“Goddamnit. Listen, have you got a veterans’ memorial there?”
“We got a flagpole with an MIA flag,” Bunch said.
“Have somebody check it, see if they can find a body,” Virgil said. “You say you’ve got the state coming in? You mean us? The BCA?”
“Yeah, the crime lab,” Bunch said.
“Okay, freeze it… I’ll be there quick as I can.”
“What about Ray?”
“I think Ray’s gone,” Virgil said.
CHARLES WHITING, the BCA agent-in-charge at Bemidji, said he’d sent the crime-scene crew and had been about to call St. Paul looking for Virgil. He said he would call the local cities, to have them check and then watch the veterans’ monuments.
“We can do the crime scene, but this is gonna be a federal case. The FBI has two guys on the way from Duluth,” Whiting said. “There might be some question about why we arrested Bunton and then turned him loose, and he gets killed the next day…”
“I’ve got some questions about that myself,” Virgil said. “I haven’t been to Red Lake for five years, but unless it’s changed, it’s a mess of roads and tracks, and how in the hell did the killer find him? How? The whole point of going up there is that nobody could find him if he didn’t want to be found.”
“Well-I don’t know. You left him at his mother’s house.”
“Yeah, but, she has a different last name,” Virgil said. “They didn’t look him up in the phone book.”
“No. She doesn’t have a wired phone, anyway, so that wasn’t it. You know, Virgil, I don’t know how they found him. But I will start pushing that question with the Red Lake cops.”
“Do that,” Virgil said. “Bunton had to be under observation. I thought the deal was everybody could spot an outsider in a minute.”
“I’ll push it. How far out are you?”
“I don’t know exactly, I’m somewhere out in the dark, on 2, south of Grand Rapids. Coming fast as I can…”
“You be careful up there in Red Lake. Olen Grey was a pretty popular guy, and they… you know. They’re gonna be looking for somebody to blame,” Whiting said. “We’ve had some problems, even before your stunt the other night. Some of the drug task-force guys went up there, undercover, and got their asses kicked out. They were told if they came back, they’d be arrested.”
“I’ll take care.”
ANOTHER TEN MINUTES, and Rudy Bunch called: “Nothing at the flagpole. Nobody’s seen anything there.”
“Okay. Chuck Whiting is calling the other towns around, telling them to keep an eye out,” Virgil told him.
“If we don’t find him, that’s good, right? There wasn’t too much blood in the car, on the passenger side. Ray might not have been hurt that bad.”
Virgil thought about the bag full of Wigge’s finger joints. “I don’t know, Rudy. I don’t know. I got a real bad feeling.”
HE WENT THROUGH Grand Rapids with lights and siren and never did slow down, heading northwest in the dark, and then Whiting called again. “They found him. Here in Bemidji. At the veterans’ monument on Birchmont Drive. Got the lemon in the mouth. Shot in the heart and the legs.”
“Any sign that he was interrogated?”
“No; he’s got some fingernails ripped loose, but it looks like he was fighting. Looks like he got the killer by the coat.”
“DNA?” Virgil asked.
“Don’t know. Don’t know anything but what I told you. I’m in my car, on the way over there. You know, the other night, when you guys went for the walk?”
“Yeah?”
“You must’ve walked right past the monument,” Whiting said. “It’s right there, where you guys were.”
VIRGIL WENT and looked at the body, another puddle of light with cops, but there was nothing to see other than Bunton’s distorted face. A local television reporter tried to get him to talk, but he referred everything to Whiting, said good-bye to the agent, and headed on north to Red Lake. As he crossed the line, he called Rudy Bunch on his cell phone, and Bunch said that Louis Jarlait would meet him in Red Lake.
JARLAIT FLAGGED HIM down outside the Red Lake Criminal Justice Center, said, “Follow me,” got in his own truck, and led Virgil through a profound darkness into the woods. Two or three miles out of town, Virgil saw the lights coming up: ten or fifteen cars lined up along the road, cops standing around.
They parked and climbed out, and Jarlait had a lollipop in his mouth and asked, “You want a sucker? Chocolate?”
“Sure.” Jarlait got a Tootsie Pop out of his truck, and Virgil unwrapped it as they walked toward the house.
Jarlait said, “I heard about Ray.”
Virgiclass="underline" “Yeah… Who’s here?”
“Most of us Red Lake guys. Some of your people here from Bemidji we invited in. FBI is still on the way, they probably won’t get here till morning.”
“Anybody have any ideas about who did this? Strange cars, strange guys-how in the hell could he come in here and just do this?”
“White van,” Jarlait said. “It might have been a guy in a white Chevy van. We got people coming through here all the time, but there was a white van going kind of slow around, and one of our guys, Cliff Bear, passed it, and he, uh…”
Jarlait paused, and Virgil said, “What?”
“Well, he said the guy was an Indian man,” Jarlait said. “So he didn’t pay much attention.”
“He didn’t recognize him? Or the van?”
Jarlait shook his head. “No. Here’s the thing-Cliff thought he was an Indian man, but not one of us. He thought he looked like an Apache.”
“An Apache.”
“Yeah. You know, those skinny string bean little assholes,” Jarlait said. “BIA has a lot of Apache cops for some reason. They get sent up here sometimes.”
A half-dozen Red Lake cops were looking down at them as they walked up the road, working on the suckers, and one of the cops, Rudy Bunch, broke away from the group. Virgil noticed a man sitting on the side of the road, weeping. Jarlait walked over to him and squatted down next to him.
“Did you stop and see Ray?” Bunch asked.
“Yeah. Shot in the legs and head. Probably killed here, transported down there,” Virgil said. “What’s the situation with your guy?”
“Shot in the head. Cold. Looks like he was sitting right at the wheel. Looks like a.22.”
“That fits,” Virgil said. “Any reason that he’d be here?”
Bunch pointed back up the road. “Well, you were at Ray’s place, Ray’s mom’s place, it’s about a mile up that way. She says Ray and Olen was going into town. Looks like they got this far…”
Virgil scratched his head, looking up and down the road. “So… what’d he do? Flag them down? Fake an accident?”
“Olen never called in, so that’s not it,” Bunch said. “If he’d seen an accident, he would have called. I don’t know why he stopped, but he did, and here he is.”
“Would he have called for something like a flat tire?” Virgil asked.
“Ah, probably not. He didn’t… but who knows?”
Virgil looked up and down the road, shook his head. He didn’t know why Olen Grey had stopped, but he suspected that whatever happened, neither Grey nor Bunton had taken the situation as seriously as Virgil had. Maybe, Virgil thought, he hadn’t pounded it home hard enough. Ray had been frightened but had seemed to think once he got across the line into Red Lake, he’d be safe. As though that, alone, would be enough.
Then he’d gone to his mother’s house…
VIRGIL WALKED OVER, looked in the car. A white guy was working with gloves and a UV light on the far side; on the street side, Grey sat slumped in his seat, his safety belt still looped around his chest. He turned back to Bunch: “If an Indian man did the shooting-Louis told me somebody saw a guy who might be the shooter-that’d mean, what? That it’s somebody with connections up here?”