Storm Front

by John Sandford

  —

  HAMM ESCORTED THEM through the house. He didn’t want them in it at all, because of the possibility that a violent crime had been committed, but Virgil insisted on looking for places that the stele might be hidden.

  “The problem with that is, the guy who was here when you came in—he might have left prints, but we don’t know where,” Hamm said. “If you go digging around, you’ll ruin them.”

  “So you open the doors,” Virgil said. “We’ll just look.”

  And that’s what they did. They went through two bedrooms, a third bedroom that had been converted to a study, two bathrooms, a small home office niche, the living room, and the basement, and then out to the garage. They found no sign of a stele, no body, and no further evidence of violence. The Nissan Xterra was still in the garage, still covered with garage dust. Although Jones had apparently been home, he hadn’t moved the truck. Virgil looked inside, to see if he might have stashed the stone there, but the truck was empty.

  In the house, one living room wall was devoted to photographs, mostly small, and mostly taken at a variety of digs in Israel, featuring Jones and a cheerful, slightly overweight woman Virgil thought was probably Jones’s wife. Yael pointed out various well-known Israelis, posing with Jones. “This is Jones with Yigael Yadin, probably the most famous archaeologist in Israel, after the War of Independence,” Yael said. “They look very friendly together. I confess, I am impressed.”

  “This can’t be right,” Vigil said of another. “He’s playing golf by the Pyramids.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never been to Egypt,” Yael said. “But I tell you, in my job, I travel to sites all over Israel, and there are sites here that I haven’t seen. I believe this one is Samaria, on the West Bank, it must have been years ago. He was digging near Jericho . . . here.” She tapped a photo. “Not the best place for a Jew.”

  “Maybe not so bad for a Lutheran,” Virgil said. “Especially one with a bushy black beard.”

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  There were three or four photos, wide-angle shots, taken in Minnesota at what looked like ministerial conferences. Virgil examined them closely, then said to Yael, pointing at a sandy-haired man at the edge of one of the shots, “This is my father. Must’ve been twenty years ago. He would have been maybe ten years older than I am now.”

  She nodded. “I see the resemblance. Was he disappointed that you didn’t follow in his footsteps?”

  “No, he knew I’d never had a call to the ministry. He was just hoping I wouldn’t become a moonshiner or a stock-car driver. Being a cop was just fine with him: he imagines that I’m on the side of the angels.”

  “You’re not?”

  Virgil shook his head: “There’re not many angels around anymore. Not in my work.”

  —

  HAMM THREW THEM OUT when they didn’t find the stone, or anything that might have the stone in it, and told them not to come back too soon. “This will take a while. What do I do if Jones shows up?”

  “Bust him,” Virgil said. “We have a warrant for him and an Israeli extradition request.”

  “I haven’t arrested anyone in fifteen years,” Hamm said.

  “So, get one of the other guys to do it. Or, you know, just say, ‘You’re under arrest,’ and make him sit on the couch until somebody else gets here.”

  “So that’s how it’s done now,” Hamm said, scratching his neck. “I don’t remember it being that easy.”

  Two minutes later, Virgil and Yael were on their way to the Twin Cities. Virgil had gotten Jones’s daughter’s name from the old woman next door, and had found her phone number on a list tacked inside a kitchen cabinet, next to a telephone.

  He called Davenport with that information, and asked for a callback, detailing where Ellen Case worked. Davenport said he would give it to his researcher, Sandy, and Sandy called back ten minutes later with a home address and the information that Case was a highway engineer with the state Department of Transportation.

  “Call her and tell her to stay where she’s at, so we don’t have to chase all over town,” Virgil told her. “We’ll be there in an hour and a half, or so.”

  “I’ll call her,” Sandy said.

  When he was off the phone, Yael said, “If she’s involved in this plan, she may warn her father.”

  Virgil nodded. “Maybe.”

