Deadline

by John Sandford

  “What about Jennifer Houser? The sheriff thinks she might have been killed, but I don’t think so. I think she’s running, because she knows the shit is about to hit the fan.”

  Laughton shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s a nice lady, but . . . who knows? Maybe she was in on it, maybe they needed a board member to tip them in case anybody on the board got curious about spending amounts, or something. You know, sometimes the board just throws everybody out . . . they can do that when they discuss personnel matters . . . and they talk privately. Maybe Henry and the others were worried about that, and brought Jen into it.”

  “I’ve got to think about that. I’d like to tell you something off the record here . . . you could probably get some official word on it tomorrow, if you inquire around . . . off the record?”

  Laughton nodded. “Sure. Unless I get it from another source.”

  “The attorney general’s office is sending down a really hard-nosed hit team—prosecutors. They’re going to start taking the school board apart tomorrow, and then home in on the others. The feeling is, somebody’s going to crack.”

  Laughton shook his head. “I’ll be amazed if any of them are involved. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, if you want. The board members are my friends. I’ll call them, one at a time, and see what they have to say—maybe somebody will tell me that they do know something. Or suspect something. Maybe we could work out some kind of arrangement where the board members tell you everything about Henry and Del and Kerns, instead of getting all frozen up. I mean, if they think you’re after them, they’re going to be talking to lawyers and you might not get anything at all.”

  Virgil said, “That’s . . . a possibility. I could tell the AG’s main guy to talk to you first, see what you’ve found out.”

  They both took a moment to lick around the sides of their cones, then Laughton said, “Go ahead and tell him. Tell him to give me a call. I’ll do what I can to help.”

  “Wish that goddamned Kerns hadn’t been killed,” Virgil said. “I wish I knew the sequence of events when he killed Bacon. I talked to Bacon, on my phone, not ten minutes before he was murdered. And when I get there, he’d already disappeared—dead. And Kerns tries to shoot me. Which I find pretty goddamned interesting.”

  “I wouldn’t find it so much interesting, as I would freakin’ horrifying. Somebody shooting at you? No thanks. I’ll stick to keyboards.”

  Virgil said, “The question I’d like to ask him is, why? Why shoot at me? There was nobody else in the school. He’d already killed Bacon, he could have snuck out the back, nobody the wiser.”

  “I don’t know. Sounds stupid,” Laughton said.

  “He might not have been the sharpest knife in the dishwasher, Vike, but I believe he had a reason. That camera took two memory cards—you could either run them sequentially, to make a longer recording, or simultaneously, to make a duplicate. We had it set for a duplicate. I suspect that Kerns caught Bacon putting up the ladder to get the camera down, waited to see what he was doing, and then came in and challenged him. And Bacon knew Kerns was probably a killer, because I told him. So I think old Will Bacon pulled out either one or both of those cards, and hid them. Maybe up on top, in the rafters. I think that’s why he was beaten to death—Kerns was trying to find out where he put them. The crime-scene people will be done in there by the end of the day, so I can get in. I’m going in there tonight and I’m gonna crawl all over that room. Bacon would have left it somewhere I could find it. And I’m going to.”

  “Well, good luck with that,” Laughton said. “Some of those memory cards are about the size of my dick.”

  That made Virgil chuckle, and they finished the cones, and Laughton sighed and said, “Glad I decided to stick around my little river town, instead of going up to the Cities. Nothing like peace and quiet, and then four or five murders.”

  “Yeah, well. Maybe we’ll know more tonight. Whatever, there’s gonna be a genuine North Dakota goat-fuck tomorrow, when the AG’s people hit town. You wouldn’t want to miss that.”

  25

  VIRGIL, JENKINS, and Shrake rendezvoused at Johnson Johnson’s cabin, decided that shotguns-only would be appropriate, along with body armor. “I’m thinking of inventing the world’s first office camo,” Jenkins said, as he dug his Kevlar vest out of a duffel bag. “I bet half of all shoot-outs are inside buildings—why would you want the shooter to mistake you for an oak tree? Have to be a dumb shooter. With my camo, you’d look like a file cabinet, or maybe a water cooler.”

