: “She did not.”

“No, but it’s a good story and I plan to tell people she did,” Shrake said. “I’ll see you in five minutes, if I actually know where the clinic is. I think I do.”

“Yeah, it has a big brightly lit sign on the front, and it says ‘Clinic.’ You can’t miss it.”

T
HE CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY
—the school board—called an emergency rump session at Jennifer 1’s house, attended by Randy Kerns, the three Jennifers, Vike Laughton, and Henry Hetfield, the school superintendent.

They immediately fell into a screaming brawl.

Kerns started it: “. . . so I know that fucking Bacon was up to something. He came into the meeting, which he never does, and he did something with his hand, which I didn’t know what it was, but I thought he might have took a picture or a remote control or something, I couldn’t tell what. Anyway, I hung around afterward, when everybody was gone, and he brings this ladder over and he climbs up into the lights and takes down a movie camera—I think he filmed the whole thing, the whole meeting after the meeting.”

He was carrying a gym bag. He put it by his feet, dipped inside
and came up with the camera. “I don’t know how to work it, but it’s got a tag that says, ‘Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’ on the side of it. That goddamned Flowers must have gotten Bacon to put it up there in the rafters. To do that, he had to get a warrant. To get a warrant, he had to have some evidence, and pretty good evidence, too.”

“Well, what’d you do?” Jennifer Gedney asked. “If Will wants money, we could all chip in . . .”

Kerns shook his head. “Couldn’t take the chance.”

They all looked at him aghast. Jennifer 2 said, “You didn’t . . .”

“I had to,” he said. “But that’s not the worst of it.”

Vike had launched himself from his chair and shouted, “Well, Jesus Christ, what could be worse?”

Kerns said, “The BCA guy, Virgil Flowers, showed up. I thought our only chance—”

Henry Hetfield said, “Oh, no, no, no no . . . you didn’t kill a police officer.”

Kerns said, “I tried, but the problem is, I didn’t. And if he doesn’t know who I am tonight, he will in a week.”

He told them about following Flowers up into the school attic, to some kind of hideout. “I don’t know what’s up there, but there’s a room, and there are lights. I think Bacon built himself some kind of hidey-hole, or maybe even a whole private room up there, because Flowers went straight up there. We got in a gunfight. I couldn’t get at him, he was barricaded in, he’d called nine-one-one so I had to run for it. He never saw me, but . . .”

He rolled up the sleeve of his long-sleeved shirt and showed a large bandage. “He shot through the walls and I got hit by a big splinter. The thing is, I was bleeding pretty hard, and I think I
probably left some blood behind. If I did . . . they’ll get the DNA, and I’m cooked.”

Vike had stumbled back into his chair, where he said, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus, Oh, Jesus . . .”

Jennifer Barns recovered first: “What do you want from us?”

Kerns said, “It takes time to do DNA—a few days, anyway. I’ve got cash stuck away in a safe-deposit box in the Cities, and I can get to that. I’ve got a few thousand in my truck. You all know I used most of the money to buy a place up on Lake of the Woods. I can make it across the border, all right, I’ve got a new name up there. But I gotta leave everything behind, even my truck. So what I want from you all is money. I know you all got cash, we talked about it. What I want is, I want fifty grand from every one of you. One of you can get it all together, next month, and I’ll meet you someplace up north and come get it.”

Gedney asked, “You’re gonna leave tonight?”

“I got to,” Kerns said. He rolled his sleeve down, fumbling with the cuff button. “I’m afraid they’re all looking for me right now. I can sneak up to the Cities, I think, back roads, get to the bank tomorrow morning, get the money, unless they already got me on TV. I’m going to have to leave the truck there, and go north in a fuckin’ bus. My problem is, they might have my blood, and they sure as hell know I’ve been cut up—and that would be enough to hold me until the DNA comes back. I gotta go. I gotta run.”

They argued about the necessity for flight, and Kerns convinced them: no other way out. He had a Canadian ID and passport with a different name, he said, so crossing the border wouldn’t be a
problem. “I can ditch myself up in Kenora, grow a beard, stay close to the cabin, and in a year or so, sell out and go far away. But I need the money. I need the cash, until I can establish myself up there.”

Henry Hetfield said, “Leaves the rest of us in the lurch.”

