“You find brass?”
“Yup. A .223 shell, and I bet your tool-marks guy will tell you it’s the same firing pin as in the Conley killing. We got us either a nutcase, or a drug link.”
“Who found him?”
Purdy tipped his head toward the woman up the driveway: “His wife. She heard the shots, and came running out to see what it was. Found him, and called for help. We had a car here in four or five minutes, and the ambulance a minute after that, but there was never a question of transporting him. He was gone.”
Virgil looked up at Zorn’s wife: she looked like a chunk of stone. “What’s she say? She got any ideas?”
“She says not. She says she has no idea of what happened.”
“You ask her about the meth?”
“Virgil, I got here about three minutes before you did.”
“Let’s go talk to her.”
—
THEY WALKED UP the driveway and Purdy said, “Miz Zorn, I know this is a bad time, we need to get you up to the house and talk a bit.”
“I knew it was gonna happen sooner or later,” she said, without moving. She had a nearly rectangular face, black hair and eyebrows, a small nose and a small tight mouth that made a natural down-turned new-moon shape. “I told him to quit fuckin’ around with that meth, he was way out of his league. Did he listen?”
“We oughta go up to the house,” Purdy repeated.
This time she turned and led the way up the driveway. The house was a simple single-story square. The small living room was just inside the front door, with no entry, the kitchen off to the right. A battered couch, with a matching easy chair, backed against one wall, with a glass-topped coffee table in front of it. The table was stacked with hunting and women’s magazines. The couch faced a wide-screen TV, with a pair of red leatherette beanbag chairs on the carpet to the right of the couch. The place smelled of bacon and cooked cabbage.
The woman flopped on the couch and Purdy took the chair; Virgil leaned against the wall next to the television.
Purdy asked, “What did you see?”
“Nothing. I heard the shots, then I heard the car or the truck, sounded like it was laying some rubber, and it was all pretty close, so I went out to see what Roy was doing, and there he was, just like you see him. I went running down, but . . . I could see he was dead. I ran up here anyway, and called you cops, and here we are.”
“You knew he was cooking meth?” Virgil asked.
“I’m not talking about meth,” she said.
Virgil said, “Look, Miz Zorn, if somebody killed him to keep him from talking about his meth business, then they could come after you, too. They’d think that you knew everything that he knew.”
She considered that for a moment and then said, “That’s what a cop would say.”
“Yeah, it is, and the cop would be right.”
She said, “I need a cigarette.” She pushed herself off the couch, went into the kitchen, and came back with a pack of Camels and a book of matches. She lit one, blew smoke, and said, “That ain’t it. Nobody killed him because of the meth.”
“You can’t—” Purdy began.
She interrupted. “He cooked that shit for the Seed. He’s done time, twice, in Wisconsin, and he never said a single fuckin’ thing to the cops. He knew if he ever did, the Seed would kill him.”
The Seed was a neo-Nazi motorcycle gang based in Milwaukee, with alliances in the Twin Cities.
“You know, another guy was killed the same way Roy was,” Purdy said. “We know Clancy Conley was a pill head, so it seemed like there might be a natural connection there.”
“No,” she said. “Roy had one hard rule: no retail. Never sell to locals, because this is a small town, and the word would get out. All the retail was done out of Milwaukee. We were going to sell out this winter and move on, because we were already worried that somebody might start thinking about us up here.”
Virgil looked at Purdy, who shrugged.
They talked to her for another fifteen minutes, but she asked for a lawyer and said she wouldn’t answer any more questions. Back outside, Virgil called Gomez, the DEA guy. Gomez said, “Friendly chats don’t usually start this late at night.”
“Roy Zorn just got shot to death, and it looks like it’s the same shooter in the other murder I’m looking at.”
After a moment of silence, Gomez asked, “What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know—are you getting anything out of the guys you busted?”
“They don’t know anything. They know how to cook, and that’s about it—they weren’t in the business end of things. Now they’re lawyered up. We’ll get them, of course, and we’re talking to the lawyers about cooperation. But if Zorn’s dead, we don’t have anything to talk about. He was the guy we were trying to get.”
