“John Wigge…”
“… and David Ross.”
“… and Ross, too?” Warren was astonished, but not astonished enough. Virgil thought, He knows something.
“They were ambushed at a meeting with Ray Bunton at a rest stop up north on I- 35,” Virgil said. “Do you know what they were talking about? Why they were meeting?”
“I don’t know any Ray Bunton,” Warren said. “Is this about the veterans thing?”
“If you don’t know, how did you put that together?” Virgil asked.
“John told me. He said he knew the guys who were killed,” Warren said. “That’s why he had Dave Ross hanging out with him.”
“But why are you stacking up with security?” Virgil tipped his head toward the bodyguard still in the room. The other two had moved back to their posts, wherever they were. “Three guys around the clock?”
Warren shook his head. “Nothing to do with that. I’m providing security for the convention. I’ve got two hundred guys in it, armed-response guys, bodyguards. I’ve got plans for the whole works right here in my briefcase, and the Secret Service requires, you know-they require that we keep it all under guard. The plans, me, everything.”
“So this doesn’t have anything to do with Wigge?” Virgil was skeptical.
“No, no. This is strictly the convention,” Warren said. “You think this guy, the killer-you don’t think he’d come after… people who know John?”
Virgil shrugged. “We don’t know what he’s doing, Mr. Warren. So the security is not a bad idea. But you’re telling me that you didn’t know about this meeting, about what’s going on. Wigge never told you anything about it?”
“I think it might go back to his cop days-he said the Mafia might be involved,” Warren said.
“The Mafia.” Virgil let the skepticism show.
“That’s what he said.”
“In Minnesota?” Virgil asked.
“The Mafia is here,” Warren said. “If you don’t believe that, I can’t help you.”
“I know it’s here-I know both guys,” Virgil said. “Their average income last year was fourteen thousand dollars, from delivering pizza.”
They talked for another five minutes, but Warren didn’t know what was going on; he wanted a few details about Wigge’s death, shook his head when Virgil told him about the torture.
“Why did they torture him?” he asked.
“They must think he knows something. They’re trying to find something out. I don’t know what that is.”
“Well, I sure as shit don’t-”
The conversation was interrupted by Virgil’s cell.
Carol said, “We got a break, I think. I got a number for you, it’s a cop out in Lake Elmo.”
VIRGIL EXCUSED himself, walked out on the front lawn, and called Roger Polk, who was in Lake Elmo, all right, but turned out to be a Washington County deputy sheriff. “The Liberty Patrol is on a run up to Grand Rapids for a funeral-”
Virgil said, “Wait, wait. The Liberty Patrol?”
“Bunch of bikers who provide security for the funerals of guys who get killed in Iraq. You know-they’ve got these antiwar church goofs who show up at the funerals to scream at the kid’s parents? About how the kid deserved to die?”
“Yeah, I read something about that,” Virgil said.
“The Patrol backs them off. Anyway, they met yesterday after work, and rode up to Duluth, sixty of them, about, riding in a pack. They’re staying overnight in Duluth, and then they’re heading over to Grand Rapids. One of the guys’ wives is my sister-in-law, and she heard the thing on the radio, about Ray Bunton. She says that Ray Bunton was riding with them. She knows him. He’s gone before.”
“All right, all right. That’s good, that’s terrific,” Virgil said.
VIRGIL SAID GOOD-BYE to Warren, trotted back to his truck, got out his atlas. Minnesota is a big state, but a good part of the northern third, where Bunton was heading, was vacationland: thousands of cabins on hundreds of lakes, surrounded by thirty thousand square miles of forest, bogs, and prairie.
As long as Bunton stayed on a highway, it’d be possible to locate him. If he were headed into the Red Lake reservation, as his uncle said he was, he’d be a lot harder to find. There was a history of animosity between the Red Lake tribal cops and outside cops, especially when it came to arresting tribal members.
And if Bunton weren’t headed specifically to Red Lake, if he was planning to stop at one of the tens of thousands of cabins scattered all over hell, all off-highway, he’d be impossible to locate.
Best shot to catch him was on the highway and Bunton knew it-that was probably why he went up in a pack, using the other riders for cover.
VIRGIL GOT on the phone, talked to the highway patrol office in Grand Rapids. Because of the potential for trouble at the funeral, the Grand Rapids office knew where the Liberty Patrol was-still in Duluth. “They’re eating down on the waterfront, making a little tour of it, picking up some Duluth guys.”
“Do you have anybody traveling with them?”
“Nope. We’re just talking to local deputies, who’re passing them through,” the Grand Rapids patrolman said.
“Have them take a look at the plates,” Virgil said. He read off Bunton’s plate number. “Don’t be too obvious about it. We don’t want to spook him.”
“If your guy is in there, we’d have trouble pulling him out,” the patrolman said. “Everybody’s cranked about this funeral. We could have a riot here tomorrow, if those church people show up. We’d rather not have a riot tonight, busting one of the riders.”
“So take it easy. I think he’s riding up there as cover, so he can shoot the rest of the way up to Red Lake,” Virgil said. “I’m coming up, I’ll take him out. But keep an eye on him. If he makes a run for Red Lake, you gotta grab him.”
“We’ll keep an eye out,” the cop said. “When’ll you get here?”
“I’m driving and I got lights, so I’ll be coming fast-but it’s gonna be a while,” Virgil said. “I won’t catch them before they get there. Call me when you know anything at all.”
“We’ll do that.”
HE CALLED Carol and told her where he was going; stopped at the motel, grabbed a change of clothes and his Dopp kit, but didn’t check out; stopped at a Cub supermarket and bought some premade cheese-and-meat sandwiches, a six-pack of Diet Coke, and a sack of ice for his cooler. He packed it all up and headed north on I-35, lights but no siren, moving along at a steady hundred miles an hour, past the rest stop where he’d been at midnight-still cop cars where Wigge had been killed-almost to Duluth.
From there he hooked northwest through Cloquet toward Grand Rapids.
On the way, he got two calls. The first came an hour and ten minutes out of St. Paul, the highway patrolman reporting that Bunton had been spotted by a deputy who’d cruised the whole pack as they left Duluth. “Not sure it’s him, but it’s his bike.”
“I’m coming,” Virgil said. He was tired now, too long without sleep. Needed some speed, didn’t have it.
When he was twenty minutes out of Grand Rapids, the Grand Rapids patrolman called again and said, “Your guy is still with the group. They just rode into town and we picked him out. It’s the guy in your pictures. He’s wearing a bright red shirt with a black do-rag on his head. Easy to track.”
TOM HUNT, the state trooper, was waiting on the shoulder of the road just south of town. Virgil followed him into the patrol station, where Hunt transferred to Virgil’s truck, tossing a shoulder pack in the backseat. “Saw him myself,” Hunt said. Hunt was a sandy-haired man with wire-rimmed glasses, dressed in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. He looked more like a junior high teacher than a cop. “He wasn’t trying to hide. He was like the third guy in line.”