“That depends,” Kerns said. “We burned all the records. You can afford good attorneys—and you can blame the killings all on me. I’m done anyway, if they’ve got that blood. And they will find Bacon’s body, sooner or later—if not right away, when he starts to . . . smell.”

Jennifer Houser: “I can’t believe this. I can’t.”

Kerns: “Where’d you put your money?”

She shook her head: “I’d never tell you that. But it’s safe. And I’ll chip in fifty thousand, that’s not a problem.”

“If any of you run, they’ll know for sure you’re guilty,” Kerns said.

Another argument flared: Jennifer Houser and Kerns and they thought Del Cray, the finance officer, who wasn’t there, might be able to run. The others, for one reason or another, were anchored by their money. Couldn’t run with it, if it was all in stocks and bonds or real estate, but couldn’t run without it, either.

“All they’ve got now is Randy,” Houser said. “The fire took out most of the other evidence. And Randy did most of the talking to outsiders, like that bus driver. We can still blame this all on him . . . that he set up a ring. But if I were you, I’d start cashing in stocks and bonds. If Flowers gets any closer, we might have to run ourselves.”

To Kerns, she said, “I’m willing to pay you the money—but you’ve got to swear, right here, that you’ll take the blame for all
these crazy killings if you do get caught. And the money, too. You won’t try to spread the blame around. You’ll get a half million dollars from us, and you’ll get a chance . . . but you can’t turn on us, if you get caught.”

“If I get caught, there’s no profit in trying to spread the blame,” Kerns said. “You get me the cash, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

They argued about that some more, and Vike said he had twenty thousand stashed at his house, but he couldn’t get more for quite a while—“I put all the money in Tucson real estate after the bust.”

Jennifer Houser said, “From what Randy says, this roof isn’t likely to fall in for at least a few days. That gives us some time. Let’s just stay calm, but prepare.”

Kerns said that he would be in touch with all of them, in a week, to set up a meeting. “Your lives are hanging by my thread,” Kerns said. “If you get me that money, I’ve got a real good chance of getting away. If not, that cuts my chances way down. You don’t get it to me, and I get caught, I’ll drag every one of you motherfuckers into the shit with me.”

They all swore they would.

—

J
ENNIFER
H
OUSER LOOKED UP
at the sky as she walked out to her car, a clear night, lots of stars, a good night for driving. A thrill ran through her, raising goose bumps down her arms. The whole scheme was coming down around their ears. It had worked well, for a long time—longer than she had originally expected it to. But she had always known this day would come, and she was ready for it.

Like Kerns, she had an alternative identity, one that had once belonged to her late sister-in-law. She could be in Chicago by early morning, in Belize City by midday.

Belize was a good place for an American to hang out, because English was the official language, and for people with money, Belize was extremely slow to extradite. A logical place for her to go, if anyone managed to trace her that far.

But the best thing was, it was a great red herring. Getting across the Mexican border from Belize was not a huge problem. She knew that, because she’d done it, on a practice run.

After several tiring bus rides, Jennifer 2, in less than a week, would be settling into her apartment in Gringo Gulch in Puerto Vallarta, where everybody knew her as that nice middle-aged Lucy lady, from Virginia, who wore wide-brimmed straw hats and liked to sail and bicycle and get giddy on daiquiris and fuck younger Mexican men.

Houser had some other ideas. Uneaten toast in a toaster, uneaten egg in a skillet, undrunk milk in a glass, a smear of her blood on the kitchen floor . . .

Kerns wouldn’t see a dime from her. She was gone.

—

K
ERNS LEFT.
He looked up at the sky and the stars as he walked down the driveway and got in his truck. He had to take it slow going up to the Cities, he thought. Hide the truck in a parking ramp in St. Paul, get some sleep, get up in the morning, go to the bank, never look back. He had a bag in the back of the truck with everything he
needed to travel: he was leaving behind a house with a mortgage and some decent equity that he’d never see, but he wouldn’t see it in Stillwater Prison, either.

Vike walked out behind him, shook his hand. “You got enough cash?”

“I got some, as long as I can get to the bank box tomorrow. Most of it’s up in Canada. If I can just get up there, get out to my island, I’m okay.”

“I could give you a few thousand right now, if that would help.”

“That would help. If they put me on TV tonight, I’ll just have to keep going north.”

The others followed them out, at intervals of a half-minute or so. Nobody said good-bye to anyone else.

