“Shirley, I’m about ninety percent that your stance here was an effort to stampede us.”
“Tom, I’d never-”
“If so, you’ve succeeded. I’ve canceled my plans for the evening, and if you can get back here at six o’clock, we can at least start the conversation.”
“That will be fine,” Good Thunder said, with a smile. “I think this will be best for all of us.”
Back outside, she showed some excitement: “Damnit, Virgil, I’m actually gonna do some of that stuff we talked about in law school. Clean up the town. So far, it’s mostly been plea bargains to small amounts of marijuana. Tire theft and public urination.”
“Will you go after Shepard, or try to turn him?”
“I gotta talk to my people,” she said. “Jeanne Shepard might get us only her husband. If we can nail him down before anybody finds out, we might be able to make a deal with him. Put a wire on him, even. Get the whole bunch.”
“Up to you,” Virgil said. “I’d go for the whole banana stand, if I were you.”
“That’s what I’d do, too, but the boss might see one of those birdin-the-hand deals.”
“So: see you at six,” Virgil said. “If you don’t mind, I want to tip Ahlquist off: I don’t want it to catch him with his pants down. He’s already been in the paper standing next to Pye.”
She was hesitant: “He’s gotta keep his mouth shut.”
“He can do that,” Virgil said. “We’ve worked together in the past, and he’s good at that, when he needs to be.”
Virgil followed her toward the courthouse, but swung into a McDonald’s drive-through for a shot of calories, talked to Davenport about the Shepards, while he waited for the food, then went on to the courthouse. Ahlquist had just left, going home for dinner. Virgil got one of the deputies to call him, and Ahlquist said he’d come back.
When he arrived, Virgil was finishing his cheeseburger while looking at the hundred and seven letters that they’d already gotten back from the survey group. Twenty-two had declined to participate, for reasons ranging from a lack of time to concerns about civil rights, leaving eighty-five lists of names. More were arriving every few minutes. They’d asked for ten names, and had gotten back as few as four, on a few lists, to as many as twenty-one on the longest list. Most were ten.
Virgil had opened his laptop, set up an Excel spreadsheet, and started entering names. In the first five letters, he’d had three duplicates, a Lyle McLachlan.
Ahlquist came in, looked over his shoulder, stole a couple of Virgil’s french fries.
“McLachlan isn’t smart enough to pull this off,” he said. “He’s crazy enough, and violent enough, but he’s not the guy.”
“Bummer.”
“So what’s up?” Ahlquist asked. He took a couple more fries.
“These rumors about the city council being bribed,” Virgil said. “Uh, they’re true.”
“You say that like a cop,” Ahlquist said.
“Yeah.”
“Ah, shit.” Ahlquist dropped in a chair. “How bad?”
“We got at least one, Pat Shepard. He’s gone, unless Good Thunder decides to flip him.”
“Ah, man. He teaches civics up at the high school. How to be a good citizen.”
“Yeah, well… I got Good Thunder to agree that I could tell you about this, on the basis that you not mention it to a single person,” Virgil said. “We don’t want Pye shoveling dirt on it, we don’t want people hiding cash in coffee cans out in the woods. When we move on it, we want it all raw.”
“I can keep my mouth shut,” Ahlquist said.
“That’s what I told her,” Virgil said. “I just thought you oughta know, so you don’t wind up standing too close to Pye.”
“I appreciate that, Virgil. You’re a good egg,” Ahlquist said. “So how’d you bag him? Shepard?”
Virgil filled him in on the details-the affairs, the probable divorce, the money, and the immunity agreement with Jeanne Shepard.
“Ah, Jesus. I dread all of this, what’s going to happen,” Ahlquist said, when Virgil finished. “We’ll be busting old friends. Or acquaintances, anyway.”
“It won’t be pretty,” Virgil said. “If you want, I can talk to my boss, bring in a BCA crew. Keep you out of it.”
“That’d make it look like you guys thought I couldn’t handle it,” Ahlquist said. “Or maybe was involved.”
“You can handle it, Earl, but the question is, do you want to?” Virgil asked.
