Deadline

by John Sandford

  “Gotta waste some time on Conley, to keep up appearances,” Virgil said. “He was shot to death on a public highway.”

  After dropping Johnson, Virgil drove back to the cabin to take a shower and change clothes. He hadn’t wanted to stop at the house of Ralph Huntington, the name given to him by Ruff, to ask about the dogs, because Huntington lived almost across the road from Zorn.

  Instead, he called the number he’d gotten from Ruff, and when nobody answered, went to take his shower.

  Out of the shower, he ate a bowl of cereal and tried to figure out who might have a copy of the school district’s budget, other than the district itself. He called the Department of Education and got a runaround of such massive proportions that he finally gave up: his feeling was, they had one, but nobody knew where it was, and nobody was inclined to look for it.

  He talked to Sandy again. “I don’t want you to do anything illegal, but if you could take just the quickest peek inside the DOE’s computers, it’d be nice to find a digital copy of the Buchanan County Consolidated School’s annual budget. It ought to be in there somewhere.”

  “You try the public library down there in Trippton? They’d probably have one.”

  “I was just on my way there,” Virgil lied. “I wanted to get you started, in case they don’t have one.”

  “Liar,” she said.

  —

  THE PUBLIC LIBRARY had a librarian who caused Virgil, at first look, to think, Now, that’s a librarian. She was tall, her dark hair pulled back in a bun, and she had what Virgil’s mom called “a good figure.” She also wore rectangular gold-rimmed glasses. If she’d had an overbite, Virgil thought, the world would have been complete, but she didn’t.

  He came in, waited at the vacant librarian’s desk for a moment; the good-looking librarian glanced at him, then went back to filing something. Another librarian, a cheery short woman with a round face, started toward him from the magazine racks when the tall one finished filing and stepped back to the desk. “Looking for a quick read?”

  “Hmm, well, I’m actually looking for a copy of the, uh . . .” He couldn’t remember for a moment, then quickly filled in, “The, uh, budget for the school district.”

  “I don’t know if we’d have that,” she said.

  The round-faced woman, who’d arrived only a step behind the tall one, said, “Sure we do. But I think it’s checked out.”

  Virgil: “Checked out? Somebody checked out the school budget?”

  “I think so. Let me check the system.” She went over to the desktop computer and typed for a while, and then said, “Yup. It’s checked out.”

  “Could you tell me who’s got it?”

  “No, we’re not allowed to do that,” the tall one said.

  “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I’m investigating the Clancy Conley murder. I really would like to see that budget.”

  “I’m sorry. Still can’t. We would probably submit to a subpoena, but we’d have to have a board meeting to decide that,” the tall one said.

  “What?”

  “A board meeting,” she said. “We have a board made up of—”

  “I know what a board is. All I want to do is look at the godforsaken school budget for a couple of minutes.”

  The short one said, “If you leave your phone number, we could call the person who’s checked it out and see if she—”

  “Or he . . .” the tall one interjected.

  “Or he would be willing to return it. Then we could call you and you could come in and look at it.”

  “We just can’t give out our readers’ names to any police official who comes waltzing through here,” the tall one said.

  Virgil said, “Man . . . all I wanted . . .” The tall one gave him the bureaucrat’s death stare, and he folded. “All right, I’ll give you the number.”

  He gave the number to the tall one, and stalked out of the place, fuming. Thirty feet down the street, his phone rang, an unknown number. He answered: “Virgil Flowers.”

  “Hey, this is the chubby one, back at the library. Don’t ever let Virginia know I told you, because she can be an enormous pain in the ass, but it was borrowed by Janice Anderson. You want her address?”

  He did.

  The short one gave it to him, and added, “Janice is a little nuts, so go easy with her.”

  “How nuts? Does she carry a gun?”

  “No, no gun. A gun isn’t nuts, that’s just Monday in Trippton. Anyway, Janice thinks the school spends too much money on math, science, and sports, and not enough on the arts.”

  “That’s outrageous,” Virgil said.

  “Like I said, take it easy with her.”

  —

  JANICE ANDERSON was an elderly white-haired woman who came to the porch door leaning on a cane, and asked through the glass of a screen door in which the screen hadn’t been installed, “Who are you?”

  Virgil showed her his ID. He was wearing his cowboy boots, well polished, and a black sport coat over a vintage Guy Clark “Old Pair of Boots” T-shirt. He was carrying his briefcase. She looked at him, and the credentials, with some skepticism, but said politely, “Give me a moment.”

  She went away, and came back ninety seconds later and unlatched the door and said, “Come in.”

  “You found somebody to vouch for me?”

  “The sheriff. He said you looked like a hippie who’s lost the faith, or a cowboy who’s lost his horse. That fits.”

  “Remind me to shoot the sheriff,” Virgil said, as he stepped inside.

  “Say, isn’t that an old Eric Clapton song?”

  “I think it is,” Virgil said.

  “Bob Marley, too. Probably before your time,” she said. She took him into what once would have been called a parlor, and pointed at a couch with her cane, said, “Sit there,” and took a high-backed chair.

