“The store has a digital recorder tied to the cameras, and the whole thing is hooked up to the Internet,” he said. “We had the video a half hour after Ms. Nobles was attacked. Two cameras cover the gas pumps, a third one is mounted above the pumps and looks at the front door to catch a stickup man coming out. We can see the attack on the edge of that one.”
They bent over the desk watching the full-color video, which had no sound. It began as two men, one rangy and athletic looking, the other too fat and built like a door, walked up to the side of the store and passed out of sight. The video then skipped forward three or four minutes to show Frankie walking out the door carrying a sack of groceries. As she turned down the slot between Sparkle’s Mini and a truck, the two men jogged back into the video frame, then into the slot between the vehicles.
Frankie saw them coming and turned at the last second, as one of the men swung an open-handed slap at the side of her head. The slap connected and she dropped the bag and flattened against the car, her hands going up to protect her face, then the man hit her with a gloved fist, once, twice, and she tried to squeeze past him but the second man, the heavy one, blocked her retreat and shoved her back to the first one.
The athletic man swatted her across the forehead and this time she began to sink down, and he grabbed her blouse with one hand and wound up to hit her again, but she turned her head and bit into a length of exposed arm above the work glove, and they could see him shout or scream as she wrenched her head away from the arm and she fell out of sight, but the man kicked her twice, and then ran out of the picture, followed by the fat man.
Without sound, the video was flat and looked something like a puppet show: the punches and slaps didn’t have the sound effects of movies.
A few seconds after the attackers ran out of the picture, a third man hurried around the nose of the truck and looked at her, then turned and shouted to somebody out of sight, and went to his knees over her, although the camera still couldn’t see her, and they saw a heavy brown-haired woman in what appeared to be a hairstylist’s nylon uniform run into the store and then, a moment later, two more men run out to where the third man was now standing over Frankie, shouting. One of the newcomers turned and ran back into the store.
The video then skipped ahead to an ambulance arriving. The paramedics hurried up to the small crowd between the cars, and a moment later brought a backboard, and then loaded Frankie onto a gurney and wheeled her to the ambulance and loaded her inside. A moment later, the ambulance was gone.
Virgil hadn’t really been aware that the two attackers had been wearing masks, and said so.
“It’s hard to see,” the Mankato cop said. “Watch this.”
He typed in a number and the video recording skipped back to the point where Frankie turned between the two vehicles and the two men appeared. Mattsson muttered, “Watch out!”
At that point in the attack, the men’s heads were up and looking straight at the cameras. That lasted for only a second or two, but Carlson froze the photo as the two looked toward Frankie. With the image frozen, Virgil could see that they wore pale rubber masks. “Don’t think they look like Mitt Romney, but I’ve been told that’s what they are,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, they are,” Carlson said. “We matched them with some masks you can buy from a Halloween place on the Internet.”
–
Mattsson spent five minutes quizzing Carlson, with Virgil chipping in from time to time, then Mattsson closed her notebook and said to Virgil, “Let’s go talk to this Sparkle person.”
–
Frankie’s farm was northwest of Mankato, across the Minnesota River and out in the countryside, a fifteen-minute ride from the public safety department. Frankie’s truck was parked on the side of the driveway past the house. Virgil parked and Mattsson pulled in beside him, and as they got out, Sparkle came out of the house. She was smiling, but when she saw Virgil’s face, the smile fell away like a dead leaf off a tree.
“What? Virgil! What happened?”
Virgil told her, and she pressed her hands to the sides of her head, and kept saying, “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
When she’d recovered a bit, Sparkle said that she hadn’t seen anyone following her that day; that her interviews had been congenial, but she had names of all the canning factory people she’d spoken to. Mattsson took notes and asked more questions, and Virgil realized that he wouldn’t be able to help much, wouldn’t do anything that Mattsson wasn’t already doing.
As Sparkle was answering questions, Frankie’s youngest son, Sam, came walking up the driveway wearing his Cub Scout uniform, carrying a BB gun, and trailed by Honus the dog. Virgil went to meet him and before he could say anything, Sam said, “I finished second.”
“In what?”
“Marksmanship,” Sam said.
“How many people in the competition?” Virgil asked.
“Seven other ones. I shoulda won…” He squinted, just a bit, and then asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Ah, man, your mom got hurt,” Virgil said. “Not real bad, but she’s going to be in the hospital for a couple of days.”
“What happened?”
Virgil told him, and Sam said, “If I catch that motherfucker, I’ll kill him,” and he was deadly serious.
“No, no, the cops are taking care of that,” Virgil said. “And don’t say ‘motherfucker.’”
“You say it.”
“Yeah.” Virgil slapped Sam on the shoulder and looked around and then said, “Basically, you’re right. The guy’s a motherfucker.”
–
Sparkle and Mattsson were still talking when Virgil left, driving back to Mankato and the clinic. Sparkle said she’d come as soon as Mattsson was finished with her. At the hospital, Frankie was soundly asleep and a nurse said she’d be down for a few hours.
He called Sparkle to tell her that, but Sparkle said, “I’m coming anyway. I called Bill and he’ll take the night off and stay here with the kids. I’ll sit with Frankie until she wakes up, whenever that is.”
Virgil sat with Frankie for a while; signed onto the hospital Wi-Fi and checked his e-mail. Sandy the researcher had left a note that said five meat dryers had been shipped to an address in St. Paul’s Frogtown, from Bug-Out Supplies, a St. Louis survivalist supplier. She left a link to a website, and when Virgil went to it, he found a red headline that said, “When the SHTF, BOS’s Got Your Back.” Virgil figured out that “SHTF” meant “shit hits the fan,” a refrain he found throughout the online catalog. The dryers Sandy highlighted cost $231 each.
She included the address to which they were sent, and the buyer’s name: Bob Smith.
“Bob Smith,” Virgil said to himself. “Right.”
Sandy added a note: “BOS said the order came in with a postal money order for the full amount. They said that’s not uncommon with survivalist types-apparently they don’t want you to know that they’re making survival jerky in the basement.”
–
Virgil headed back north toward the Cities as night was falling.
As he did that, Winston Peck VI was driving the remnants of Hayk Simonian out of the farm and onto a Washington County back road, heading south. He no longer much cared if the second Simonian’s body was found-he’d been afraid of Hayk, but now Hayk was dead. Killing Hayk wouldn’t mean much, in terms of penalties, if the police ever figured out who’d killed Hamlet Simonian.
His main objective was to get Hayk’s body well away from the farm. He drove south, slowly, not to attract the attention of any roaming cops, past small farms and orchards and truck gardens, crossed the bridge at Prescott, and drove into Wisconsin toward River Falls.
After a couple of random turns, he found himself in the middle of a long, shallow valley with a wet, overgrown ditch on one side. With no headlights in view, he stopped the truck, dragged the Simonian load out of the back, wrapped in plastic, then staggered over to the ditch, waded into the weeds, and finally gave the body a heave.