Storm Front

by John Sandford

  He lived a mile away, and decided he might as well get going on the Jones case: with any luck, he could have it settled by the time he picked Yael up in the morning. There wasn’t much of the working day left, but Gustavus Adolphus College was only fifteen minutes away, and Jones lived even closer.

  At home, he cut up an apple and moved to his den, where he got online with the college. Jones was listed as a professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. His online vita said that he’d graduated from a seminary in St. Paul and had been ordained there, and later graduated from the University of Iowa with a Ph.D. in early and primitive religions.

  When he’d been working full-time, he’d taught Archaeology of the Holy Land, the History of Religion and the Hebrew Bible. He’d worked on archaeological digs in Israel, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Cyprus, and Greece during the late sixties and the seventies, and after becoming a tenured professor at Gustavus, had led annual student treks to Israeli archaeological digs.

  Attached to the site was a note that he was leading a dig that summer, with the dig scheduled to start on Sunday, June 23, and continue for six weeks.

  Judging from the dates of graduation listed in his vita, Jones must have been in his late sixties. His departmental photo showed a thick—but not obese—bearded man dressed in a short-sleeved blue shirt and long khaki pants and boots, standing with a group of smiling students both male and female, on the edge of a dig, with odd-looking black tents in the background. On closer examination, the tents appeared to be swaths of some kind of fabric held up with PVC drainage pipes.

  As with Yael, if asked to describe Jones, Virgil would have included the word “smart.” Jones looked like a smart, tough prairie preacher, Virgil thought, and he’d met a number of those.

  With Jones’s background in mind, Virgil went online with the Department of Motor Vehicles and took a look at his driver’s license. While the online photo at the college had shown a man with jet-black hair and a thick black beard, the license photo showed a thinner man with graying hair and beard, though both were more black than white; but it was the same guy, and he lived only eight blocks from Virgil.

  Virgil thought, Pick him up tonight, wring him out, get the rock back, give it to Yael in the morning, and send her on her way. Warn Jones about not running, and let justice take its course. Whatever that might be. With any luck, he could be back investigating Ma Nobles by noon the next day.

  Ma, he thought, was a much more interesting case. With that thought, he shut down the computer, put the remains of the apple in the garbage disposal, washed it away, and headed over to Jones’s house.

  —

  JONES LIVED in a plain-vanilla clapboard house that had a porch with a wooden swing and a picture window that looked out over the porch steps to his small front lawn. A flower box hung under the window, but had no flowers in it; a big but barren flowerpot sat on the porch at the top of the steps.

  The front door had a wide, short window that was covered with two curtains, with a crack between them; he peered through the crack and simultaneously rang the doorbell. Nothing moved. He rang again, and there was none of the vibration you got from an occupied house.

  After a third ring, and another minute on the porch, he walked over to the detached garage and looked in the window: there was an SUV inside, but it appeared to be covered with a thin layer of dust, as though it hadn’t been moved for a few weeks. Had Jones been home at all? He’d certainly had the time.

  After looking in the garage window, he wandered into the backyard and looked in a window in the back door, but couldn’t see anything but the inside of a mudroom, with a bunch of coats hanging on pegs.

  He’d climbed down off the stoop when a woman shouted, “Hello?” He looked around and saw her next door, standing on her own back stoop, an old lady with a cane and Coke-bottle glasses, looking at him with suspicion.

  He called back, “I’m a police officer. I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

  “Elijah isn’t home. He’s in Israel,” she called.

  Virgil walked over, took his ID out of his pocket, and showed it to her. “He’s actually back in the country—he’s been here for a while, over at the Mayo,” Virgil said.

  “Hasn’t been here,” she said. “He always stops here first thing—he leaves a set of keys with me.”

  “His biography at the college said he’s married,” Virgil said. “Is his wife around? Or did she go with him?”