  “The way you dress now, they’d mistake you for a trash can,” Shrake said. “I’m not sure a file cabinet would be a big enough change to be worthwhile.”

  “You’re already jealous of my incipient riches,” Jenkins said.

  “My biggest fear is getting shot in the ass,” Virgil said. “He’s got to make some kind of move before we can take him. If I’ve gotta climb that ladder before he tries to jump me, he’ll be shooting up at me, not straight at me. And the armor doesn’t fit that well around my ass.”

  “That could be Jenkins’s second product,” Shrake said. “Ass armor.”

  “I gotta be honest, I don’t think he’s gonna fall for anything at all,” Jenkins said. “We tried to ambush Kerns, and he never showed up. Now we try to ambush Laughton . . . I’d be surprised if he shows up.”

  “If he doesn’t, he’s given up,” Virgil said. “If he thinks I’m going to get a recording of the school board meeting, he’s either got to show up, or concede the fact that he’s going to prison for murder. There has to be something serious on that memory card or Kerns wouldn’t have murdered Will Bacon to get it.”

  “But there isn’t a second memory card,” Shrake said. “There was only one.”

  “But there are two slots. Whoever killed Kerns got one card—but can’t take the chance that there really is a second one. He can’t know that there isn’t a second one.”

  “Maybe. I guess we’ll see.”

  It was just getting dark when they started over to the school in Virgil’s truck. On the way, Shrake said that Jenkins’s talk of making his fortune with office camo reminded him of a rumor going around BCA headquarters. According to the rumor, a BCA team had been digging out financial information about a defunct investment company in St. Paul. Virgil knew about the criminal part of the investigation, because it had been handled by Lucas Davenport, his boss.

  “The question was, did a bunch of other people take out money before the collapse, because they’d been tipped off by the owner that trouble was coming?” Shrake said. “And if so, should that money be reclaimed?”

  “That’s the kind of shit that puts me asleep,” Jenkins said.

  “Me, too,” Shrake said. “But that’s not what the rumor was about. Supposedly this team was looking at all these income tax returns, and somebody decided to take just a wee peek at Davenport’s returns.”

  Virgil said, “Uh-oh. If they did that, and anybody official found out, they’d be fired.”

  “Probably,” Shrake agreed. “But the rumor is, they took a peek, and as close as they can figure it, he’s worth something between thirty-five and forty-five million. Can you believe that?”

  Virgil thought it over for a few seconds and finally said, “I honestly have no idea. I know he’s richer than Jesus Christ and all the Apostles. I know that two weeks ago, when he flew down to El Paso after Del got shot, he wrote a check for the plane he borrowed from the governor. I know he buys what he wants, he has expensive cars . . . but I don’t know a number. You could do all that if you had a half-million in the bank.”

  “It’s not a half-million,” Shrake said. “He’s way, way on the other side of that. The question is, say the guy is worth something like the rumor says he is. What the hell is he doing working for the BCA? Why’s he going mano a mano with some psycho fruit in the basement of a torture castle? What the fuck is he doing? He could be
living in . . . LA. Or Paris, if he likes cheese.”

  “If he likes cheese, he could be living in River Falls, Wisconsin,” Jenkins said.

  “You know what I mean, man.”

  Virgil said to Shrake, “You know why he does it.”

  Shrake said, “No, I don’t. I really don’t. Not if he’s got forty million . . .”

  Virgil said, “Shrake, you’ve got a fuckin’ shotgun between your knees, you’re wearing an armored vest, and there’s a chance you’re about to shoot it out with a psycho killer in the dark. Why is that?”

  Jenkins laughed, and said, “Yeah, why is that, putter boy? How come so many guys, including you, try to get on SWAT squads? Come on, admit it.”

