Storm Front

by John Sandford

  Later, driving away, she thought about his sincerity in saying that, and it made her cry.

  12

  Virgil’s phone rang at 3:37. He knew that because his clock was the first thing he looked at when the phone began ringing; 3:37 phone calls were not usually lawn-furniture sales, and more often than not, left him fumbling for his pants in the dark.

  He took his cell phone off his nightstand, looked at the caller ID and saw “Unknown,” which usually meant a cop. He answered: “Virgil Flowers.”

  “Virgil, this is Shane Cobley over at Mankato. We just got a call from the hospital, and they said your guy Jones has taken a hike.”

  “What?”

  “They said—”

  “I heard that. He was chained to the bed.”

  “They say he cut the chain off. That’s about all I know. I called Don Scott, and he said he’d go over there, and he told me to call you.”

  “I’m going,” Virgil said.

  But he would not, he thought, fumble into his pants in the dark. He turned the lights on before he fumbled into his pants, and a clean T-shirt, and yesterday’s socks. He was out the door in five minutes, at the Mayo in ten.

  —

  SCOTT WAS STANDING in the hallway talking to two nurses, one each male and female, and a young man in a white jacket, when Virgil arrived. The nurses’ names were Max and Jane, and the resident’s name was Mark.

  “Don’t know what happened,” Jane said. “I checked on him every half hour, and at three o’clock he was sound asleep. At three-thirty, he was gone.”

  Mark, the resident, said, “I was asleep in the physicians’ room, and Jane woke me up. We ran around looking, but there was no sign of him. His clothes are gone, so he’s probably outside somewhere.”

  “Can he walk?” Virgil asked.

  “He’s hurt, but he’s pretty bound up in bandages. We would have had him on his feet in the morning.”

  “We got three patrol cars covering the area,” Scott said.

  “What about the cuff on his leg?” Virgil asked.

  “Take a look,” Scott said.

  They went into Jones’s room. One of the two cuff bracelets was still attached to the bed, with a short length of chain hanging from it. Virgil squatted to look at it. “Bright metal. Cut with a real bolt cutter—this was no side-cutter. Snipped right through it.”

  “There was nobody up here that I saw,” Jane said, and she then glanced sideways at the male nurse, Max.

  Max said, “I just got out of an elevator and I saw a woman walk down the hall toward me, and then she went down the stairwell. I didn’t see where she was coming from, but she shouldn’t have been here. I thought maybe she was a nurse I didn’t know, but she was dressed in civilian clothes.”

  “A dirndl,” Jane said.

  Virgil: “She was wearing a dirndl?”

  Max said, “That’s what Jane says it was. You know, a low-cut dress, cut square across the top. She went through the stairway door, and I thought it was odd, something odd about her, so I pushed open the door and looked down after her, but she was already going outside at the bottom.”

  “Did you mention it to anyone?” Virgil asked.

  “Yeah. Jane. She’s the charge nurse tonight,” Max said. “That’s how I found out about the dirndl.”

  “She was never around the station, I never saw her,” Jane said. “The thing is, the stairway door is only two rooms down from Reverend Jones’s. So . . . I wouldn’t have seen her, if she was just quick in-and-out.”

  “What time was this?” Virgil asked.

  “A few minutes before three, I guess,” Jane said. “Because a little while after I talked to Max, about this woman, I went and did my room checks, at three. Reverend Jones was asleep. Then . . . well, you know. I did the three-thirty check, and no Jones.”

  “What did this woman look like?” Virgil asked Max.

  “I wasn’t that close to her . . . blond, maybe, very fair-skinned. I didn’t see her hair. She was short, she had . . . uh . . .” He’d unconsciously cupped his hands, then glanced at Jane, who crossed her arms, and he uncupped his hands and finished, “A pretty good figure.”

  “Couldn’t see her hair?”

  “No, she was wearing like a handkerchief over her hair.”