  “That’s Magda, poor thing. She has Alzheimer’s,” the old lady said. “She’s in a home now. He couldn’t take care of her anymore. No, he lives here by himself. His children are gone. One lives up in the Cities, one is out on the West Coast, San Diego, I think. I haven’t seen either of them, either.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Oh, the oldest one, Dan, he must be . . . forty-one or forty-two? Ellen must be in her late thirties. I think she’s three years younger than Danny.”

  “Would you have their addresses or phone numbers?”

  “Well, no, no, I don’t. Ellen works for the state, her last name is Case. You could probably find her that way. Did something bad happen?”

  “There’s some kind of an argument going on with this dig that Reverend Jones was on,” Virgil said, evading the question. “Listen, I’m going to leave a note on his front door. If you should see him, tell him to call me, right away. The moment he gets in.”

  —

  WHEN VIRGIL left Jones’s house, he checked his watch. If Gustavus Adolphus operated like most colleges, he might be too late to talk to anyone, but he wasn’t doing anything else anyway, so he decided to take fifteen minutes to run up to the town of St. Peter, where the college was.

  Gustavus was a mixture of old and new buildings set on a rolling campus; in the late nineties, it had been hit by a huge F3 tornado that tore the campus apart, but luckily during spring break, and none of the students were killed.

  Virgil had to poke around for a few minutes before he found the administration offices, and from there was sent to Jones’s department, where he found a woman pecking at a computer keyboard in a small book-stuffed office. Her name was Maicy, she said, an assistant professor. She’d been working every day, she said, because she couldn’t afford to go anywhere that summer, and had not seen or heard from Jones.

  “We’ve had a lot of calls, though,” she said. “We just haven’t been able to help. We can’t even believe what they’re telling us—that Elijah stole this stele? I mean, if so many people weren’t telling us the same story, I would have said it was nonsense. I don’t think Elijah ever stole a single thing in his entire life. To steal a stele? It’s hardly credible.”

  She was insistent, and said that if Virgil tracked down other department members, he’d get the same thing from them: until they saw the proof, they would not believe that Jones was in any way involved in any theft.

  Virgil thanked her and left.

  He’d run out of time. The college offices were closing, and there wouldn’t be much more that night. He stopped by Jones’s house again, found his note still on the door, leaned on the bell, got nothing.

  It occurred to him that Jones might be inside, dead. If another day passed with no sight of the man, he’d go talk to a judge about that idea—or call the daughter, when he found her.

  Virgil went home, ate, and resumed work on a magazine story about fly-fishing for carp, the part about stalking tailing carp in shallow water.

  —

  YAEL WAS bright and cheerful and drinking coffee when Virgil arrived at the hotel’s restaurant at eight o’clock the next morning. He slid into the booth across from her, and she said, “I am completely screwed. I slept well until one o’clock this morning and then I woke up. I haven’t been back to sleep since. About four o’clock this afternoon, I am going to die.”

  Virgil said, “Maybe we’ll be done b
y four. I couldn’t find him last night, I looked, but he only lives about a half-mile from here. We’ll check his house again, and if we don’t find him, we’ll check with his daughter and see if she knows where he is. If she does, we’ll pick him up, get the stele, and send you off to Macy’s.”

  “Macy’s and then this Best Buy. Everybody says I should go to Best Buy for good prices.”

  “Well, there are lots of them around,” Virgil admitted.

  “But first, the stele,” she said.

  “First, I need some pancakes,” Virgil said.

  During the pancakes, he quizzed her on the investigation of Jones, trying to figure out what she’d been lying about the day before: “I don’t want to hassle the wrong guy.”

  “He’s not the wrong man,” she said. She detailed the investigation into Jones, including his positive identification by several unconnected individuals in two countries, as well as some exit photos at the airport in Cyprus, and entry checks at Minneapolis.

  “It was him, all right,” she concluded.

  Virgil said, “You know, just off the top of my head, I would have thought that if you were going to steal an Israeli stele, you might try to sneak it out of the country. I mean this place he stole it from—is it in a town, or out in the countryside, or what?”

