“I don’t think that’ll work,” Virgil said. “The town’s too small.”
“It might not totally work, but it’ll confuse them,” she said.
SHE WAS BACK in an hour, satisfied that everybody was confused. “I told my son that we were working a surveillance,” she said, as she pulled her sweater over her head and shook out her hair. “So. Tell me about Omaha.”
He told her, and she said, “Too bad. So we stay local.”
“Looks like.”
“You know what we could have done? We could have mailed one of those pictures of Rouse to ourselves. An anonymous tip. Then we raid the place—”
“That would involve some heavy-duty lying in court,” Virgil said. “I’m up for an occasional breaking-and-entering, but serious perjury . . .”
She nodded. “Good. I agree.”
“Just checking?”
“Ah, God, I don’t know,” she said. “Ever since I started thinking about it, I’ve had all kinds of ideas, most of them bad. But I can’t stop thinking. It’s like a disease.”
Virgil was sitting on the bed, and he reached over and caught her by the belt, pulled her close, and began unbuckling it, and she scratched his scalp with her fingernails, and said, “Schickel and Brown were all over the west end of the county today, but they didn’t get much. I’m sure the rumors are starting to spread, though.”
Virgil dropped her jeans to her ankles, and she stepped out of them, and he stroked her thighs with his fingertips. “I do have one idea. But it’s probably crazier than anything you’ve thought of.”
“Tell me about it,” she said. “Later.”
LATER, HE SAID, “Birdy has been gone for eight or nine years. The World of Spirit people threatened her, but they’ve got no idea of where she might be.”
Coakley sat up and said, “Virgil, you can’t tell them.”
“No, I don’t want to do that. For one thing, she’s in Nebraska, and we don’t have the resources there to cover her. But. She has a twin sister here in Minnesota, and the twin looks exactly like her, and sounds like her.”
“Virgil, jeez . . .”
“I’d tell her about it,” Virgil said. “Go up there and explain what we’re trying to do. Maybe Birdy can’t get involved, but maybe her sister would be willing to. We put her in a house where we can give her good cover, get a phone. She calls Roland Olms, says, ‘Virgil Flowers was here and he’s investigating a murder of some kind. Kelly Baker. He says if I don’t talk about the church, they’re going to indict me, too, as an accessory. What should I do? I’m really scared.’ Then we cover her, and see who shows up.”
“She’ll tell them where she’s at?”
“No—but they’ll have her phone number,” Virgil said. “We’ll make sure she’s in a reverse directory, that they can look her up.”
“That sounds complicated.”
“If we can talk her into it, it’d only take a couple days to set up,” Virgil said. “We’ve got a house where we stash witnesses, up in Burnsville; it’s empty right now. We could do it.”
“Let’s try to think of something better than that,” she said. “I mean, I think it’s unlikely that she’d even go along with it.”
VIRGIL GOT UP in the morning, still a little worn from the long drive the day before, and headed in to the Yellow Dog. Coakley was already there, eating pancakes, and Jacoby came over with a menu and asked, “Anything new?”
“Nah. I’m thinking about heading out,” Virgil said. “Short stack of blueberry pancakes, Diet Coke.”
“So she’s gonna get away with it?”
“We don’t know that, Bill,” Coakley said, her voice crisp. “We don’t actually know that she did anything.”
“Well, Jesus, that just isn’t right,” Jacoby said. He wandered off to talk with the cook.
Virgil asked Coakley, “Did you think about it?”
“Not much,” she said. “My brains were banged too loose.”
“Nasty expression,” Virgil said. “Nasty.”
“I heard it from you,” she said.
“But women aren’t supposed to use it,” Virgil said.
“Pig,” she said. “Anyway, it seems to me to be too crazy. We should be able to figure out things here.”
“That Loewe guy,” Virgil said. “We got him scared. He’s been stewing for a while—let’s go back. Right after breakfast. Let on that we know more than we do, see if he’ll cave.”
“That’s a plan,” she said. “We should take Schickel with us, to add to the pressure.”
They finished breakfast and Virgil followed her over to the sheriff’s office, where they picked up Schickel, who rode with Coakley, Virgil leading in his own truck. When they got to Loewe’s place, they knocked for a while, but got no answer.
No sign of a truck: Virgil looked in the garage and found it empty.
“That’s better’n if it’d been here,” Coakley said. “Then I’d have to worry that he was dead in there.”
“Probably just went downtown for something,” Schickel said. “We could go talk to his folks, see when he’s coming back.”
Virgil tracked around to the front porch, nine inches deep in snow, and peered in the front windows. Through the glass, he could see five or six pieces of furniture bagged up with plastic sheeting; he could see just a corner of the kitchen counter, and it was completely bare.
Schickel and Coakley had walked along the driveway so they could see him on the porch, and when Virgil said, “Uh-oh,” Coakley called, “What?”
“I think he’s gone. It looks like he mothballed the house.”
“Oh, boy. He can’t . . . Well, I guess he can.”