“Maybe talk to them about who might be crosswise with Zorn? Ask them about the first guy who got killed, Clancy Conley?”
“We can do that. Send me an e-mail, and we’ll push them on it tomorrow morning.”
“You’ll be talking to the Buchanan County sheriff’s investigator. I’ll have him get in touch.”
—
PURDY CAME OUT of the house and said, “She was terribly upset by her husband being killed. Not.”
“I noticed,” Virgil said. “A guy down the valley told me that she was the brains behind the operation. Doubt that you could prove it, but keep it in mind.”
“Our investigator will be here in ten minutes: I’ll tell him,” Purdy said.
Virgil told him about Gomez: “You need to get in touch with him, interview the guys who worked for Zorn. See if you can get something on Zorn’s old lady, and squeeze her. But I’ll tell you—I think the link between Zorn and Conley is pretty funky.”
“But, Virgil, you saw—”
“I know. It’s the same shooter,” Virgil said. “But I don’t think it’s drugs, I think there’s gotta be some other connection.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Right now? Gonna shout and yell.”
“What?”
Virgil walked down into the road, looking into the darkness on the other side, and shouted, “Muddy! I’m going to your place! See you there!”
—
WHEN VIRGIL ARRIVED at the Ruffs’, a porch light was on, and a couple of interior lights, but there was no movement. There were two chairs on the front porch, looking down the valley, and he took one of them and waited. Muddy Ruff materialized out of the dark five minutes later; he didn’t have his gun.
“What do you want?”
“You see who did the shooting?”
“No. I was here, eating dinner. Dad was already gone, he’s got a gig over in La Crosse tonight. I heard the shots and went running out of here. I knew it wasn’t hunters, the shots just ripped out. Bap-bap-bap. Nothing I heard before. I saw the taillights of the truck, going out, but I didn’t see who was driving it.”
“That’s all you got?”
Muddy hesitated, and Virgil saw it, and Muddy saw Virgil seeing it, so he went on. “I think it might be a red Ford F150. Pretty new.”
“License tags?”
“Never looked. But I think they’re from here, or maybe from Iowa. If they were from someplace else, I would have noticed that. And I didn’t. Some of the Minnesota and Iowa plates look alike, and I see them all the time . . . so I didn’t notice.”
“Why do you think it was a red Ford?” Virgil asked.
“Because I saw a red Ford sitting behind that line of bushes in the Carlsons’ turnout. But the Carlsons aren’t home, they’re up north at their cabin. And if you were a friend of theirs, checking on the house, why wouldn’t you go up the drive?” Muddy said. “The thing is, if you were going to ambush Zorn from a truck, right after he got home, that’s where you’d wait for him. At the Carlson
s’ turnout.”
“How long was it there?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t see it come in. I was down at the river on my bike and rode up after it got dark. I’ve got a light on my bike, and pedaled past the turnout, and that’s how I know it was a red Ford. Got here, stuck a potpie in the microwave, and it was still cooking when I heard the shot and went running out.”
Virgil: “How long does it take to cook a potpie?”
“Fourteen minutes in our microwave, seven minutes on fifty percent power, seven more at a hundred percent,” Muddy said. “It was in the second seven minutes that I heard the shots. I went running out, the red Ford was gone, but I saw taillights down at the end of the valley.”
“And you didn’t see anybody. No faces.”
“Nope. Some of the neighbors went down there, to look—I think they were calling each other on the phone. I stayed back in the woods.”
Muddy had one more thing—“We heard the dogs this morning. I’m going to sneak up there tomorrow and see what’s what.”
“Not a good idea,” Virgil said.
“I’ll take my rifle.”
“Even worse idea,” Virgil said. “Leave it to us. Your old man told you to stay away from there, and that’s very good advice.”
They sat without talking for a moment, then Muddy said, “I got lucky.”
“Yeah?”
