Deadline (8 page)

V
IRGIL 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.”

—

T
HAT FUCKIN’
F
LOWERS
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.”

“If he backed it up on a flash drive or a Time Capsule, it probably went with the computer,” Virgil said.

“Flash drives are so last year,” Johnson said. “I wonder what the chances are that he stuck them up in the Cloud?”

“Hmm. Maybe Sandy could find out for me,” Virgil said. “I knew there was some reason I hung out with you.”

“You mean, besides attracting women that you can make a run at?”

“Yeah. Besides that.”

—

A
TRUCK ROLLED
into the yard, and they both looked out the window. “It’s Clarice,” Johnson said. “I called her and told her to meet me here.”

Clarice came in a moment later and said, “Goddamnit, Johnson, you been reading again, without your Chapstick.” She looked at Virgil, who was looking down her cleavage again. Clarice was on
her way to Friday’s, and looked, Virgil thought . . . nice. “His lips get chapped when he reads too much.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Virgil said. “You look . . . nice.”

“Especially with her tits out to here,” Johnson said.

Clarice’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t have tits, if you’ll just excuse the shit out of me, Johnson. I have breasts.”

Johnson agreed that she did, indeed, and Virgil nodded in agreement, and she and Johnson went out the door. “Don’t let those pictures get out of sight,” Johnson said. “They are something.”

—

W
HEN THEY WERE GONE,
Virgil called Sandy back and asked her to start working on the Cloud concept. “Gonna need subpoenas and all that,” she said.

“I’ll leave that to all you large brains back at HQ,” Virgil said. “Let me know what happens.”

—

V
IRGIL WENT BACK
to his computer and read the e-mails that Sandy had sent earlier, the details on Conley and Laughton. When he was done, he got a Leinenkugel’s from the refrigerator, kicked back on the glider, and thought about it. Was it really possible that Conley had discovered a case of public corruption, and had been killed to cover it up? If so, how big would the conspiracy have to be? How many people would have had to know about the planned killing? Had it been one guy, panicked, who decided to solve the problem? Or had it been several people?

As soon as Johnson mentioned the possibility of a big public
organization, Virgil had thought of Bill Don Fuller, who’d seen Conley getting into his car in the predawn darkness, right there by the high school. . . .

He was still thinking about it when Frankie called and spent a half hour keeping him up on the happenings around the farm, and her architectural salvage business. Her second-oldest boy had taken his girlfriend up the Minnesota River to an island where he knew there were lots of raspberries, and he and his girlfriend had picked four quarts, and in the process, had gotten two of the worst cases of poison ivy in the history of poison ivy.

“They had to go into the clinic to get special stuff. Tall Bear is bad enough, but poor old Tricia went back in the bushes to pee. . . .”

“Ah, God . . .”

“Yup. Won’t have to worry about Tall Bear knockin’ her up for a month or so. Anyway, the Bronsons are over cutting hay, be nice if you could be home when we’re doing this sometime. You missed all of last year and the first cut this year when you had to go out to Windom.”

“We weren’t seeing each other last year,” Virgil said. “And you know how much I love baling hay. I’d give anything to be there with you.”

“I’m beginning to suspect you’re not telling the whole truth about that.”

“Aw, Frankie . . .”

If Virgil were given a choice between following a hay wagon around a field, throwing bales, on a hot summer day, or dropping his testicles into a bear trap, he’d have to think about it. They were still talking when another call chirped in. Gomez.

“Gotta go, Frankie. Gomez is on the line. We could be moving on the meth—”

“You be careful! Take your gun!”

“Yep. Call you back.” He clicked off and answered Gomez’s call. “What’s up?”

“They’re cooking,” Gomez said. “We’re moving in on them. If you want to come along, get down by that bridge in the next fifteen minutes.”

“I’m coming. Wait for me.”

—

V
IRGIL RAN OUT
to his truck, missing a porch step and nearly falling on his face. Night had settled in since he’d started talking with Johnson. On his way north, he called Frankie back and said, “Yeah, the feds are going in. I won’t be on the front line, though.”

“Call me back and tell me what happened. I won’t sleep until you call.”

“Could be late.”

“Call me.”

Kind of an odd feeling, he thought, having a woman who wanted to know where you were, and what you were doing, and wanted daily updates. Virgil had been married, very briefly, three times, and he couldn’t actually remember any of the other three worrying about where he was; he could remember wondering where the hell they were.

Another interesting thing about Frankie, Virgil thought, was that she had no problem with him going face-to-face with people who carried guns. Unlike some cops’ wives and girlfriends, she didn’t
pay much attention to possible negative consequences. She herself liked excitement, and she liked guys who liked excitement, and she thought his job was exciting.