“I’m gonna try to look in another window,” Virgil said. He tramped around the house, but the windows were too high. He looked in the garage, found an old wooden stepladder, put it against the kitchen window, and looked through the open blades of the venetian blind. The kitchen was empty—the dinette table cleaned and wrapped in transparent plastic. Schickel had walked away from the house, and walked back and said, “No heat coming out of the chimney.”
“Let’s go talk to his folks,” Coakley said.
“You go ahead and do that,” Virgil said. “I’m going to get my camera and take some shots through the window.”
“What for?” Schickel asked.
Virgil didn’t want to tell the truth—to get you out of the way while I break in—so he said, “Just documenting it. That he ran. Maybe . . . I doubt it, but it might help get a search warrant.”
Schickel shrugged, and Coakley said, “We’ll give you a call when we get out.”
Virgil walked around to her door, as Schickel was getting in the other side, and said, “Rouse.”
She nodded.
Coakley backed in a circle and headed out. Virgil got his Nikon from the truck, just in case, recovered the butter knife from under the front seat, and went to work on the kitchen door. In one minute, he decided that the knife wouldn’t work; the lock was too new, and the door too tight.
He checked for a key above the door frame, found nothing, checked the adjacent window frame, came up empty, went back to the garage, looked for a key hanging from a nail on one of the exposed studs, found nothing there, and then knocked it off the top of the door frame.
The key worked fine, and he was in. He walked through in thirty seconds: Loewe was gone, no doubt about it. No note, nothing to look at, although there was a room full of cardboard boxes, packed with dishes and other household stuff, covered with a sheet of plastic. Nothing perishable.
The refrigerator and stove were unplugged, the microwave was missing, the water was turned off.
Virgil let himself out, put the key back, and walked around to the front porch, with the Nikon, and took a few shots.
When he was done, he sat in the truck, waiting, and daydreamed possible ways to get at the photos at the Rouses’ place. Had to get them. Had to get just the smallest edge, just enough to get in there.
Maybe lie.
<
br /> COAKLEY CALLED and said, “His folks say he decided to take off for the Cities, check out some job possibilities. They don’t know exactly where he’s staying, and they don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“Is that the truth?”
“I don’t think so. His mother had that ‘I’ve got a secret’ look on her face. She was messing with us. Gene thinks so, too.”
“You want to come up to Sleepy Eye with me?”
“I don’t think so. I’m going to look for Loewe. Give me a call when you get there, though. . . . I’m still skeptical about the whole idea.”
“It’s what we’ve got,” Virgil said. “I’m gonna give it a shot.”
On the way north again, Virgil thought about the idea of using Louise Gordon as bait in a trap: and thought better of the idea of putting her in a BCA witness-protection house. The problem was, the house was in Burnsville, a Twin Cities suburb that was simply too large. They needed a small town, like Sleepy Eye, he thought, so they could spot whoever came in after her.
That could be handled, he thought: Minnesota had no shortage of small towns, where strangers would be picked up in a minute.
SLEEPY EYE had thirty-five hundred residents, more or less, the usual clutter of small businesses, including two cafés. Virgil had eaten at Doreen’s once before. He stopped at Gordon’s house, knocked, found it empty, because she was at work, and went down to Doreen’s.
The place was going through the afternoon slump, and there were only two other customers in the place, a couple of older men huddled at one end of the counter, arguing about medical care. Virgil ordered a hamburger and fries, and when they came, showed the waitress his ID and asked, “You know where Louise Gordon works? I just went by her house and there was nobody home.”
“What’s going on with Louise?” she asked.
“Nothing, really. I was talking to her night before last, about a person she knew—actually, her sister—and I need to talk to her again. I forgot to ask her where she works.”
The woman took another look at his ID, then said, “She’s down at Phillips’. The Ace Hardware. She’s not in trouble, or nothing?”
“Not at all. I just need to check in with her,” Virgil said. And, “You guys got any berry pie?”
“Five kinds—cherry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, and mixed berry.”
“Put a piece of raspberry on there, too.”
“Warmed up?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“Ice cream?”
“Might as well,” Virgil said. “Long as there’s no calories in there.”
She snorted: the laugh of a woman who’d heard the line six hundred times, and was being polite. “Lucy. That’s her name. Louise’s sister. Twin sister.”
“Nice lady, too,” Virgil said.
LOUISE WAS SORTING nuts and bolts into metal bins at the back of the somnambulant hardware store. When Virgil walked in, he could hear two men’s voices, working in a small-engine repair shop, then the tink-tink of metal on metal, and when he turned the corner, Louise spotted him, frowned, and asked, “How’d you do that? Find my call?”
“Lucy called you? Lenore? Birdy?”
“As soon as you left,” Louise said. “She knew you must’ve figured it out from my call. I don’t call her in three months, and then I do, and you show up the next day.”
Virgil bobbed his head and said, “Well, she’s right. I followed you down to your friend’s house and had the outgoing calls checked the next morning.”
“I watched to see if anybody was following me,” she said.
“I was over on the street behind your house, so I could see when you got in the garage. I stayed on parallel streets as much as I could, and then, way back.”
“Tricky,” she said. She looked at a bunch of nuts in her hand, selected one, and threw it in a bin. “So what do you want now?”