Jennifer Barns and Henry Hetfield walked out separately and separately looked at the sky and asked themselves,

“Is this the end?”

E
VERY LIGHT IN
the school was on when they got back. Shrake called ahead to say that Virgil had survived, and the sheriff was waiting in the school doorway where Virgil had broken in.

“You sure Bacon’s in here?” he asked.

“I talked to him on the phone. He said he’d jam the door open for me, and go pull a surveillance camera out of the little auditorium. That was maybe eight, ten minutes before I got here. When I got here, the door was locked, the paper he was gonna jam it with was by the door, and he and the camera were gone.”

“Surveillance camera?”

“Yeah. The school board here has been stealing the school system blind—that’s just between you and me and Shrake and Jenkins, for the time being.”

The sheriff looked as though somebody had hit him between the eyes with a plank. “I know the board, I mean . . . How sure . . . ?”

“I think their security guy is the one who shot Conley and Zorn—Zorn for no other reason than to pull me away from the schools. Conley had cracked the whole thing, and he was planning to publish it. I think he made the mistake of telling Vike Laughton about it.”

“Vike . . .” The sheriff turned away and stared sightlessly across the parking lot. “Hate to say it, but I can believe Kerns and Vike. I’m having trouble with all the Jennifers. You think the fire . . . ?”

“The fire was set to destroy the district’s financial records. I can guarantee they’re not up in a Cloud, somewhere. They were melted. But Conley got copies of enough of them to hang them all. Now, Sheriff, you’re an okay guy, but this ring has feelers all over town. You’d do best not to mention this to anyone, not until I figure out how to pull them in. Kerns is out there with a rifle, and he did his best to kill me tonight, and we can’t find Bacon. He won’t hesitate to shoot a deputy, or a sheriff.”

“We gotta find that sucker.”

“Yes, we do. But first we’ve got to find Bacon. I keep hoping that he’s locked up somewhere.”

“We’re tearing the place apart.”

“Let me look.”

—

T
HERE WERE EIGHT COPS
walking the school. A sergeant who seemed to know what he was doing had them run all the obvious places in a hurry, which had taken twenty minutes or so, he told Virgil.

Then they’d backtracked, and were doing the whole place inch by inch.

“The shooter knows the building,” Virgil said. “He could have stuck him someplace weird.”

With the deputies doing the search better than he could, Virgil took Jenkins, Shrake, and Alewort, the sheriff’s crime-scene guy, up to the attic. Jenkins and Shrake had to bend their necks to walk down to Bacon’s apartment. Virgil spotted the shooter’s blood for Alewort, who began doing his crime-scene routine, and Virgil led Shrake and Jenkins into the apartment.

“Holy shit,” Jenkins said. He was looking at the splintered walls. “You were in here? You’re living right, Virgil—brick walls on the outside, you should have been killed three times by ricochets.”

“Or splintered to death,” Jenkins said. He tipped his finger at the side of one of Bacon’s bookcases, which had three six-inch splinters embedded in the wood, like straws in a telephone pole after a tornado.

Virgil explained how he’d huddled down at the far end of the room, stretched on the floor with the book boxes on the other side. “He couldn’t get the angle on me,” Virgil said. “I got lucky.”

—

T
HEY LEFT
A
LEWORT
to do his work and went back to the auditorium, where Virgil climbed the ladder to make sure the camera was really gone, although he was sure that it was. When he got to the top, he saw that it was, indeed, gone; and then turned and looked down at the stage, where he saw five bumps arrayed across it, four small and one a bit taller and longer.

A phrase popped into his head: prompter box.

And he thought something he should have thought of sooner: in the small space of ten minutes, Kerns wouldn’t have had time to kill Bacon and carry him all over the school. He would have hidden him quickly, if, in fact, he’d killed him.

And if he knew every nook and cranny . . .

With a growing dread, he backed down the ladder in a hurry, and then hustled over to the stage, hopped up on it, walked over to the prompter box, and looked down into it. The opening in the box was only a foot high and three feet wide, big enough for perhaps two people. He looked down into it, but couldn’t see anything.

Shrake: “What you got?”

“How do you get down into this?”

Jenkins looked at the outside of the box, down below the stage level, facing the audience, and said, “Nothing on this side. Must go under the stage.”

They found a trapdoor on the left side of the stage, half-covered with a pile of ropes and canvas. “It’s been moved,” Virgil said. “Let’s pull it off.”

