Deadline

by John Sandford

  “So what happened?” Vike Laughton asked.

  They’d left an empty chair for her, but Gedney spoke on her feet: “The state agent, Virgil Flowers, was pushing Buster around. Buster was intimidated. Flowers came back yesterday and told Buster that if he didn’t identify the person he sold the . . . I can’t remember what he called it, but it’s the parts that make Randy’s gun shoot three bullets—”

  “Burst kit,” Kerns said.

  “Yes. He knew that Buster made them. Buster denied it, but he knew anyway, because Buster couldn’t get a lie past a two-year-old. So yesterday he told Buster that if Buster didn’t tell him who he sold the burst kit to, he’d be charged with first-degree murder. He said he’d go to prison for thirty years, and when he was there, he’d be . . . sodomized. Buster was so scared—”

  “He told you all this, Buster did,” Barns said.

  “Yes. Last night. He said he wouldn’t tell Flowers about the burst boxes, but he sounded really shaky.”

  “Time to do something about Buster,” Laughton said. A couple of people nodded.

  Gedney waved them down: “Too late. When I came home for lunch, I found out that Buster had loaded up most of his equipment, everything movable, and he’d run for it. He also cleaned out our savings account, and the safe-deposit box.”

  “Oh my God,” Jennifer Houser said. “Did he get it all?”

  “No, I’m not dumb enough to put it all in one place. I’ve got another one, but he took everything at Second National. More than a hundred thousand, plus nine thousand from our savings. Anyway, I’d just found out about it when Flowers showed up looking for Buster. Buster had left the garage doors open, and Flowers saw that his lathe was gone. He knew that Buster had gone, and he took off: I suspect they’ve put out some kind of watch for him.”

  “Buster’s too damn dumb to get away clean,” Henry Hetfield said. “I believe when they catch him . . . I believe he’ll talk.”

  “That’s correct,” Gedney said about her husband.

  Laughton said, “I don’t have a philosophical problem with killing Buster, but there’s a practical one. Randy shot Zorn to steer Flowers away from us. That makes total sense. If we kill Buster, that steers him back. If you’ll excuse me for saying so, a string of three murders does tend to catch the eye. If that happened, we’d have more than one cop down here. We’d probably attract the FBI.”

  “You should have called a meeting on Zorn,” Barns said. “I would have voted against it. If I had seen—”

  “Water under the bridge,” Laughton said. “It’s done—and to tell you the truth, I think it still has some value, should this all get to court. It’s an alternative theory on the murders, and a good defense attorney will make it into something.”

  “What do we do about Buster?” Gedney asked.

  “We hope you can reach him before Flowers does, or that he calls home,” Laughton said. “If Randy can get to him, then Buster, bless his heart, could disappear. Instead of leaving the body out there for all and sundry, Randy could put him down someplace deep, out in a forest or a swamp, and it’d just seem like he ran away and was never found.”

  Kerns said, “I could do that.”

  Laughton held up a finger. “I’m officially scared shitless. But—all Buster knows is that he sold a burst kit to Randy. I suggest that Randy get rid of that gun, soak the burst kit in some gasoline to get rid of any powder residue, then wash it with soap and water and put it in a plastic bag. If Flowers gets to him, he could claim he never used the kit. Then he gets another gun—hell, I’ll give him mine, I got it at a gun show, there are no numbers on it—and if the cops ever get that far, he denies everything. They check the gun, it wasn’t used to kill anyone. They got nothing.”

  “Buster knows we’ve gotten a lot of money we shouldn’t have, and he knows where it came from,” Gedney said.

  “Did you put the money somewhere they could find it?” Laughton asked.

  Gedney said, “Well . . . not exactly. They could find out about my safe-deposit boxes. I’ve got one here and one in La Crosse. I could clean out the La Crosse one, leave a couple thousand dollars there, tell them I was hiding it for a divorce.”

  “That should work,” Houser said.