“I want to tell you a story, and then see if you could help me out.”
“Why should I help you out?”
Virgil said, “Because you’re a good person? Because it’d be a lot more exciting than sorting nuts?”
She looked at the nuts in her hand and said, “Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”
They wound up back at Doreen’s, sitting in a booth, and Virgil made his pitch, starting with a couple of questions, spoken quietly. “How much do you know about Lucy’s love life? When she was married to Roland?”
“Enough,” she said. “I know about the swapping and so on. And you said that they might be abusing children now.”
“Not just now . . . for a long time. Generations.” He told her about Kelly Baker and the evidence of multiple partners, and sadism. He told her about Bobby Tripp, and his murder of Jake Flood.
“I’m not a prude. I’ve been married and divorced a lot, and I like women a lot—but that’s not what we’re talking about here,” Virgil said. “And this isn’t some phonied-up sex ring where there’re a bunch of wannabe therapists manipulating the kids. . . . This is hard stuff, with hard evidence. And it may have been going on for a long time. Maybe a hundred years. Their grandparents might have brought it over from Germany with them, a long time ago.”
“So exactly what do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Lucy won’t help, because she doesn’t want to have to go to court and testify about her sex life,” Virgil said. He didn’t mention that Birdy was scared to death. “But: you look exactly like her, and you sound like her, even now.”
“We were always pretty identical. Nobody could tell us apart,” she said.
“And they haven’t seen her for years. Now. If we put you in a small town a hundred miles from here, if we can get them to bite, if we can get them to threaten you, we can hit them with search warrants. If we can just get inside a couple of their houses, if we can just get the kids by themselves, we can make our case.”
“What if they shoot me?”
Virgil grinned and said, “That’d certainly make the case for us.”
Her eyebrows went up, and he quickly added, “No, no, no. You’d be covered twenty-four hours a day. That’s why I want to stage it in a small town. Have you ever heard of Hayfield?”
“No. It’s in Minnesota?”
“Yeah, it’s up north of Austin. I got involved in a missing-kid case up there. People thought a kid had been kidnapped, but he hadn’t been—he’d drowned, actually. I mean, a tragedy. But I know a lot of people in town from the investigation. The thing is, we could put you in a house there, and talk to the neighbors, and when anybody unfamiliar went by, we’d get an instant alert. I mean, the town’s half as big as Sleepy Eye. Maybe less than half.”
“How long would it take?”
“If they didn’t bite in a few days, they wouldn’t,” Virgil said. “You could just come back here, and be done with it.”
“Would I get paid?” she asked.
“Sure, we could fix something up. Not a lot, but something.”
“The thing is, work is really slow right now,” she said. “Dave would be happy to see me take a couple of weeks off.”
Virgil said, “So. We got a deal?”
“Better’n sorting nuts,” she said. “Or bolts. I’ll do it.”
They talked about it awhile longer, and then Virgil walked her back to the Ace Hardware. “I’ll get back to you—but it’ll be in the next couple of days. Soon. I’ve got to run over to Hayfield and set up a house, get some guys to work it with me. Then we’ll go for it.”
VIRGIL CALLED COAKLEY: “She’ll do it. I’ve got to call my boss, get his okay, and then I’m going to run over to Hayfield and see if I can find a house. I know an old guy up there who I think will help us out.”
“Loewe is in the wind,” Coakley said. “He sold his truck yesterday up in the Cities, got cash for it. Went right to the bank with the buyer. I called his bank here, and he took everything but five dollars. That’s confidential, by the way, I got that on a friendship basis.”
“I think we let him go, for now,” Vi
rgil said. “If we said anything publicly . . .”
“That’s what I think. You’re coming back tonight?”
“I think so. I’ll see what happens in Hayfield,” he said. “If we’re going to do this, we want to do it quick. I keep worrying that somebody will tell them about the young-sex angle, and those pictures go up in smoke.”
“So we hurry,” she said. “We hurry.”
17
Virgil headed for Hayfield, and got on the phone with Davenport to tell him what he wanted to do. “I worry about bringing in a civilian,” Davenport said. “What if they walk through the door and pop her?”
“This isn’t about bringing in a civilian—it’s about bringing in the only person who could do the job, Birdy’s twin,” Virgil said. “I’ll put her in a vest, but I don’t think they’ll go right to guns. They’ll want to know what she said to me before they do that. I need a couple of guys, though. Del, Shrake, Jenkins, you, I don’t care, but at least two.”
“I can’t do it, but I’ll get you two. Do you have a house in mind?”
“Yeah, an old guy named Clay Holley, and some people in his neighborhood. I got to know them pretty good, and I think they’ll go for it.”
“When are you going to make the call?” Davenport asked.
“Tomorrow, or the day after, if Holley goes along,” Virgil said.
“All right, I’ll see who I can shake free. Stay in touch. And, Virgil . . . you’re sure about this sex thing?”
“I’m sure.”
“If you’re so sure, why can’t you just file on it, get a search warrant?” Davenport asked.
Virgil said, “That’s a sensitive issue.”
After a moment of silence, Davenport said, “I’ve had a few issues myself. Good luck with that.”
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