“Could be prints and DNA,” Shrake said.

“So don’t touch the pile, push it off with your shoes.”

They did that, and Shrake pulled up the handle set into the trapdoor, and then lifted the trapdoor on its hinges. A set of narrow stairs went to the area under the stage, a space perhaps five feet deep.

Will Bacon’s body was crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.

“Ah, shit!” Virgil went down the stairs, clumsily stepping over the body. “We need a light, get a light.”

Jenkins shouted at a deputy, and a minute later Jenkins dropped down the stairs with a Maglite.

Bacon was dead. His head looked like he’d been beaten with a baseball bat, or a fat pipe of some kind, his shiny broken teeth grinning up at them through a mass of pulped flesh, bone, and blood.

Virgil looked down at him, locked his hands on top of his head, and started rocking back and forth, unbelieving, and Jenkins was saying, Virgil-Virgil-Virgil, and then Jenkins said, “Shrake, get him out of here, he’s fucked up.”

—

V
IRGIL WAS LOCKED UP
for a while, sitting in a chair in the auditorium, remembering and replaying his meeting with Bacon, thinking that Bacon was a good guy making a tough way in the world, and that he’d been killed because Virgil hadn’t taken enough care. Because Virgil worked alone, he tended sometimes to lean on civilians; other cops had thought that was weird, but that was because they fundamentally didn’t trust civilians, it wasn’t because they’d get the civilians killed.

Virgil was somewhat aware of the arrival of a doctor, who went down the stairs and said what everybody already knew, that Bacon was dead. Alewort then kicked everybody out of the space around the trapdoor.

But Virgil didn’t pay much attention for a while, just sat and rocked back and forth, and then Jenkins came over and slapped him on the back and asked, “How you doin’, buddy?”

Virgil nodded, more of a body-humping than a real nod, and
said, “I am kinda fucked up. I killed that guy, and he was a good guy. Jesus. I just—”

“We got shit to do, so pucker up,” Jenkins said. “The sheriff’s department has a deal with the medical examiner over in Rochester. We’re thinking that might be the way to go—”

“Whatever. We gotta find Kerns.”

“The whole sheriff’s department is looking for him. We’ve got the highway patrol looking for his truck. They been over to his house, but it’s dark. Don’t know if we have enough to get a warrant, since you never saw him.”

“I gotta think,” Virgil said. “I gotta go somewhere and think.”

“The cabin,” Jenkins said. “Shrake went over there with a couple of deputies. We thought that crazy as he is, he might have been making a last run at you, but there’s nobody there. We’re going to keep a couple of cops there overnight, just to make sure. And we’re putting a couple cars on Kerns’s place until we get a warrant figured out, and I’ve called back to St. Paul for a crime-scene crew. They can be here in three hours, but that’s about as good as they can do.”

—

W
HEN THEY WERE SURE
that the sheriff had everything handled, Virgil and Jenkins drove over to the cabin in Virgil’s truck. A cop car was sitting on the entrance road, Jenkins’s Crown Vic was parked beside the house, blocking the driveway, and Johnson’s travel vehicle, an enormous GMC Tahoe XL, was parked on the front lawn, between the water and the porch. Virgil parked behind the Crown Vic, and he and Jenkins walked around the collection of vehicles and up on the porch, where Shrake and Johnson were waiting.

“You’re better protected than the fuckin’ president,” Johnson said. He gestured at his truck and said, “We thought he might come up by boat and take a potshot from the water, so we’re blocking out the door with the truck.”

Virgil nodded and said, “Thanks,” and they all went inside and sat on a long couch and a couple of chairs and Shrake asked, “You okay?”

“Pretty unhappy,” Virgil said. “But I’m not gonna start chewing on the rug.”

“Good thing, too, when you think about what’s been on that rug,” Johnson said. “We’d like to know that you’re functioning again.”

“Yeah, I’m good.”

The side window lit up, with headlights bouncing down the rough road, and Johnson asked, “Who’re we expecting?”

“Don’t know,” Jenkins said.

The approaching car stopped, and a second later the door slammed, and Virgil said, “That sounds like Frankie’s truck door.”

Shrake and Jenkins both had weapons in their hands when Frankie came through the front door carrying a backpack and a well-used Remington pump shotgun. She looked at them and said, “I give up.”