  Shrake tried to hold out: “It’s my job.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Jenkins said. “You do it because you like it, because you get that feeling in your balls like you’re in a falling elevator, and you like it. We all like it. We get all grim and warriored-up about it, but the bottom line is, we like it.”

  “That’s somewhat true,” Shrake admitted.

  “That’s why Davenport does it: it’s better than money,” Jenkins said.

  “You guys bum me out sometimes,” Virgil said.

  “Getting that feeling in your balls?” Jenkins asked.

  “I’ve had it for about three days now,” Virgil said.

  “Attaboy.”

  —

  AS THEY CAME UP to the school, Jenkins said, “The question is, is he inside waiting for us, so we get hosed the minute we go through the door, or is he planning to come in after you have a chance to find the memory card?”

  “Or is he home eating fried chicken and trying to decide what to watch on TV?” Shrake added.

  “I got a key from the crime-scene crew that’ll let us in the back door, all the way around by the ball diamond, where he won’t be expecting us,” Virgil said. “We go around there right quick, and in through the doors. Once we’re inside, we’ll be even.”

  “What are the chances he’s got night-vision glasses?” Jenkins asked.

  “Unlikely—no reason for him to have them. Besides, right inside the door there’s a whole bank of switches. I’m going to light up the halls all the way down to the auditorium. Then, inside the auditorium, there’s another bank that’ll light that place up.”

  They thought about that for a minute, then Jenkins said, “Most likely hiding inside a classroom. Hard to know exactly where, but probably between the auditorium and the door he thought you’d come through. He’d make sure you’re alone, then he’d watch you go in there, and maybe peek to see if you were finding anything . . . and then, boom.”

  “Or he could already be stashed in the auditorium. There are quite a few places on the stage, or in the projection booth, at the back, that’d give him cover,” Virgil said.

  “So we go in, with full lights, and we watch for any classroom doors that are cracked open. Then we go into the auditorium in a regular clearance formation, ready to hose him. If he’s not there, we wait.”

  “One of us up high, one low, while Virgil climbs up the ladder and looks for the chip. You know where the ladder is?”

  “Still in the auditorium,” Virgil said. “The crime-scene guys were processing it, and I told them to leave it.”

  —

  AT THE SCHOOL, Virgil said, “I haven’t seen his truck.”

  “Probably wouldn’t show it,” Shrake said. “But he’d want to have it close, in case he had to run—so he’s probably not here yet.”

  “Probably at home, eating chicken,” Jenkins said.

  Virgil took the truck into the student parking lot, then swung onto the track that took them behind the school by the baseball practice diamond, then across some grass and right up to the back door. They piled out of the truck, jacking shells into their shotguns, and Virgil knelt below the windows in the door, and fitted the key into the door lock.

  “Okay,” he said, and turned the key and the lock popped. The door was sheathed in thin steel; good against a shotgun, but not against a deer rifle. He pulled the door open, staying behind the door, waited, and then crawled inside, felt for the light switches, turned on five or six of them at once.

  The lights flickered down the long hallway—which was empty. Jenkins and Shrake moved inside, and Virgil pulled the door shut. They walked cautiously forward, spread across the hall, their shotgun muzzles at chest height.

  Fifty feet in, Shrake said, “Door on the left.” Virgil saw the crack between the door and the jamb. He and Shrake kept their weapons pointed at it, while Jenkins kept his tracking down the hall. As they came up to the open door, they moved to the door side of the hall. As they got to it, Virgil called, “If there’s anybody in room 120, you best come out, because we’ve got three shotguns pointed at it.”

  There was no response, no sound, no feel of presence. Virgil, closest to the door, moved up and pushed it open with the muzzle of his gun. When it was fully open, he reached around the jamb, felt the light switches and turned them on. A conference room—empty.

  They continued down the hall, around a corner, turned on more lights. Moving faster now, with the feeling that the building was empty. They turned the last corner, and Virgil said, “Auditorium is straight ahead, on the left.”

  They continued, looking for open doors, Shrake now walking backwards, watching their backs, past the burned-out district offices, then into the hallway beyond, to the auditorium door.