“The guy in the truck—he must’ve been slouched down in the truck, or sitting in the weeds off to the side. If I’d pulled in there and looked in the window, if I’d seen him, he might’ve killed me.”
Virgil nodded. “Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Muddy. I don’t want to scare you unnecessarily, but we’ve got a nutcake on our hands. That’s why you’ve got to stay clear. If this guy came back, it wouldn’t make any difference if you had your rifle. He’s a back-shooter. He’d kill you like he was stepping on a bug.”
“Okay,” Muddy said.
Virgil looked at him for a moment, then said, “Okay.” He added, “I need to talk to your father. You got a cell phone for him?”
—
VIRGIL DROVE BACK down the valley to a mailbox that said “Carlson,” got a flashlight out of his toolbox, and walked around the turnout. He found nothing useful: it was all loose gravel, nothing that would hold tire tracks. Neither did he find any fresh cigarette butts, matchbooks from Spike’s Biker Bar and Grill, or discarded receipts with a credit card number. He did see a Northern Walkingstick, Diapheromera femorata, making its ponderous way across the gravel.
He went up the driveway, and a motion-sensor light came on, and there were lights in the house, but nobody answered the door. As he was standing there, one of the lights in the back winked out, but a lamp turned on, and he could see it, and nobody was standing by it: timer switches.
He drove back to the crime scene, where somebody had put a plastic sheet over Zorn’s body, and checked with Purdy: “Are you okay with Alewort working this, or you want me to bring down a BCA crime-scene team?”
Purdy said, “I think we’re good, Virgil. There just isn’t much to the scene.”
Virgil told him to have his investigator check with Muddy Ruff: “He saw a red Ford pickup parked up the valley. He thinks it could have been the shooter’s truck. He might be right, but he doesn’t have much on it. Tell your investigator that I might stop back here tomorrow and have another run at Miz Zorn.”
On the way out of the valley, he called Muddy’s father, but the call clicked through to the answering service, and he left a message asking for a callback. He called Johnson Johnson: “You gotta call around to your friends. I need to know if any of them might have gone after Roy Zorn tonight.”
“What happened?”
“Somebody shot Zorn in his driveway.”
“Better than shootin’ him in his heart,” Johnson said.
“Johnson . . .”
“All right, all right. Is he dead?”
“Yeah, and it looks like the same guy who took out Conley. There’s something going on, Mr. Johnson, and we don’t know what it is.”
“If one of the boys shot Zorn, they wouldn’t tell me, but I might find out if somebody’s nervous,” Johnson said.
“You be careful when you ask, I don’t need to teach somebody else how to fish.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“And listen, I’m going back up there early tomorrow—same place we went the other day, but at five o’clock in the morning. I want to be hidden by five-thirty. You up for that?”
“Can I bring my gun?”
“Would it make any difference if I said no?”
“Not really, but I’m a polite guy, so I thought I’d ask. There’s a carp fisherman’s turnoff four or five hundred yards south of where we parked the other day. Let’s go back in there, we can leave our cars by the ramp. Shouldn’t nobody from the valley see them back there.”
—
VIRGIL WAS BACK to town when Julius Ruff called him back: “Something happen?” he asked, sounding scared.
Virgil told him about it, and said, “You gotta nail down Muddy—he can’t go wandering around up there, not until we’re done with this. He said he was going up tomorrow, and I told him not to, but he might anyway. Keep him out of it.”
“I will. I’ll keep him out of it, I swear to God,” Ruff said.
—
BACK AT THE CABIN, Virgil got in bed and read one of Johnson’s Randy Wayne White novels for a while, then spent some time thinking about God and why he would allow dogs to be mistreated. Before he fell asleep, he thought that it was time that he catch Buster Gedney by himself, away from his wife, and squeeze hard. He was the source of the three-burst .223 kits, Virgil knew it in his heart. He set his clock for five in the morning, and killed the light.
Turned it back on five minutes later, read one more chapter in the Randy Wayne White novel, then turned it off again and went to sleep.