  “Out in the countryside, east of the city of Beth Shean, very close to the Jordan River.”

  “Okay. Now, Jones has a Ph.D. from an actual legitimate university, so he’s probably not stupid. If he’d stolen the stele and then reburied it, say, a few hundred yards away, who would have known? He could have pretended to be as mystified as everyone else. When it was time for him to leave, he could dig up the stone, pack it in his luggage, get a boat out of town. Who’s to know?”

  “But he didn’t do that,” she said. “I told you what he did.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Virgil said. “I mean, look at it. He finds the stone, digs it up, steals it, steals a car, drives it to the car agency, where it can be traced instantly—he could have left it in a parking lot somewhere, and you might still be looking for it. Then, dressed as an American Christian minister in a big black suit with a white collar, who speaks good Hebrew, he calls a taxi and overtips the driver. Then he gets a ride out of the country with these Germans, who everybody in the marina knows. He then pees blood into the harbor in Cyprus, so that everybody will be sure to remember him there, and flies home, where he’s met by an ambulance crew. He couldn’t have left a clearer, faster trail to follow if he’d been dropping ten-dollar bills at each step.”

  “We considered that,” Yael said. “It does seem a little curious—but.”

  “But?”

  “But he stole the stele,” she said. “That’s very clear. I don’t care if he snuck out of the country by getting Tinker Bell to sprinkle fairy dust on his ass. I just want the stele.”

  “Your English is very good,” Virgil observed.

  “Thank you.”

  “And you know about Tinker Bell?”

  “Of course. My parents have had a condo on South Beach, in Miami Beach, for forty years,” she said. “I was born there. I’ve been to Disney World eight or nine times.”

  “Ah. So you’re actually an American?” Virgil asked.

  “No. I could have been, but I chose Israel,” she said.

  —

  ON THE WAY OVER to Jones’s house, Virgil went back to Jones’s departure from Israel. “Are you telling me that he stole the car, drove to this city on the coast . . .”

  “Haifa.”

  “Yeah, Haifa. Then he drops the car at the Avis agency, which he just happens to know where it is, catches a cab before dawn, gets a ride to a specific marina, where he finds two Germans willing to smuggle him out of Israel, no questions asked . . . and he didn’t prearrange it? And, of course, he couldn’t prearrange it, because he didn’t know the stele would be found.”

  “The diggers left the tel at noon and locked the stele up at midnight. He could have easily taken a sherut to Haifa, and back, in that time.”

  “A sherut?”

  “Like a minibus,” she said. “Or he could have taken a taxi.”

  “So Haifa’s not far?”

  “Maybe an hour and a half,” Yael said.

  “You checked to see that he was gone for at least, say, five hours in that period? Time enough to catch a bus, get there, make arrangements, and get back?”

  “There seems to be some controversy about that, but I don’t care,” she said.

  “And you don’t care, because he stole the stele, and that’s what you care about.”

  “Correct,” she said.

  —

  AT JONES’S HOUSE, Virgil’s note was gone from the door. He rang the doorbell again, and a second time, then reached out to the doorknob . . . and it turned in his hand. Hell, this was Minnesota. He pushed the door open and called, “Hello? Anybody home?”

  He heard the creak of a floorboard from the back of the house. “Hello? This is the police. Anybody there?”

  He heard two quick steps and then the back door banged open and Virgil was running through the house. It occurred to him, as he cleared a china cabinet full of blue-and-white Spode dishes and cups, that usually, in this situation, the cop had a gun. His was in the truck, and not for the first time, he thought, Jeez.

  He went through the kitchen and took a wrong turn, into a dead end that led to stairs down into a basement. He reversed field, and through a back window saw a tall, dark-complected young man with long hair, in a T-shirt and jeans, hop a back fence and dash between the two houses that backed up to Jones’s house.