  —

  EXAM TIME.

  Virgil asked himself, who did he know who was short, blond, would cause a witness to cup his hands, and who very likely would have instant access to a bolt cutter, and who knew about the stone and the search for it, and the money involved?

  He said aloud, “Goddamnit, Ma.”

  Scott: “Who?”

  “Ah, that goddamned Ma Nobles. You know her?”

  “Yeah. What’s she got to do with this?”

  Virgil explained how she’d been around the edges of it. “She has a nose for money, and she probably gives every one of her kids a bolt cutter when they graduate from elementary school.”

  “She lives out in the country, right?”

  “Yeah. I’ll go on over there,” Virgil said. “But by this time, she’s ditched him someplace. Unless his daughter picked him up.”

  He explained that, then excused himself, went down to his truck, pulled out the tracking tablet, and found that he’d lost Ellen—according to the map, she’d driven off the north edge of the tracking radius at nine o’clock, apparently heading back toward the Twin Cities. Possibly, he thought, because she was creating an alibi.

  —

  VIRGIL PICKED UP his cell phone and peered at it, reluctant to make the call, but he really had no choice.

  Davenport said, “Goddamnit, Virgil.”

  “Listen, one phone call, and you can go back to sleep. I need Jenkins and Shrake. Like now.”

  Davenport wanted to know what had happened, and why Virgil was up at four o’clock in the morning.

  “Jones took a walk,” Virgil explained. He finished with, “ . . . so I need somebody to keep an eye on her. Shrake has that pickup, that’d be good, but Jenkins sure as shit can’t come down in the Crown Vic. He oughta get a company car, I guess. The more dusty and beat-up, the better.”

  Davenport said that he’d get them started. “What’re you going to do?”

  “I’m going to find a place where I can watch Ma’s driveway, see if anybody’s coming or going,” Virgil said. “Tell those guys to call me as soon as they get close. If Ma sees me, she’ll know I know.”

  —

  VIRGIL STOPPED back at his house, got an olive drab REI bivy bag, a couple of pillows, and two Dos Equis, threw them in the truck, and drove north out of Mankato. On the way out, Jenkins called, and Virgil had him pull up a map on his iPad, and spotted Ma’s house for him. Jenkins said they’d be there sooner or later, depending on traffic.

  —

  MA LIVED on what had been a run-down farm. She’d been rebuilding it since her second husband died in the epicurean tragedy at Wendy’s, and it had come a long way back—too small to be really successful as a farm, but with some of the better land leased out, and extensive subsistence gardens, some chickens and an annual calf, they did okay. Virgil looked at a satellite view before he went out: the place appeared to cover a half section, a near-perfect rectangle a mile long and a half-mile deep.

  Two of the back forty-acre chunks were wooded, with the beginning of Ayer’s Creek running through them. Five of the remaining forties were covered with corn and soybeans, and the last forty included space for the house, barn, garage, machine sheds, a chicken house and pen, maybe ten acres of pasture. The satellite shot showed what appeared to be a corral with a trodden dirt circle inside, as though Ma might be training horses.

  Virgil could see almost none of that on the ground, as he arrived in the faint predawn light. He checked the mailbox, and in his headlights saw “Nobles” painted on the side of it. A single
mercury-vapor yard light hung from a pole at the end of the drive, and he could see the red pickup parked under the light. He went on by, to the first turnaround, then back past the house. He could see no lights, other than the yard light.

  He continued up the road for a half-mile, to the remnants of a woodlot, turned in, found a spot where the local children probably came to screw, and parked. He walked back out to the road and then a half-mile down it, crossed the ditch into a soybean field, spread out the bivy bag, zipped himself inside, propped his head on the pillows, cracked one of the Dos Equis, and began the surveillance.

  Nothing happened, and eventually, as the sun came up, he dozed.

  A couple of trucks went by between six and seven, and then Jenkins called: “Where you at?”