  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “No, because I plan to scare the shit out of her,” Virgil said. “I’ll draw her a picture of how her career ends in disgrace, how she might spend fifteen years in an Israeli prison. Or maybe a Minnesota prison. I’ll tell her about the blood on the floor, and that if she lies to us, she may be involved in a murder conspiracy, which is thirty years’ hard time in Minnesota. She’s a bureaucrat: she’ll know all about cutting her losses.”

  Sandy called back a few minutes later and said, “She’s not working. She’s on vacation. A guy at her office said she’s getting over a divorce, and decided to take a long wandering trip to Alaska. By car.”

  “Well . . . that’s a poke in the eye,” Virgil said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Sandy said.

  Virgil got off the phone, told Yael, who said, “I suspect this is a ploy. It’s too convenient that she is on a vacation so far away, while her father dies.”

  “You really do speak good English,” Virgil said. He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and waited for a line of traffic to pass so he could make a U-turn. “I’ve never heard anybody use the word ‘ploy.’”

  “Perhaps because you live in a rural state?”

  “What?”

  —

  HE MADE THE U-TURN and they headed back south, and had gone about three hundred yards when he took another call, this one from a Mankato cop named Georgina. She said that Mankato had collected tag numbers on forty-two Toyota Camrys that might have been considered champagne, depending on who was considering it.

  “I would say it would probably run from gold to silver,” she said. “Anyway, you said something about this guy might be a Middle Easterner, so when I ran the numbers, I was looking for something that might be relevant. The good news is, an Arab-sounding guy popped up, a student here at the U, so I thought I’d give you a ring. His name is Faraj Awad. You want the address now?”

  “I do,” Virgil said. He wrote it on a notepad. “Thank you. Now, what’s the bad news?”

  “My husband gets back tonight, unless he gets stuck in Chicago,” she said. “I probably won’t make it down to the Coop.”

  “Aw, man—Wendy’s playing.”

  “You know I’d give anything to be there,” she said. “But Ralph’s gonna want his pound of flesh.”

  “Well, shoot—make it if you can. Don’t bring Ralph.”

  “He wouldn’t be caught dead doing a two-step,” Georgina said.

  —

  “THIS COULD BE INTERESTING,” Yael said, when Virgil told her about Awad. “If we can get passport details, maybe I can talk to somebody in Israel and get more information.”

  Virgil called and told Davenport about the change of circumstance. Davenport put him on hold, and came back in one minute: “He’s got a Minnesota driver’s license. Been here for at least two years.”

  —

  ON THE WAY BACK TO MANKATO, Virgil and Yael spent most of the drive time talking about the Solomon stone, archaeology, and about the differences between Minnesota and Israel. There were many; in fact, there were almost no similarities, geographically, climatically, ethnically, or culturally. Minnesota was about nine times larger than Israel in land area, but Israel had about two million more people.

  “Everything here is so green. In Israel, we have more tan,” she said. She examined a farm they were passing, and sniffed at the distinctive aroma: “And you have far more pigs.”

  She also tried to nap, but without su
ccess: “I hate jet lag,” she groaned, after ten minutes with her eyes closed. She sat up and smacked her lips. “My mouth tastes like a hoopoe has been roosting in it.”

  “A what?”

  “A hoopoe. It’s our national bird.”

  “Ah,” Virgil said. “Minnesota’s state bird is the rotisserie chicken.”

  “A chicken?”

  “It’s because we’re a rural state,” Virgil said. “You know, the politicians have to please the farmers.”

  “I’ll have to look them up, these chickens,” Yael said. “If you see one, point it out.”

  “I will do that,” Virgil said.

  5

  Faraj Awad, according to his driver’s license, lived at North Star Village, an apartment complex for students not far from the university. Virgil had driven past it, but had never stopped.

  As he turned into the parking lot, he judged it as an okay place, but not great: the four rectangular, yellow-painted concrete-block buildings in the complex were neatly kept, but offered neither individual garages nor an underground parking garage. Given Mankato’s winter weather, a garage was a serious consideration.

  But not today.