  Larry Parsons, the fifth board member, who hadn’t spoken, said, “Here’s what I think. I think it’s time to shut down, at least for a while. I think we need that really bad fire at the school board offices, something that takes out the whole computer system, all the records. We’ve talked about it—I think it’s time.”

  “That’ll attract a lot of attention,” Hetfield said.

  “We’ve worked all through that,” Parsons said. “Leave behind something that makes it look like kids did it. Vandals. The thing is, Flowers can believe anything he wants. He can know anything he wants. But to charge us with anything, he’s going to need proof. Burn the office, where’s the proof?”

  They all considered that for a while. There were a few places here and there where they might be vulnerable—places where they’d had to take kickbacks, rather than simply cook the books—but if those people kept their mouths shut . . .

  Jennifer Barns said, “Larry’s right. It’s time. How many people vote for a fire?”

  “Who’ll do it?” Hetfield asked.

  They all looked at Kerns, who said, “I’ve done some reading up on it. The office is in the middle of the building, so nobody’ll actually see the fire until it breaks through the roof. I’ll pull the battery in the smoke alarm. . . .”

  He walked them through the details. Five gallons of gas for flames and heat, a quart of motor oil to give it some substance; evidence of an amateurish break-in . . .

  “When do we do it?” Hetfield asked. He was nervous, polishing his glasses with the tail of his shirt.

  “Soon as possible.”

  “I got a couple things I’d like to get out of there.”

  Kerns shook his head. “No. Leave them. The cops and fire people will want to talk to you. We want you kinda messed up about the fire. Talking about what you lost. When I was doing my research, the one thing arson investigators always look at is whether anything was taken out in the days before a fire. If something was, that’s the guy they always look at.”

  Owens, the senior board member, shook his head. “My God, where have we gotten?”

  Gedney said, “Buster is still the loose cannon. I’m really worried about him.”

  Laughton said, “If we can find him . . .”

  Barns said, “Everybody—if Flowers manages to dig something up, to turn somebody on us, we shut up and we lawyer up. Instantly. Nobody talks. If anybody turns, we’ll all go down, and frankly, with two killings, the state’s not going to let anybody go free. The best you could probably hope for is twenty years, instead of thirty. We’re all old enough that we wouldn’t see daylight until it hardly mattered anymore. So: if push comes to shove . . . don’t give it up.”

  Gedney looked around the room: “Everybody understand that?”

  “I think we all do,” Laughton said. “And what Jen One said is exactly right. We won’t be able to buy our way out of this. The only way out is straight ahead.”

  Barns said, “The fire. We were talking about a fire. We all know the plan, and Randy suggests we go ahead with it. Let’s see a show of hands, all in favor . . .”

  They were unanimous: burn it.

  15

  JOHNSON AND VIRGIL sat drinking on the cabin porch, Johnson a bottle of lemonade—he’d brought three quarts with him—Virgil a beer. Johnson said, “You’re a cruel man, Flowers. Taunting an ex-alkie like me.”

  “It’s a test, which I fervently hope that you pass,” Virgil said. “Besides, everybody you know will be doing this. You gotta get used to it. Anyway, if I squeeze this Henry Hetfield’s nuts, will he talk?”

  “Don’t know him that well, but from
what I’ve seen, I’d say, probably,” Johnson said. “He’s one of those bureaucrats who thinks about everything in terms of deals and arrangements. With a couple murders in the mix, though, you’d have to be pretty convincing. He’d have to know that even if he makes a deal, he’s gonna spend a few years in jail, at best.”

  “I can be convincing, if I have just a piece of evidence,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a little bit, but it’s all sort of hearsay—a dead reporter’s notes. I’ve got the name of a school bus driver who might talk. I’m afraid if I go to her too soon, she’ll let the cat out of the bag. And she might be worried about keeping her job. If I can get a piece of something to stick up Hetfield’s ass, and he points me at the right computer files, I can get a state auditor down here and hang all of them at once.”

  “Gonna have to do something. Time to fish or cut bait,” Johnson said.

