“Something like that,” Conley agreed.
Vike told him to keep it all top secret. “This here’s a Pulitzer Prize, boy, if we play it just right,” he said, slapping his hands on printouts of the budget documents.
Vike suggested Jennifer Houser as the one likeliest to turn on the others — he’d been covering the school board himself, for years, and was familiar with all the members.
Conley had finally gotten to Houser just that afternoon.
“This is going in the paper next week, Jen,” he’d told her. “Everybody’s going down, but when the police arrive, I’ll tell them that you were the person who cracked the case. I’m sure, if you cooperate, they’ll take it easy on you. You might have to do a little jail time, but you ask anybody who’s been to jail, and they’ll tell you — a little is way, way better than a lot. Way better.”
She’d started crying, and asked for a couple of days to think it over. Conley had just put the paper to bed for that week, and had time, so he’d agreed: “Two days is fine, Jen. Take three, if you need it. But… it’s going in the paper one way or another, next week. I’ve already cleared it with Vike.”
She’d crack, Conley thought. He was coming to the bottom of the hill, by the cattail swamp, just before the last hard climb back up to his trailer, his running shoes flapping on the warm blacktop. A truck came up in front of him, slowing as it went by, and Conley moved over to the shoulder. Wasn’t sure, but it looked like Randy Kerns behind the wheel.
He turned his head to look back, but the next thing he knew, he was lying in the cattails, the cold water soaking through his shirt and shorts.
Before he died, which was only a few seconds later, it occurred to him that he wasn’t too surprised.…
Vike was really, really close to the school board.
4
The alarm on Virgil’s cell phone went off at eight o’clock. He rolled out, remade the bed, more or less, got cleaned up, and took a call from Johnson Johnson.
“You up?” Johnson asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m in my truck. I’ll meet you at the Gourd.”
“Ten minutes,” Virgil said.
Johnson and his girlfriend lived west of town, in a sprawling ranch-style house with a barn out back, for the horses, which his girlfriend trained and endurance-raced. Johnson’s sawmill was a mile back behind the house, on the other edge of his twelve hundred and eighty acres of hardwood forest.
Johnson was hunched over a cup of coffee, reading the Wall Street Journal, when Virgil walked into the Golden Gourd. “Don’t know what I’m going to do about insurance,” he said. “Gotta have it — I got six employees, and it’s rough work, but Jesus, it costs an arm and a leg.”
“You need to work for the government,” Virgil said. “Insurance is free.”
“Free for you, not for the rest of us,” Johnson said. He put the paper down and waved at a waitress. They got breakfast, argued about insurance, and talked about what they’d be doing that day.
“We need to find a way to come down from the top,” Virgil said. “There’s gotta be one — there’s probably a whole bunch of ways. If you have to go in on that road, everybody in the valley knows you’re coming.”
“The south side of the valley is steeper, and not so many houses over there,” Johnson said. “If they’re hiding dogs, they’re probably on the north side.”
“Ought to look at a plat map, see who owns what,” Virgil said.
“Do that at the courthouse,” Johnson said.
“Might be handy to have a rope to come down off that bluff line,” Virgil said.
“Get that over at Fleet Farm,” Johnson said.
When they finished eating, Johnson looked at his watch and said, “Ag office oughta be open.”
They left their cars in the street and walked two blocks over to the Buchanan County Soil and Water Conservation District, where they talked to a clerk who pulled out large-scale, high-resolution aerial photos of the land around Orly’s Creek.
The clerk left them, and they bent over the photos, tracing Orly’s Creek Road up to the spring. The cleft of the valley was clear on the photos: the land up on top was the dark green of heavy forest, cut by the lighter green of the valleys, from which most of the trees had been cleared.
Virgil tapped County Road NN, which ran west a half-mile north of Orly’s Creek. “If we leave my truck at this bridge”—he looked at the scale—“which is about three-quarters of a mile from 26, we could walk along the edge of this field and into woods, up the hill and down the other side. No houses close by… and it looks like there’s a gap in the bluff line… here… and here.”
“Still gonna be pretty goddamned steep,” Johnson said.
“That’s why we take some rope.”
“We could probably get down, but we won’t be able to get out in a hurry,” Johnson said. “If we have to run for it, we might best go all the way down to the road. Tell you something else — might be tough calling for help. In those deep valleys, the cell phone service is kinda iffy.”
Virgil said, “We’ll take it slow.” He tapped the map, a line that ran near the top of the valley, just below the bluffs. “See this line? It looks too heavy to be a game trail, and it comes up to this flat patch. It looks like something built is in there.”
“Kennels?”
“Looks like something. If we can come over the bluff line… here… we could move right along the trail, and it’s not more than a couple hundred yards.”
“Worth a look,” Johnson said.
Virgil got the clerk to make a Xerox copy of the photo, paid for it, and they continued down the street to the county courthouse, where they looked at plat maps. The man Virgil had talked to the day before, Zorn, owned the land from the road up to his house, and perhaps fifty yards on either side of it, and behind it — not more than two acres or so, a relatively small patch compared to some of the other holdings. The largest plot was at the end of the valley, on the north side. A hundred and twenty acres of woods, and what looked like a small house, showing no mowed fields or outbuildings, under the name of Deland.
“Don’t know any Delands,” Johnson said. A quick check with the tax records showed a mailing address in the Twin Cities suburb of Eagan.
“Could be a hunting cabin,” Virgil said. “That kid must have come down from here.” He touched the image of a house on the south side, on twenty acres, showing a large garden to one side, and what appeared to be a small orchard, judging from the way the trees were spaced. The tax records said the bill went to a Julius Ruff. After a last review, he said, “Let’s get some rope and go on out there.”
They bought a hundred feet of three-quarter-inch nylon rope at Fleet Farm, stopped at Johnson’s cabin on the way north, so they both could change into running shoes, and took Highway 26 past Orly’s Creek Road for half a mile, took a left on NN, and drove to the small bridge where they’d leave the truck. The creek below it was barely damp.
Virgil had weapons in the back, and after debating with himself about the options, put a “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension” sign on the dashboard, activated the car alarm, and locked everything up.
He did take his pistol with him, a standard-issue Glock 9mm, and though he didn’t ask, was sure that Johnson had his .45 in his military-style rucksack, along with a couple of cans of Budweiser and a GPS receiver that he’d bought for his boat. Before leaving the ag service, Johnson had found the GPS references for what looked like the easiest breaks in the bluff line above Orly’s Creek valley.
In his own pack, Virgil carried two bottles of water, the rope, a multi-tool and two extra magazines for the Glock, a Sony RX100 compact camera, and a homemade first aid kit.