“I gotta think.”
Virgil said, “We could fix it for you to make the announcement, along with the county attorney. You could say something like, ‘I’ve recused myself and the sheriff ’s department to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest.’ ”
He bobbed his head: “That might be the way to go. Once you say I can talk, I’ll tell Mary Alice about it, ask her what she thinks. She’s my brain trust.” Mary Alice was his wife.
“We’ll probably move in the next day or two, so you gotta decide what you’re gonna do, and pretty fast. You think Mary Alice can keep her mouth shut?”
“When she needs to,” Ahlquist said.
“Then talk to her,” Virgil said. “Let me know tomorrow morning what you’re gonna do.”
“I’ll tell you tonight,” Ahlquist said. “I want to see your final list, so I’ll be back anyway.”
Virgil went back to work on the list, pushing hard. Lyle McLachlan, he thought, must be an enormous asshole, because he was on about every other list. George Peck was on one list. Virgil checked the number of the letter that nominated Peck, against the secret numbered list, and found that Peck had nominated himself.
Interesting.
The desk officer came in and handed him more letters. He put them in the pile, and went back to sorting names.
Time went by. He was fifteen minutes from finishing when he glanced at his watch and realized he didn’t have fifteen minutes: it was time to get back to LaRouche’s office.
He went out past the front desk, and found he had sixteen more letters. “Hang onto these, will you?” he asked the desk officer. “I’ll be back in a couple hours to finish up.”
When he got to Larouche’s, the office window was dark, and the door locked, but Good Thunder’s Camaro was parked outside. He knocked, and pushed a doorbell, and a minute later, a clerk-like woman came to the door and asked, “Are you Agent Flowers?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She let him in, said, “I’m Coral Schmidt, I’m the reporter,” and he followed her down a hall past LaRouche’s office, to a conference room, where LaRouche and Good Thunder were chatting, while Shepard sat next to LaRouche, listening and toying with her purse. Schmidt sat down next to a black steno machine and, as Virgil took a chair, nodded to Good Thunder and said, “Anytime.”
Good Thunder dictated some time and date stuff to the reporter, the identities and offices of those present, then she and LaRouche agreed that they would abide by the terms of an agreement reached earlier that day, with copies to everyone, etc. With the bureaucratic bullshit out of the way, they started.
Good Thunder said to Shepard, “Mrs. Shepard, you’ve asserted that your husband, Patrick Shepard, a member of the Butternut Falls City Council, received a bribe of twenty-five thousand dollars to change his vote on a zoning application from PyeMart Corporation, in regard to a PyeMart store to be built on Highway 12 West in Butternut Falls. When did you become aware of the offer from PyeMart?”
Shepard unrolled the story: the first contact with a PyeMart expediter named John Dunn, a series of discussions between Dunn and other members of the council. The discussions had the effect of softening up the council members, she said, and when an offer came to “help” Shepard with some credit card and income tax debt, it was not unexpected.
The offer, she said, had not come directly from Dunn, but from Mayor Geraldine Gore, who had also delivered the money. Pat Shepard, she said, had come home and told her excitedly that their problems were over: they
might even have enough left to buy a home theater system.
“Did he buy one of those?” Good Thunder asked.
Shepard bit her lip, looked away: “No. I have reason to believe that he’d begun a relationship with another woman, Carol Anne Moore, who works for the county clerk, and that he spent a good deal of money on her.”
Virgil: “Was this a serious relationship? Was this a fling, or did you consider your marriage endangered or over?”
“The marriage was over. I was just picking a time to leave,” she said. “I don’t know how serious the relationship was. Is. I don’t know if it’s still going on; I assume it is. Why would it make any difference?”
Virgil asked, “I wonder if he would confide in Miz Moore.”
She shook her head: “I don’t know.”
Good Thunder: “In regards to your own personal life, I would suggest that you act with discretion. If it comes to a jury trial, it will be… less difficult.”