  “I’m laying in a bean field. Excuse me. I meant, I’m lying in a bean field.”

  “We’re on the job. We’ve got her pickup and her plates and her picture, so we’re good.”

  “She’ll be looking for you.”

  “Like I said—we’re good. You can go on home.”

  “Call me if she moves,” Virgil said. He gathered up his gear, put the empty beer bottles in his pockets, went home and went back to sleep. When his phone went off, he jerked awake and looked at the clock: it was after ten, and he picked up the phone.

  Yael-2: “What are we doing today?”

  “There’s been a problem,” Virgil said.

  He explained the problem to her, and she said, “To use your American idiom, our grave is in the water.”

  He had to think about that for a minute, came up with “dead in the water,” and said, “Yeah, pretty much. Have you made any inquiries about our Mossad agent?”

  “Yes, I called my embassy and they told me that they know nothing. This is not true.”

  “Is there anyone there who I can call?” Virgil asked.

  “Mmm, I think this would cause trouble,” Yael said.

  “Probably, but so what?”

  “Mmm. If you wish to explore this direction, I think you should make the exploration yourself. To determine who to call.”

  “I can do that,” Virgil said. “If you want to go off to the Sam’s Club, now would be a good time to do it. Just not much happening.”

  “Okay. But be cautious in your phone call,” she said.

  “What could they do to me?”

  “To be honest, I worry not so much about you,” she said, and hung up.

  —

  SO VIRGIL looked up the embassy on the Internet, found that it had a “police and security” division, called it, identified himself, and wound up talking to a colonel, an “aluf mishne,” who was described by an underling as second in command.

  “Good enough,” Virgil told the underling.

  A moment later, a man said, “This is Colonel Ohad Shachar speaking. And who are you again?”

  “I’m Virgil Flowers, I’m an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’ve been assigned to help an Israeli investigator from your antiquities authority recover an artifact stolen from a dig there a couple of weeks ago.”

  “I have heard of this,” Shachar said.

  “Yes. Well, the problem is, while the real investigator was delayed by Dutch police in Amsterdam by what now seems to be a phony or spurious charge against her, another woman, who several people have suggested to me is a member of the Mossad, impersonated her in an effort to recover the stone.”

  “This sounds very unlikely and unreasonable,” Shachar said.

  “I think so, too. Now, the problem is, this person apparently tried to assassinate the holder of the stone, to recover it—this happened yesterday.”

  “This sounds increasingly unlikely. The state of Israel does not conduct any such operations in the United States—”

  “I’m sure you don’t, so you probably can’t help me much. But I thought I would call, and you could perhaps talk to your Mossad contact in the embassy. If there’s any small sliver of a possibility that the Mossad knows who this woman really is, and if they can reach her, they should tell her to surrender herself to law enforcement authorities. They should warn her that she is being sought for attempted murder, attempted robbery, aggravated assault, conspiracy to receive stolen goods, illegal entry into the United States, and reckless discharge of a firearm, as well as other state and federal felonies carrying a minimum prison sentence of one hundred and sixty-five years. Also, because of the assassination attempt yesterday, all police officials have been warned to treat her as armed and exceptionally dangerous. If I see her, I will deal with her with an M16.”

  “This sounds very . . . bleak,” Shachar said.

  “An excellent choice of words, Colonel.”

  After some more back-and-forth bullshit, in which the colonel assured Virgil that no Israeli government employee would ever knowingly violate American laws and friendship, and Virgil assured him that he believed that, Virgil rang off and went to make breakfast.

  —

  SHRAKE CALLED while he was eating: Ma was in her pickup, driving toward town. Ten minutes later, Jenkins reported that she was at a Hardware Hank. Virgil took more calls as Ma headed west, and wound up at what Virgil recognized as Jones’s country place, where she met two young men. They walked around looking at the buildings, prying random boards off and examining them. Then Ellen showed up, and when Virgil checked, he found her back on his tracker tablet.