  Temperatures would be reaching well into the eighties, and could touch ninety. They cruised through the lot, and found Awad’s car—the exact shade that Virgil remembered, with a basketball-sized dent in the left rear bumper—in the second row.

  “There we go,” Virgil said, pleased with himself for making the call on the Camry.

  When they got out of the car, Yael said, “This is another difference, from Israel to here. I am drowning in the humidity. The air feels thick.”

  “It gets worse,” Virgil said. “On the other hand, this is the most beautiful place in the world, in August. If you like water and natural color. And rural states.”

  He opened the truck’s back door, used a key to unlock the gun safe hidden under the backseat, took out his pistol, already in a soft waistband holster, checked it, and tucked it behind his belt at the small of his back. Then he took a sport coat that had been folded in a plastic bag out of the back and pulled it on.

  “You prefer the Glock?” Yael asked with a frown.

  “It’s preferred by my agency,” Virgil said. “You’re familiar with them?”

  “Yes. I’m much happier with a Sig 229 in .40 Smith & Wesson,” she said. “Though I would also take a Beretta, if it was well turned.”

  “I don’t know much about pistols and I’m not that good a shot,” Virgil said. “When there’s a problem, I prefer an M16 or a good solid pump shotgun.”

  Yael said, “Hmm. Have you ever had to shoot at a human being?”

  Virgil said, “Yes, unfortunately,” and headed for Building B. She hurried to catch up, and Virgil half-turned to ask, “You’re a good pistol shot?”

  “Very good,” she said. “But as an IAA investigator, I mostly arrest people for digging holes in tels. Or illegally selling antiquities to tourists, on those rare occasions when the antiquities are real. I’ve never had a chance to test myself in combat.”

  “It’s not all that it’s cracked up to be,” Virgil said.

  “You will have to tell me,” she said. “Such experience is rare.”

  “Have to get me drunk first,” Virgil said.

  —

  THE APARTMENT BUILDINGS each had an interior porch, with unlocked doors to the outside, but a second set of locked doors going in. Awad was in Building B, “The Sunflower.” Virgil leaned on the buzzer for the manager’s office, but no one answered.

  They’d waited three or four minutes when a young woman popped out of an elevator inside and walked out through the interior doors. Virgil caught it when it opened, and held it for her, but she stopped and said, uncertainly, “You’re not supposed to do that—go in.”

  Virgil fished his ID out of his pocket and said, “I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We’ve been buzzing the manager, but nobody answers.”

  “That’s no big surprise,” the woman said. “She considers all calls to be a pain in the butt, so she mostly doesn’t answer anything.”

  “I’ll talk to her about that,” Virgil said. He ushered Yael inside, and the woman went on her way.

  Just inside the door were a series of mailboxes, and 220 said: “Awad.”

  “We should talk to the manager?” Yael asked.

  “Why? She doesn’t want to talk to us,” Virgil said. “Let’s go upstairs and knock on his door.”

  —

  THE INTERIOR of the apartment building resembled a lower-end travel motel, with a central atrium going up three floors to a skylight, and two sets of red-carpeted stairs winding up on either side of the atrium’s core. There were also elevators, but Virgil took the stairs, with Yael at his elbow.

  There appeared to be about a hundred doorways down the corridors stretching north and south from the central atrium, the doors painted in varying shades of red, blue, and yellow in a failed effort to make them look stylish. Awad’s was blue-green. Virgil knocked on the door, and a second later, heard a thump from inside.

  “Somebody’s home,” he said. He stepped a bit sideways from the door, gestured to Yael to get behind him, knocked again, and put a hand on his pistol. A moment later, the door opened two inches, and a man peered out through the crack behind a chain: Virgil could see a single dark brown eye. “What?”

  Virgil held up his ID. “We need to chat with you, about Reverend Jones.”

  The man’s eye narrowed, and Virgil thought he’d slam the door, but then he said, “Ahhhh . . . I will take the chain.”

  The door closed an inch, and the chain rattled and the man said, “Come in,” to Virgil, and then, “Why are you bringing an Israeli?”