“You mean, ‘Don’t fuck anyone new’?” Then, with a quick glance at the stenographer, “Oh my God, I’m sorry I said that, I just…”
“A lot of stress,” Good Thunder said.
“It’s completely understandable,” said LaRouche.
Shepard said that her husband had laundered much of the money by giving it to his brother, who owned an auto-body shop in St. Cloud. The brother ran it through his bank, then returned it to Shepard as a “temporary employee.”
“I don’t know if Bob knew where the money was coming from, but Pat told me it was no skin off Bob’s butt. The money came in, he paid it to Pat, deducted Pat’s wages as a temporary employee, and it all came out even, tax-wise.”
After they’d wrung her out, Virgil said, “Mrs. Shepard… your husband will likely be looking at a jail sentence here. Do you think that if he were offered a deal, a reduction in the sentence, that he would be willing to implicate some of the other members of this conspiracy?”
“If you said that you could keep him out of prison if he ran over our daughter with the car, he’d do it,” she said. “He is a coward and a rat. And he cheats at golf.”
Good Thunder: “Do you know a woman named Marilyn Oaks?”
Shepard stared at her for a moment, then closed her eyes and leaned back: “I knew it. That sonofabitch.”
When they were all done, and the stenographer had folded up her machine, Shepard said, “The thing that defeats me is, Pat is a jerk, and his hair is falling out, and he’s got a little potbelly… How does he have two mistresses? That we know of?”
“Lonely people,” Virgil said.
“I’m lonely,” she said.
“Yeah, but Pat apparently can’t fix that for you.”
She shook her head, then looked at Good Thunder and said, “I’m not sure I can act with discretion.”
Out in the parking lot, Good Thunder asked Virgil, “Can you guys give us some technical support? Now that we’ve got Mrs. Shepard nailed down, I’m going to pull in Pat Shepard. You won’t have to be there for that-I can handle it with an investigator-but if Shepard agrees to flip, I’ll need a wire and support.”
“Count on it,” Virgil said. “I’ll talk to my boss tonight, and he’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Deal,” she said.
At the courthouse, the duty officer had another stack of letters for him, and Virgil asked the officer to find George Peck’s phone number. He waited, got the number, and dialed. Peck picked up, saying, “Peck.”
Virgil suppressed the urge to tell him he sounded like a chicken, and instead, said, “George? Virgil. Listen, I’m over at the courthouse, compiling those names. If you’ve got time, you could come over and take a look.”
“As a matter of fact, I do have time,” Peck said. “I was just about to get in the bathtub. I’ll be an hour or so, if that’s okay.”
“See you then.”
Virgil had set up the spreadsheet to rank the names by the number of entries in each name-cell; McLachlan had one hundred and eight nominations. The second most, a man named Greg Sawyer, had seventy-four. After that, the numbers dropped sharply. There were four ties with eight, five with seven, eight with six nominations, lots of names with five, four, three, or two nominations, and the rest were scattered, with one each; a total of more than five hundred names.
When he finished, he went out and found two more letters, entered those, with no change in the standings; he was just finishing when Peck showed up.
Virgil asked, “Why the hell did you nominate yourself, George?”
“IQ test,” Peck said. “I wondered if you were smart enough to keep a secret list of which letter went to who. What’d you use, something that shows up under ultraviolet?”
“Nope. Just added a dot in one of the letters on the rightnumbered word in the letter.”
Peck was pleased. “Excellent. So even if somebody sent back a non-original copy, a Xerox, you’d still know who it was.”
“Yeah, I guess, but I didn’t think of that,” Virgil said. “Hey-here’s the list. Take a look.”
Peck settled in front of Virgil’s laptop. Looked at the list, his lower lip stuck out, stroked his left cheek with an index finger, then muttered, “What a fascinating list. McLachlan is a moron, there’s no way he did these bombings. Throw him out, and you’ve got eighty people with two or more nominations. I know most of them, and I wouldn’t have nominated several of them, but I’d still say, ‘Yes, I can see that.’ Fascinating.”
“You think the bomber’s on the list?”