Everybody had something to say, but Frankie ignored them and came to Virgil and said, “Sit down and let me look at your head.”

“Ah, my head’s okay,” Virgil said.

“Sit the fuck down, and let me look at your head. What’d they do, take a bullet out?”

“Splinter,” Virgil said. “Not too bad. Besides, I got a lot bigger problem.”

—

V
IRGIL HADN’T HAD
a chance since the shooting to tell everything that had happened in one coherent story. He did it now, starting with his talk with the bus driver, the connection with Will Bacon and the secret apartment, the delivery of the camera and microphone, and finally, the call from Bacon before he was killed.

They all thought about the story for a few minutes, then Frankie said, “I’m not a cop, but I’m probably the smartest person in the room, and I’ve got some ideas.”

“Let’s hear them,” Shrake said.

“If this killer man, if he knows he left blood behind, then he knows the jig’s up for him. I would expect that he’s either running, or he’s holed up somewhere with a lot of guns. Or maybe he makes a run at Virgil out of revenge, or something crazy, but you’ve got all of that covered. Everybody’s looking for him, and we’ve got guys out in the driveway with guns, and guns in here. Right?”

Virgil nodded. “That’s right.”

“So you can ignore all that—nothing more you can do there. The question is, what can you do?”

Everybody looked at Virgil, and finally he said, “Bust the rest of them. Okay. I need to make a phone call.”

He took his phone out, called directory assistance, got a number for Janice Anderson, the woman who’d given him the school budget, and punched it in. She answered on the third ring, sounding cranky. “Who is this?”

“Virgil Flowers. Something terrible happened at the school tonight. I’ve got to ask, were you at the meeting?”

“Just a minute, let me put the light on, I can’t talk in the dark,” she said. A few seconds later she said, “Yes, I was at the meeting. What happened?”

“After the meeting, somebody killed Will Bacon, the janitor. I need to tell you, you’ve got to keep your head down. Don’t tell anyone you talked to me, don’t even hint that there’s a connection.”

“I’ve kept my mouth shut,” she said.

“Good. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to go on a shopping trip up to the Twin Cities, maybe stay over for a couple of nights.”

“You really think that’s necessary?”

“It would be helpful—I wouldn’t have to worry about you. I think Randall Kerns is the killer, and he’s crazy. We’re looking for him, but he’s out in the wind somewhere. I’d be a lot happier if you were out of sight.”

“Okay. I haven’t been to the Cities for a while, I’ll go first thing in the morning.”

“That would be smart,” Virgil said. “Now, was the auditor, Masilla . . . was he at the meeting?”

“No. He’s hardly ever there.”

“But Hetfield was.”

“Oh, sure, he had to be, he’s the superintendent, he’s, you know . . . he runs things, and with the fire . . . they had their insurance agent there, and all that, figuring out what to do, and whether they’d have to delay the start of school and so on.”

“Okay. I’m going after those two, just like we talked about in your backyard. If you will take care—”

“I’ve got a gun in my nightstand, and I will leave for the Cities as soon as it gets light.”

“Good night, Janice.”

“Good night, Virgil. You take care, too.”

Virgil hung up, and looked at the others: “Here’s the plan: Jenkins, Shrake, and I are going up to Winona tomorrow, and we’re going to scare the living shit out of a guy.”

“I like that plan,” Jenkins said. He interlaced his fingers out in front of himself, and cracked all his knuckles.

—

V
IRGIL’S HEAD WAS
beginning to hurt again, and they all went off to their various beds, leaving Virgil and Frankie alone in the cabin. Frankie said Virgil was too injured and tired for sex, but that a little bodily warmth never hurt anyone, so they wound up huddled together on an old-fashioned double bed, which was almost large enough for them, Frankie being a small woman.

They’d agreed to meet Jenkins and Shrake at nine-thirty at Ma and Pa’s Kettle for pancakes; they’d gone to bed late, and there was little point in killing themselves by getting up too early. Winona was an hour or so away, straight up the river, so if they left a little after ten, they’d catch Fred Masilla, of Masilla, Oder, Decker and Klandorst, Certified Public Accountants, Auditors and Consultants, shortly before lunch.

If he was available.

—

V
IRGIL WAS AWAKENED
at eight-thirty by an unexpected stimulus, and he groaned and said, “I thought I was too injured for sex,” and
Frankie said, “I wouldn’t want to give you a pounding, but this is okay.”