  Virgil was inside, with Yael a step behind him. “How’d you know she was an Israeli?”

  The man shrugged: “She looks like one.”

  Virgil: “You’re Faraj Awad?”

  “Yes, but everybody calls me Raj,” the man said. “And you’re . . . Virgil?”

  “Virgil Flowers. Yes.”

  Virgil looked around. Awad’s apartment was small, with a kitchenette, a fourteen-by-twelve living room, and a tiny balcony overlooking the parking lot. A bedroom was off to the right, and through an open door Virgil could see that it was barely big enough to contain a queen-sized bed. The bathroom was apparently out of sight off the bedroom.

  The living room was furnished with a couch, two chairs, a coffee table, and a worktable with a laptop and a printer in the middle, and a small flat-panel TV sitting on one end of it, facing the couch. A soccer ball was half hidden under the coffee table, along with stacks of books, American magazines and newspapers, and two twenty-five-pound dumbbells.

  Awad was an inch or two shorter than Virgil, slender and square-jawed, with a short, carefully cut beard, longish black hair, and large dark eyes. He had a gold earring in one ear. He would, Virgil thought, do well with the Mankato State coeds, if he was inclined to. He said, “Come in and sit down. Even the Israeli, as long as she builds no settlements behind my couch.”

  Virgil asked, “Why’d you break into Jones’s house this morning?”

  Awad dropped on the couch and shook his head, not bothering to deny that he’d been there. “I didn’t. I was invited to come over to look at a stone. I was on time, I knocked, but nobody answered. I knew he was sick, so I went inside—the door was not locked—and called to him. Nobody answered. I was writing a note to him when you came in . . . I suppose it was you.”

  “It was,” Virgil said. “Why did you run?”

  “I thought you might be the Turk,” Awad said.

  “The Turk,” Yael repeated.

  “Yes. You definitely do not want to mess with the Turk. He cut your good parts off. Well, maybe not you, but”—he pointed at Virgil—“you.”

  V
irgil thought, First things first, and asked, “Where’s this note you were writing to Jones?”

  “Should still be there, in the kitchen.”

  Virgil said to Yael, “Don’t let him run—I’m going to make a phone call.”

  “Yeah, I’ll stop him,” she said. “I’ll hit him with my purse.”

  Awad said to her, “Your personality alone would be enough. You are one very attractive Jewess.”

  “Keep talking,” she said.

  “Ah, Jesus,” Virgil said.

  —

  VIRGIL CHOSE to step into the hall, leaving the door mostly open, in case one of them tried to strangle the other. He called Mankato PD to get the cell number of the crime-scene guy, and when he had it, called and asked about the note.

  “It was on the floor by the kitchen counter. All it says is, ‘Dear Mr. Minister Jones . . .’ That’s it.”

  “Thanks,” Virgil said, and rang off. He had no case on Awad, even if he wanted one. Not unless Awad’s fingerprints were found on the patch of blood.

  Back inside, Awad was saying to Yael, “Think about it. I am a young single Lebanese Arab man who is attending a flight school. You think I want to get caught by the American police for breaking and entering? I’m surprised Virgil didn’t bring Homeland Security with him, to kick down the door. Not even my large and succulent personality could help me then.”

  Virgil came in, sat on the couch, winced, took the gun out of the small of his back and put it in his jacket pocket. “So,” he said, “who’s the Turk?”

  “One minute,” Awad said. He went to the worktable, picked up the laptop, came back to the couch, touched some icons, and a note page popped up: “He is a man named Timur Kaya,” he said, looking at the laptop page. Virgil moved closer, looked over his shoulder, took a notepad out of his jacket pocket, and copied the spelling.

  Awad continued: “He represents another man named Burak Sahin.” He tapped the laptop screen, and Virgil noted that name, too.

  “According to my uncle, Kaya spent his earlier days in Turkish Army intelligence, cutting the testicles off Kurds, when they would not tell him where the other Kurds were hiding,” Awad said. “My uncle told me to be careful with my testicles.” He looked at Yael. “I am very fond of them.”