12
THE NIGHT WAS losing its grip, and the early morning steam was hanging off the river’s surface, when they pulled into the parking area near the dirt ramp. A pickup followed them in, towing a trailer that carried a twenty-foot-long jon boat.
The truck driver swung in a wide circle, backed up—fast—toward the waterline at the ramp, hit his brakes, and the boat slid off the trailer into the water. The fisherman jumped out of the truck, walked around to the trailer, untied the line that kept the boat from floating away, tied it to a pole stuck in the ground next to the ramp, got in the truck, and pulled it up beside Virgil’s SUV.
He hopped out, nodded at Virgil, and said, “Johnson, morning,” and Johnson said, “Syz, how they hangin’,” and they all went their separate ways. By the time Virgil and Johnson got to the highway, Syz was roaring out into the river.
“He’s a Polack from Chicago, a carp fisherman,” Johnson told Virgil. “They like their smoked carp, the Polacks do. Smoke it almost till it’s brown. Kinda nicotine-colored.”
They walked up the highway, dodged across when they got a break in the high-speed traffic, and began climbing the hill. They were both carrying their packs; Virgil’s pistol was in his, with a couple bottles of water and the large-sized Payday peanut candy bar. At five-twenty they were at the top of the ridge at the far eastern end of the valley. They found a grassy mound inside a clump of sumac, made sure it wasn’t an anthill, and sat down.
Johnson took a beer out of the pack and popped the top.
They were waiting, and didn’t have much to talk about, so Virgil said, “I’m starting to worry about your drinking.”
Johnson said, “Me, too.”
“Then why don’t you quit?”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it, but never got around to it,” Johnson said. “I talked to Clarice about getting married, you know, but she said she won’t do it, if I keep drinking.”
“
How many beers are you up to?”
“Don’t really count, but I pretty much do a six-pack a day, I guess. Give or take. Mostly give.”
“Jesus, Johnson, you gotta quit,” Virgil said. “You’re hanging around a lumber mill, for Christ’s sakes. Circular saws. Chain saws.”
“Yeah, I guess. All right.”
“All right, what?”
“All right, I’ll quit. I’ll drink these two, and that’ll be the end of it,” Johnson said.
Virgil told him about the murder of Zorn, and the scene the night before, and his encounter with Muddy Ruff. “That kid knows more than he lets on,” Johnson said. “You ought to get close to him. If he thinks you’re a friend, he’d talk.”
“You mean, exploit him.”
“Well, yeah.”
They didn’t talk for a while. Johnson popped the top on the second beer, took a long swig, then tossed the nearly full can over his shoulder and down the hill. “Good-bye, old friend,” he said.
“I’ll believe it a year from now,” Virgil said.
Johnson: “Say, this whole stop-drinking thing . . . it doesn’t include margaritas, does it?”
—
VIRGIL WAS CHECKING the time on his cell phone—6:50—when they first heard the dogs, like a distant pack of foxhounds off in the English hills, somewhere. The barking got louder, over the next couple of minutes, and faster than a dog could run, Virgil thought. He took his weapon out of his pack, with its holster, tucked it into the back of his pants, and said, “Let’s go. I don’t want to see your gun unless I’m shot.”
They came down off the hump and walked through the neck-high sumac, into the oak forest, following a thin game trail that led them below the emerging bluff line, toward the sound of the dogs. They’d gone three hundred yards when the sound of the dogs grew sharper, with some canine shrieks, and suddenly the barking began to diminish. “They’re moving them,” Johnson said. “We’ve got to run.”
They began to jog toward the sound of the dogs, which suddenly stopped altogether, cut off as cleanly as the flick of a switch on an amplifier. Virgil said, “Faster,” and they broke into a full run. A minute later, they could see the pen they’d found during the first search. The pen was empty. Johnson was running behind Virgil, but he suddenly sped up, reached out and caught Virgil’s shirt, yanked him to a stop. He said, “Shhh!”
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