  Virgil sat down, his elbow falling on a couple of poetry collections edited by Garrison Keillor, which sat on a side table, atop a yellowed lace doily.

  “What can I do for you?” Anderson asked. “I didn’t know Clancy Conley, other than by sight.”

  “I need to look at the school budget,” Virgil said. He patted his briefcase. “I understand you checked it out of the library.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “The school budget? The state finally figured out what’s going on with all this science and math bullshit?”

  “No, no. I’m strictly working on the Conley case. Well, and a couple other things. But I need to look at the budget.”

  She used the cane to push herself up out of the chair, winced, and said, “Let me get it.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not. I cracked my hip a few months ago and it hasn’t quite healed,” she said.

  “Sorry to hear that,” Virgil said, as she limped toward the kitchen. “How’d you do it?”

  “I was skateboarding on the levee and lost my edges,” she said.

  “You were skateboarding?”

  She turned and looked at him and shook her head in exasperation: “No, you dummy, I fell. On the ice. On the sidewalk. Like old people do.”

  Virgil: “Oh.”

  She shook her head again. “Jesus wept.”

  —

  SHE BROUGHT BACK the school budget document, which was thinner than Virgil expected, thinner even than the sheaf of papers he was carrying—and since the papers were only part of somebody’s budget, it seemed unlikely that it was the school’s.

  Anderson watched him thumbing through the school document for a moment, then asked, “Exactly what are you looking for?”

  He thought about not answering, but couldn’t think of any good reason to do that. So he told her: “I found a bunch of photos of a spreadsheet in Conley’s camera, and I thought it was possible that it was th
e school district’s budget. But the budget just isn’t big enough.”

  “I know all about this stuff,” she said. “Let me look at the spreadsheets.”

  Virgil hesitated again, and said, “It’s gotta be just between you and me.”

  “I can keep a secret,” Anderson said.

  “Good, because one guy has already been murdered,” Virgil said. “I’d hate to find out that your hip was better, but your neck was broken.”

  “Give me the spreadsheets.”

  She took them, thumbed through the stack of prints, and said, “Yes, this is the school. What you’re looking at here is the specific line-item list of everything they buy. The budget itself is not so specific—but the title headings are the same for each section. Look here . . .”

  She pointed out that the names for the various sections were identical, and in the same order. “Of course, it’s possible that this is a standard form, so every school in the state would use the same section names . . . but I don’t think so. I think this is the Buchanan County budget.”

  “You know who the auditor is?” Virgil asked.

  “Fred Masilla. He’s with Masilla, Oder, Decker and Somebody Else up in Winona.”

  “You know how long he’s been working for the schools?”

  “Nope. But a pretty long time,” Anderson said. “You think he’s a crook?”

  “Do you?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out,” she said. “If there’s something funny going on with the school money, he’d pretty much have to know about it.”

  “Then he sounds like the guy to talk to,” Virgil said.

  “Shouldn’t you have something to hold over his head before you do that?”

  “I already do. It’s called selective immunity—he pleads guilty and turns state’s evidence, and we give him a break on the sentence.”

  “What if he tells you to take a hike?”

  “They don’t usually do that,” Virgil said, “because by the time we ask them, we’ve already got enough to hang them with. We don’t negotiate, and we don’t give them a second chance if they turn us down the first time.”

  “Sounds like a nasty business, but not uninteresting,” she said.

  “Thank you for the uninteresting,” Virgil said. “Too many people would have said disinteresting.”

  “Do I look like a fuckin’ moron?”

  —

  WHEN VIRGIL LEFT ANDERSON’S, he was confident that he’d found at least a piece of the story that Conley had been working on. Thinking about Conley got him thinking about the crime-scene work at Conley’s trailer, and he called Paul Alewort, the sheriff department’s crime-scene specialist, and asked if he was done processing the trailer.

  “Yeah, we finished late last night. Got nothing for you. The only thing that’s not quite right is that missing laptop—didn’t find anything that might suggest where it is. Was he killed for it? Beats me.”

  “Could I get in to take another look at the place?”

  “Sure. Are you in town?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m at the office. Stop by and I’ll give you a key.”

  —

  VIRGIL PICKED UP the key and drove up to Conley’s trailer, let himself in. The place was a mess: Alewort had warned him that they’d torn it apart. Everything had been taken from every drawer and closet, and piled on every flat surface: tables, countertops, bed, and floor. Virgil poked through the detritus of Conley’s life: dozens of movies, including a half-dozen girl-on-girl pornos, a hundred music CDs, mostly grunge and punk, stacks of paid bills and newspaper clippings of stories he’d written, a two-foot-high stack of printouts of stories, a shelf of science fiction novels, all in paperback. A tangled mass of computer cables and accessories had all been stuffed in a plastic box. A jar of pennies sat on the floor next to the bed.

  Virgil poured the pennies on the floor and found nothing but lots of pennies. He scooped them back into the jar. On one of the tables he found a half box of .38 shells; both the box and the shells looked new.