  Again, with the door and lights: and inside, the auditorium was empty. “No wild geese,” Jenkins said.

  “Let’s get into the act,” Virgil said. “If he’s coming, he saw my truck pull around the building. Jenkins, you get up in the top row of seats, on the floor. Shrake, get between those curtain rolls at the back of the stage. Anybody hears movement, snap your fingers at me.”

  —

  JENKINS AND SHRAKE set up; Virgil waited, listening, then went to the ladder, which had been left in a corner, and with a little nervous tickle between his shoulder blades, extended it and then set it against a crossbar in the light rack on the ceiling. He fussed over it a bit, giving Laughton a little more time to show, then climbed the ladder.

  A couple of pieces of tape hung down from a crossbar where they’d mounted the camera. He muttered, “Anything?”

  Shrake said, in a nearly inaudible grunt, “Nope.”

  Virgil took a foot off the ladder rung where he was standing, then frowned: a piece of the gaffer’s tape seemed to rise above the rest. He climbed back up, pulled the tape off.

  “My goodness.” The memory card was there, stuck under the tape. Kerns must have challenged Bacon while he was on the ladder, and Bacon had popped the card and hidden it under the tape, for Virgil to find.

  Virgil, still talking low, said, “All right, guys, we’re not hiding anymore. My good buddy Will Bacon actually did leave the memory card up here, so just point your guns at anything that moves. I’m coming down.”

  —

  VIRGIL COULD HARDLY BELIEVE the luck—if it was indeed luck, if the card had anything worthwhile on it. Jenkins and Shrake had set up to cover both the stage entrance and the other two corridor entrances, and Virgil rattled down the ladder, and left it standing.

  At the bottom, he picked up his own shotgun and said, “Let’s get out of here, but let’s take it easy. We’ve got the memory card, we just need to get it somewhere safe.”

  They backed out the same way they’d come in, leaving the lights to burn. At the back door, next to Virgil’s truck, Shrake said, “This would be another obvious spot to ambush you. You had to come out sooner or later.”

  Virgil looked out the window at the truck: “Jenkins, you go out first, but don’t go for the doors: just brace yourself up against the front bumper, ready to fire either direction. Then Shrake comes out, and he posts up to the right, and you take the
left side. Then I’ll come out around to the left—instead of the driver’s side, I should be okay—and I’ll pop the door and crawl across to the driver’s seat.”

  —

  THE PROCEDURE WAS FINE, and one minute later they were bouncing back around the high school and out to Main Street, feeling a little foolish about all the guns and armor and entry and exit dramatics.

  Shrake, from the backseat, said, “Now, if what you got on that chip is what you think you’ve got . . .”

  “Then we’ve got it all,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a Mac program that’ll run the film. We can load it up as soon as we get back to the cabin.”

  They were just coming to the turnoff for the cabin when Jenkins said sharply, “Hey, Virgil. Stop! Stop the car!”

  Thinking Jenkins had seen something, Virgil yanked the car to the side of the road and asked, “What?”

  “We’ve done everything right so far, but . . . If you really think about it, why would Laughton challenge you in the school? He’d have to creep down all those empty hallways, and if there was a shoot-out, he’d be right there in the middle of town, where everybody could see him coming and going. Same thing about ambushing you at the back door—he doesn’t just have to kill you, he has to find the chip, if you’ve got it. He’d want to get you someplace where he’d have at least a couple of minutes to empty out your pockets. Someplace a little private . . .”

  Virgil looked into the darkness up ahead: “Like the cabin.”

  “Like we thought Kerns would do,” Shrake said.

  Jenkins said, “Shrake and I found that back way in. What do you say we drive around that way? Just . . . to take a look.”

  “All right by me,” Virgil said.

  He waited for a car to pass and then pulled back out on the highway. A bit more than a quarter-mile farther along, Jenkins pointed at a turnoff and said, “There it is—that’s where you go in, there’s a little boat launch just over there.”