  —

  VIRGIL DREAMED OF Frankie and sex, and dogs in caves, and late at night, of a fire in Frankie’s barn. He tried to keep the barn from burning down, but when he ran for the hose, the hose was all tangled in knots; it took forever to undo the knots, and when he did, no water was running, and Frankie was screaming something about the circuit breakers for the pump, and he ran down to the basement but couldn’t find the breaker box in twenty minutes of running from one basement room to another; the rooms were endless. Virgil had a certain ability to edit his dreams, and he finally forced himself to find the circuit-breaker box, but when he did, there were about a thousand breakers, none of them marked. And all the time, the barn was burning, and Frankie was running buckets from a stock tank and screaming to him to start the pump, and he was failing . . . failing.

  He woke then, and sleepily wondered for a few seconds exactly what tangled psychological meanings the dream could possibly have. Then he heard the sirens.

  For a moment he thought he’d somehow slipped back into the dream, then realized that the sirens were real, but far away, and had probably caused the dream. At the last moment before tipping back over into a deep sleep, he thought that if it were another killing, that Johnson would be calling, because Johnson never in his life could resist a siren.

  What seemed like a quarter-second later, but was probably a couple of hours, Johnson called.

  Virgil fumbled the phone off the nightstand and asked, “What?”

  “You know that idea about getting the state auditor down here to seize the school books?”

  “Johnson . . .”

  “Yeah, well, you can forget it,” Johnson said. “They had an untimely fire at the school district offices that apparently took out every computer in the place.”

  “What!”

  “I’m told the first firemen in the place backed right out, because the gasoline fumes were so thick. The fire was so hot the desks melted like a bunch of marshmallows.”

  “The desks melted? You’ve seen them?” Virgil dropped his feet to the cool floorboards.

  “I talked to Henry Hetfield. He knows me because I’m rounding up votes for the sports arena bond issue. Anyway, he said he suspected arson, kids who want to delay the beginning of the school year. He said the firemen say that it looks like a door was pried open.”

  “I’m coming,” Virgil said.

  —

  NOTHING LIKE A FIRE to get you out of bed. Virgil had been to more than one of them, when he was a cop in St. Paul, and once when investigating a series of murders in western Minnesota. In the early morning, the stink of burning insulation and burned wet boards hangs all around the fire site, and people talk in hushed voices and firemen hustle around and red emergency lights flick off all the surrounding windows and car chrome.

  Johnson was standing by himself with his hands in his jean-jacket pockets when Virgil arrived, and he walked over and said, “They wouldn’t let me in, but I talked to Greg Jones, he’s the assistant chief, he says there’s nothing left in the office except a big hole. Henry Hetfield said he had a scrapbook with pictures of his late wife, most of what he had of her, and it apparently burned up.”

  “Let’s go look,” Virgil said. “Point me at the chief.”

  Virgil talked to the assistant chief, and showed him his ID, and explained that the fire might be entangled with an investigation he was conducting. Jones led him into the building—he allowed Johnson to come along, when Virgil said Johnson was working as a consultant for him.

  “The fire itself was mostly restricted to the district offices. There’s quite a bit of smoke damage down the second floor, into the high school. There’ll have to be a lot of cleanup.”

  Johnson said, “Henry Hetfield said you suspect arson.”

  “Yeah, unfortunately. The door down at the end of the first-floor hallway, at the back of the school, was forced with a crowbar, and so was the door into the offices. The inside of the door is badly burned, but the outside still shows splinters around the lock. Henry thinks it was some kids trying to delay the school year.”

  “Then why did they set fire to the district office, instead of the school?” Virgil asked.

  The chief shrugged: “Because they’re kids?”

  “Some of the guys said they could smell gasoline,” Johnson said.

  “The first guys in said so. Not so much anymore, everything’s wrapped in foam. But it was a fast-burning fire. The wall clock there is stopped at three fifty-two, and we were here a couple minutes after four—there’s an automatic alarm system—and we knocked it down in a hurry, but . . . it was fully engaged. It was a flash fire, and it was hot.”