  That was interesting, because it suggested that Conley had bought the shells for a new threat, but what Virgil really needed was a more substantial account of the story that Conley was working. There was nothing at all in the printouts—and he couldn’t find any reporter’s notebooks. He’d seen some at Laughton’s place, with spiral binding at the top, like narrow steno notebooks.

  After an hour he gave up, but left with the feeling that the place had been cleaned out by somebody. Who might have access to Conley’s keys? The landlord, for sure, but . . .

  He liked Vike Laughton for it. If Conley had ever left his keys on his desk, Laughton could have walked down to the hardware store and duplicated the key. If he ever came up with more evidence, Virgil would talk to the people who ran the store.

  Outside, he looked down into the valley for a minute or two, looking for deer. Saw squirrels, but no deer. He gave a push to the tire swing as he went by, got in the truck, and headed back to town.

  —

  ON THE WAY, he called a friend at the state attorney general’s office and asked about the possibility of a surprise audit of the Buchanan County school system, based on a limited amount of evidence of embezzlement.

  His friend said, “We could do that, but it’ll be a while.”

  “How long is a while?”

  “A few months. The department that does that kind of a thing is always jammed up. Not a lot of money for investigating politicians. If you know what I mean.”

  “It could be tied to a murder,” Virgil said.

  “How strong is the tie?”

  “Somewhat strong.”

  “Give me a call back when it’s really strong, and I’ll go talk to the AG.”

  —

  HE CALLED JOHNSON, who said, “I’m in the office. Come on by.”

  He went on by, and found Johnson sitting on a battered leather couch, feet up, watching a Moonshine Bandits video called “Dive Bar Beauty Queen.” Johnson pointed a longneck Leinie’s at the TV screen and said, “This is the future of American music, right here.”

  “Certainly explains your attachment to a band called Dog Butt.”

  “So you’re telling me that this isn’t the future of American music?”

  Virgil watched the rest of the video and then said, “No, I wouldn’t tell you that. You may be right. You ought to go out and buy some Moonshine Bandit stock.”

  “Would if I could,” Johnson said. Then, “What about the dogs?”

  “I was gonna ask you—what about the dog guys? I hope they’re not pushing my luck.”

  “Something’s gonna happen there, Virgil. I’ll keep you up on it, best I can, but they know we’re friends. They might stop talking to me.”

  “Do what you can. I’m gonna go jack up the sheriff, see if he’ll put another guy on it.”

  —

  PURDY WAS RELUCTANT. “What’s one guy going to do? You went up there this morning and didn’t find anything.”

  “I’m just hoping to keep the posse from going freelance.”

  “Well, if you hear anything like that going on, give me a call and we’ll get on it. I’ll have Bongo keep an ear to the ground, too. He knows all those guys.”

  —

  BY THE TIME he left the sheriff’s office, it was getting late. He decided to swing past Buster Gedney’s house, to put a little more squeeze on him. When he got there, the house was dark: nobody home. The squeeze was going to have to wait.

  The town was closing down for the evening, and there wasn’t much more he could do. He went to Ma & Pa’s Kettle for a light dinner, and then Johnson called and said that he and Clarice were going to an art film at the Masonic Lodge; Virgil went and it turned out to be Mulholland Drive.

  At nine o’clock he felt his phone vibrating against his leg. Purdy was cal
ling. Virgil left as quietly as he could, and had just gotten to the vestibule when the message chime went off. He looked at it, and it was from Purdy and said: “Call me. Urgent.”

  He called.

  “Virgil. Goddamnit, you and those dog guys. You know that guy Zorn that you say was cookin’ that meth? And probably had something to do with the dogs?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He just got ambushed and shot to death on his driveway up on Orly’s Crick. Get your ass up there. I’m on the way.”

  11

  VIRGIL WAS AT the crime scene fifteen minutes after he went running out of the Masonic Lodge. Zorn’s body was lying at the bottom of his driveway, head aimed up the hill, feet down toward the street. An oval pool of blood on the pale cracked concrete extended down past his feet. The blood was black in the headlights of the cop cars. Zorn’s arms were folded beneath his body: it appeared that he may have been attempting to crawl up the driveway, and then collapsed on his arms.

  Alewort, the crime-scene guy, was taking pictures with a big black camera and a flash, the flash flickering up the valley like heat lightning.

  A half-dozen rubberneckers stood out at the rim of the circle of light from the cars, neighbors, and a stout woman stood in the driveway itself, ten feet above the body. She was wearing a dark sweatshirt and jeans, and had her arms crossed. As Virgil got out of his car, he picked up a flicker of gray outside the lit area, a watcher who didn’t want to be seen. Muddy Ruff, he thought.

  The sheriff came over and said, “He was dead by the time he hit the ground. I have two theories: he was shut up by one of his meth customers, or we have a nutcase who’s going around shooting people.”

  “Not the dog guys?”

  “Definitely not. Come look.”

  Virgil walked over and looked at the body, which showed a hand-sized bloody patch in the center of the back. Purdy shone a light on the wound, and Virgil picked out three holes in a circular pattern not more than four inches across. “Uh-oh. Same shooter as the one who hit Conley,” Virgil said.

  “That’s what I thought. And Conley was a pill head, with a preference for amphetamines.”