“I’ll bet you a thousand dollars he is-that he’s among those eighty, for sure. He’s probably among the top ten or twelve, once you throw out McLachlan and a couple more.”
“You know this Greg Sawyer?”
“Yeah, he’s another semi-professional criminal. I mean, he’s a big rough redneck bully who steals stuff when he can, usually pigs and calves, and usually gets caught. He’s not the guy.”
Ahlquist came in, saw Peck, frowned, but then said to Virgil, “On that other thing. We’re going to let you guys handle it. You want me to call Davenport?”
“You can do it, if you want,” Virgil said. He said to Peck, “George, keep thinking. I’ve got to go talk to Earl in secret, where you can’t hear.”
Peck waved them off: “Go ahead. Ignore my feelings.”
Down in Ahlquist’s office, Virgil called Davenport at home. “I’ve got the sheriff here, and he’s got a request. We’re cracking the city council, big-time. Here, talk to him.”
Ahlquist took the phone, explained the situation-that he worried about the appearance of a conflict of interest-nodded a few times, and said, “We’ll be in touch, then. Virgil or me.”
He handed the phone back to Virgil, who told Davenport, “We’re also going to need some tech support, if we manage to flip Pat Shepard. I got a name and number for you, a Shirley Good Thunder.”
“Not a problem,” Davenport said, and took down the information. He was too cheerful about it, and Virgil said so.
“What you’re doing, is proving that we’re worth the money the taxpayers give us,” Davenport said. “That’s always good. Anyway, I’ll call Good Thunder, and send Jack Thompson down with the equipment. When you’re ready to move, I can have Shrake and Jenkins down there in two hours. I’ll call everybody and get them cocked and locked.”
Virgil said, “Ten-four. Say hello to your old lady for me.”
Back with Peck, Ahlquist took his turn looking at Virgil’s list. “Heck of a list. You got some serious people on there, important people, and every one of them is a sociopath,” Ahlquist said. “But don’t quote me.”
“Are any of them instructors at the college?”
“Mmm… no. Not regular instructors, anyway, not that I know of,” Peck said. “Somebody might be a part-timer. There’s all kinds of guys teach a class from time to time. I do myself, photography and Photoshop.”
“This guy here… he’s pretty far down, John Haden, he teaches there,” Ahlquist said, tapping the scre
en. “He’s on the staff. And this guy, Bill Wyatt.”
Haden had been nominated twice, Wyatt, three times.
“Gotta look at them. And the top eighteen,” Virgil said.
“Tonight?”
“Tomorrow,” Virgil said. “And pray to God that there’s not another bomb.”
“You’re wasting your time,” Peck said. “There is no God, and why an intelligent person would think so, I cannot fathom.”
As they broke up for the evening, Virgil said, “Listen, guys, do me a favor. Ask yourself, ‘Why would the bomber try to blow up Virgil Flowers?’ Because it’s a lot more interesting question than you might expect. If we could figure that out, it might help.”
They said they’d think about it, and Virgil went back to the Holiday Inn, where he carefully parked his truck in a no-parking zone directly in front of the front window, where the desk clerk would be looking straight out at it.
He went in the lobby, to explain, and Thor came out of the back room.
He said, “Hey, Virg.”
“I parked my truck there so nobody would put a bomb in it. Keep an eye on it, would you?”
“No problem. I’m going off in an hour, I’ll tell the night girl.” Then, “So, you talk to Mrs. Shepard?”
Virgil said, “Thor…” He sighed, shook his head, and said, “I need some sleep.”
“Hot damn, you did! I’m going over there.”
“She’s not over there,” Virgil said. “She moved out.”
Thor thought for one second, or less, then said, “She’s at her sister’s. I’m going over there.”
“If you mention my name in any way…”
“You’ll kill me. Got it.”
“She’s in pretty delicate shape,” Virgil began.
“So am I,” Thor said. “You wouldn’t believe how delicate a shape I’m in. And don’t worry about it, dude. I’m not gonna go in there and jump her. I’m gonna offer her my friendship.”
“And a pizza.”
“Well, yeah. A meat lover’s.”
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