  Virgil ran back through the kitchen and through the mudroom, out the back door and across the backyard. There was a four-foot fence separating Jones’s yard from the house it backed up to. He clambered over the fence and ran to the front of the house; but none of that was as fast as the runner had done it, because Virgil was wearing cowboy boots and the runner was wearing running shoes.

  He was in time to see a champagne-colored Camry pull away from the curb a hundred yards farther on, and accelerate down the block and then around the corner. The car was too far away to get the tag, but it was from Minnesota, and he noted a basketball-sized dent in the left rear bumper.

  “Shoot.” He felt for his phone, and remembered it was on the charger in the car.

  He jogged back around the block, got the cell phone, and called 911 and identified himself and asked the Mankato dispatcher to have her patrolmen take the tag numbers on any champagne-colored Camrys they saw in the area. “The driver is tall, with long dark hair. He looked sort of like an Apache. Or, because of what I’m doing, he could have been Middle Eastern.”

  The dispatcher said she would do that, but, “There are probably two hundred champagne-colored Camrys in town. That’s probably the most common car in the world.”

  “Yeah, but . . . do it anyway,” Virgil said. “The car had a dent in the left rear bumper. And you might send a car around to a probable burglary.”

  —

  HE’D BEEN TALKING to the 911 operator from Jones’s front lawn. When he got off the phone, he went back inside the house, where he found Yael innocently standing in Jones’s living room, examining a wall of photographs.

  “Did you look around?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” she said. “That would be illegal. I don’t have a search warrant.”

  “Good. If I were to get a search warrant and look around, do you think I’d find a body? Or a stele?”

  “No, I don’t think you would,” she said.

  “Then there’s no reason to hurry,” Virgil said.

  “Well, when I came to look at these photos, I noticed a smear of some kind on the floor in the hallway, there.” She pointed at a hallway that probably went back to a bathroom and some bedrooms. “Perhaps you should chec
k it.”

  Virgil went that way. The smear was three feet from the point where the hallway entered the front room and was about the size of Virgil’s index finger.

  “Looks like dried blood,” Virgil said.

  “I couldn’t really tell from this far away,” Yael said.

  “Right,” Virgil said.

  “The police are here,” she said.

  Virgil walked back through the living room and saw two city cops coming up the walk. He stepped out on the porch and said, “Hey, Jimmy. Paula.”

  “Hey, Virg,” Jimmy said. “You got a burglary?”

  “Well, I got a runner, anyway,” Virgil said.

  He told them about chasing the Camry man out of the house, and introduced Yael, and she told them about the search for Elijah Jones. Neither of the cops knew Jones, and Virgil said, “I’m going to walk around for a while, see what the neighbors say.”

  “We’ll take a look around,” said Jimmy. “Paula, get the basement.”

  Yael said, “I should stay here with Paula and Jimmy. I would recognize the stele.”

  Virgil went first to the house on the right, but nobody was home. Then he went back to the old lady’s house. She answered the door and said, “I think he was back last night. He didn’t come over, but I saw lights in the house, late.”

  “You didn’t see him this morning?”

  “No, and I get up early. I went and knocked on his door, but nobody answered, and your note was gone.”

  “But you’re not sure it was Jones himself.”

  “No, I guess not. Could have been Ellen, I suppose.”

  —

  VIRGIL THANKED HER, and walked back to his truck and called Davenport. “This may be a little more complicated than you thought,” he said.

  After a moment of silence, Davenport asked, “Why can’t anything you do be simple? Get the steelee and send Yale home.”

  “Well, I went over to talk to Jones this morning, but he wasn’t there, but a burglar was, and I think there’s blood on the floor.”

  “Ahhhh . . . shit.”

  “Yeah. But it might not be from violence. He’s got cancer, and he’s apparently been leaking a lot of blood.” Virgil told him about the runner, and about the smear, and about how Yael was lying about something, and then he asked, “Do you have any hint what this stele might involve? I mean, it looks like Yael’s not the only one who wants it. And wants it bad enough to break into a house.”