  “That’s probably a couple of Ma’s kids,” Virgil told Jenkins. “They’re gonna tear those places down for the lumber.”

  He told them to keep watching, and Jenkins said they’d have to keep the watch very loose, because there was no place to hide.

  “I have full confidence in your professionalism,” Virgil said. He went to get cleaned up.

  —

  SOMEWHERE, HE THOUGHT as he smoothed the shaving cream on, Jones was hiding out. He had help, from someone. From Ma? From Ellen? He probably couldn’t walk very far. Was it possible that somebody had checked him into a motel?

  This was the worst kind of police work, aimlessly looking for somebody who didn’t want to be found. Virgil had once spent two weeks looking for a hillbilly that everyone said was so insular, so repressed, that he was probably hiding in a culvert under a road. He was picked up six months later by Los Angeles cops, who busted him for trying to shoplift Maui Jim sunglasses from a Rodeo Drive accessories store.

  His telephone went off. He picked it up and looked at the screen: Awad. He put him on the speaker. “Yo. How they hangin’, big guy?”

  “The Hezbollah gentleman is here—he arrived unexpectedly an hour ago. He has one suitcase, and it is not so good. It is this ultra-suede. I think he has no money.”

  “Is he staying with you? Or in a motel?”

  “With me, unfortunately. I sleep on the couch. He is locked in the bathroom even now, in the shower.”

  “It’s very important for everybody’s future to tell me if he has an appointment,” Virgil said. “You understand?”

  “Clearly,” Awad said. “Would you like his car and license plate number?”

  “That would be nice,” Virgil said. “You’re an excellent spy.”

  —

  A BREAK? MAYBE.

  The Turks had met Jones, had seen the stone, but hadn’t coughed up any cash. Maybe they didn’t have any. Maybe this guy wouldn’t have any, either, and the whole scam would fall apart.

  He continued shaving, and a moment later the phone rang again. It was Scott, the Mankato investigator who’d been at the park and at the hospital. Virgil put him on the speakerphone. “Yeah? You get him back?”

  “No, but you know those Turks?”

  “Yeah. How they doing?”

  “I imagine they still hurt a little—some of that shot got in pretty deep, and had to be dug out. Anyway, they called me and said they wanted t
o talk to you, since you’re the state big shot.”

  “Don’t be bitter,” Virgil said. “You know what they want?”

  “No, but they’re waiting at the motel. I said you’d rush right over.”

  “Well, you’re right. I will.”

  Virgil finished shaving, picked out a fine old Wilco shirt, pulled it on, with his jeans, boots, and tan linen sport coat, and headed out the door. Hot. Sun. Went back inside for the straw cowboy hat, got in the truck, put on his aviators, and felt complete. On the way downtown, he stopped at Jones’s house, used his key to open it, took a fast lap around the place, found it empty, checked the garage to make sure the Xterra was still there—it was—and continued on his way to the Holiday Inn.

  —

  WHAT THE TURKS had to say was interesting, in its own, non-problem-solving way. Virgil knocked on the motel room door, and the small Turk answered, looked back into the room and said, “Here is the Virgil.”

  “Send him in.”

  Virgil stepped in, and found the big Turk buttoning his shirt. Their suitcases sat on the two beds. They were open, but fully packed. “You are this fucking Flowers,” he said. “We hear this from Officer Scott. But this is a friendly saying, correct?”

  “I hope so,” Virgil said. “You asked to see me?”

  “This is also correct,” the big Turk said. “We are announcing that we going home. To Istanbul. We do not buy the stone, we do not talk to Jones. Our plane is at four o’clock, so we must hurry.”

  “I think this is a wise decision, although I’m not one hundred percent sure that I believe you,” Virgil said. “Speaking only in a friendly way.”

  “I shall announce to you why we are going,” the big Turk said.

  “I’m listening,” Virgil said.