  The offices were a mess. Everything was charred, and soundproofing tiles were either burned or hung from the ceiling like dead black bats. Virgil could see fire-blacked wires and pipes in the ceiling, and water and foam had wrecked anything the fire hadn’t gotten to. A half-dozen computers were literally melted on the burned desks, as though somebody had poured acid on a bunch of oversized mushrooms.

  “Nothing to do about this,” Virgil said. “I’m going to get the sheriff’s crime-scene guy up here, see if there are any prints on that door downstairs. See if you can tape it off or something, keep people away.”

  “You think it might not be kids?”

  “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “What do you think?”

  The chief said, “We’ve had vandalism here a few times, and a small fire once, you know, over the years. Usually they come during the school year—a kid freaks out because he’s going to fail, or get kicked out of school, or whatever. Never had one in August.”

  —

  IT WAS TOO EARLY in the morning to start ringing doorbells, so Virgil said good-bye to Johnson, who said, “I hope they had good insurance. I hope they don’t try to take some of the stadium money to fix up the offices,” and went back to the cabin and fell into bed.

  No dreams this time, and when Virgil woke up again, it was after nine o’clock. He cleaned up, ate a couple pieces of peanut butter toast, and dug out Conley’s notes. The school bus driver was named Jamie Nelson, but the notes didn’t say whether that was a man or a woman, because, Virgil thought, Conley would know that, and wouldn’t have to write it down.

  Jamie Nelson was a woman. He found her at her tiny house, set well up the hill past the school; Virgil lived in a small house himself, but Nelson’s house couldn’t have enclosed more than a few hundred square feet: a living-room-sitting-room-kitchen, a small bedroom, a bath. Maybe some storage up under a pitched roof.

  She came to the door carrying a cup of herbal tea. She was in her fifties, Virgil thought, and had once had red hair, now mostly gray, with a few vagrant strands of red threaded through it. She had blue eyes, a long straight nose, a million freckles, and lips as thin as a No. 2 pencil, straight and grim. When she opened the door, she said, “What now?”

  Virgil held up his ID and said, “You talked to Clancy Conley about some ideas you had about the price of the school’s diesel. I’d like t
o talk to you about that.”

  She said, “Nope. I’m not talking anymore to nobody.”

  “I’m investigating a couple of murders, Miz Nelson, or I wouldn’t be bothering you.”

  “Think about that, and you’ll know why I’m not talking to nobody,” she said. She began to ease the door shut. Through the diminishing crack, she said, “If you come back, you better bring a judge or court papers or something.”

  “Miz . . .” But the door was shut.

  —

  VIRGIL CALLED JOHNSON: “You know I don’t entirely trust Sheriff Purdy, and I don’t know the local county attorney at all. If I go to see him about compelling Nelson to talk, is there any chance I’ll get that done, without everybody in town knowing about it?”

  “No, not really,” Johnson said. “But tell you what. Let me see what I can do.”

  —

  VIRGIL SAT IN his truck and ran over the possibilities. Eventually, he turned around and headed back downtown, to Viking Laughton’s storefront newspaper. Laughton was in, banging on a computer.

  When Virgil came through the door, he turned and said, “Shit. I was hoping it was an advertiser.”

  “Doing a story on the fire?”

  Laughton frowned: “What fire?”

  “The school’s district offices burned at the high school. I thought you’d be all over it.”

  Laughton looked at his watch: “Too late for this week’s newspaper, anyway. I’ll catch it next week. How bad was it?”

  “Not much left in the office,” Virgil said. “Somebody poured a lot of gasoline in it, and touched it off.”

  “Goddamn kids,” Laughton said.

  “Don’t think it was kids,” Virgil said. “I think it was somebody trying to cover up two murders. Which is why I’m here to talk to you. I need to talk to you confidentially, not as a reporter or editor or whatever. Can you keep your mouth shut?”

  “For a while, anyway,” Laughton said, twisting around in his office chair. He pointed Virgil at another chair. “Murder? You mean Clancy? What’s going on?”