Storm Front

by John Sandford

  “Really.”

  So they floated around and talked about life, about the summer and the heat, and about the possibility that lumber was aging at the bottom of the Minnesota River, and about the likely location of Jones and the stele. Virgil told her about the fight at Custard’s.

  “Tag Bauer? Really? I mean, you know him now?”

  “Well, I talked to him,” Virgil said. “You know who he is?”

  “Sure, he has a show on Channel Two. The Bauer Crusade. He’s always looking for artifacts. He sails someplace on his yacht, The Drifter, or he flies someplace in the airplane . . .”

  “The Wanderer . . .”

  “Yeah. And he goes on expeditions in Jeeps, and he takes his shirt off when he swims these rivers, or when he’s sailing.”

  Virgil could see that in his mind’s eye. “Not when he’s flying?”

  “Not so much when he’s flying,” Ma said. “He’s got this spider tattoo on his shoulder blade, given to him by a tribe in New Guinea, and now he’s a member of the tribe and is pledged to fight with them. Anyway, I’d like to meet him, you know . . .”

  “Because of your interest in archaeology?”

  Ma floated up to Virgil and wrapped both her legs around one of his and said, “C’mon, Virgie, I need this something fierce.”

  Virgil said, “Ma, if a guy takes it out and waves it at you, you get pregnant. I don’t need any redneck kids running around my house, and even if I was inclined to scratch your itch, which is, I confess, not an entirely unattractive proposition—”

  “I can tell,” she murmured. “Judging from the evidence at hand.”

  “. . . I don’t happen to have any protection with me, and I’m not going to take the chance that you’re on the pill—”

  “They’re not good for you, the pills,” she said. “They cause hormonal imbalances.”

  “. . . so, I’m going to have to pass. And, by the way, I suspect you already have hormonal imbalances.”

  “Well then, the heck with you,” she said, letting go of the evidence. “Maybe I’ll introduce myself to Tag.”

  “Why? Because you know where the stone is?”

  “Of course not.”

  —

  SO, THEY GOT DRESSED and walked back to the farm, companionably enough, getting there just as Sam arrived back on his bike. He eyed them for a moment, both of them with wet hair, then said to Virgil, “I guess you found her.”

  Virgil said, “Yup. How was the den meeting?”

  “Same old shit,” Sam said. “You arrest her?”

  “Not yet,” Virgil said. “But you should talk to her, and tell her to stop messing with the law. And you shouldn’t say ‘shit.’”

  “Okay,” the kid said.

  “That’s really not fair,” Ma said. “Bringing in the children.”

  “Ma, what the hell do you think is going to happen to the kids if you wind up in the joint for eight to ten?” Virgil asked. “You think that’s going to be good for them? Sam’ll be in college before you get out.”

  For the first time she looked a little shaken. “I gotta think,” she said. She took her son’s hand. “Come on, Sam. We gotta go think.”

  —

  BEFORE VIRGIL LEFT MA’S, he checked the tracking tablet. Ellen was still showing at the farm, and he wondered if that might be where the sun came through. He turned that way.

  As he drove, he called Shrake, who was watching the Hezbollah guy. “Nothing happening. They went out to a McDonald’s, and then back to the Awad guy’s apartment. I’m watching the back and both cars, and Jenkins is out front. It’s really, really boring.”

  At Jones’s old farm, Ellen’s Jeep was parked halfway up the drive. Virgil pulled in, found the house and sheds unoccupied; one exterior wall of the house had had several boards removed. He walked past the last shed and saw Ellen on her hands and knees at the back fence line. He walked that way; she saw him coming and stood and waved. When he came up she asked, “Want some rhubarb?”

  “Jeez, I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” he said. She had a pasta pot, which she’d half-filled with cut rhubarb stalks. “I don’t cook much.”

  “If I’m down in the next couple of days, I’ll bring you a pie,” she said.

  “I do eat rhubarb pie,” Virgil said. “You’re just getting a last harvest?”

  “I’m thinking about trying to move the whole bed, and some of the asparagus,” she said. “I’m going to have to talk to somebody about the best way to do it. And there’re some old yellow farm iris I’d like to move. There’re some roses and lilacs I’m afraid will have to stay. They’re just gonna get plowed under, but they’re so senile that they’re not worth moving. Ma says she’ll take down the apple trees—people like the wood to burn in their fireplaces.”

  “Sad,” Virgil said. “It’s happened all over, though, old farms going under.”

  She wiped a sleeve across her forehead and asked, “How come you look so cool?”

  “I haven’t been cutting rhubarb in the sunshine,” he said. “Listen, I need to talk to you. Seriously. Let’s find some shade.”

  “I know about Dad, but I don’t know where he is,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it when the Mankato police called me.”

  They wound up sitting on the porch steps. Several planks had been removed from the porch floor, and Virgil said, “I hope you’re getting some money from Ma.”

  “We will get some,” she said. “I checked on the Internet, and we’re getting an okay price from her. Better than burning it, anyway. I like her. She’s an interesting woman.”

  Virgil said, “Whatever. The crime-scene crew went over the cabin where your father was shot. When the shooting was still going on, but apparently after he was shot, he began writing a note. When we got there, and he realized he wasn’t going to die, he wadded it all up and threw it in a corner, behind some firewood, and hoped we wouldn’t find it. The note was to you.”

  “To me? What did it say?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. First, I’d like to ask you to stop all of this. You can stop it. I think he calls you, I think you talk to him, I think you know what’s going on here,” Virgil said. “I need to know that. What in the heck is he doing? He’s a lifelong minister, never broke a law in his life, and now people may die because of what he’s doing? Ellen: tell me.”

  She turned away from him, staring off across the summer fields. Then, “I don’t know the details. I had no idea about this stone. But it has to do with Mom. I think he’s trying to get enough money together to make sure she’ll have a place in an extended care facility, when he’s gone. She’s sixty-five. She has early-onset Alzheimer’s, but other than that, she’s healthy enough. She could live for years yet.”

  The extended care facility, she said, cost seven thousand dollars a month. She couldn’t afford that, nor could her brother, even if they pooled their resources. “Dad tried keeping her at home, with a babysitter, but she needed professional watching. The thing is, she’s healthy, and strong, but something happens, and she panics and tries to fight her way out of the house, or she sneaks out, and then . . . she’s lost. When Dad got sick and had to go to the hospital, I tried to keep her at my place. It was impossible. I would have needed professional nurses sixteen hours a day, and there was just no way to pay for that. I couldn’t stay home myself—somebody had to work.”

  “I’m sorry,” Virgil said, and meant it.

  “Dad’s frantic about it. He knows he’s going to die. There’ll be some Social Security survivor’s benefits for Mom, and we’ll sell his house and put that in a fund, but it’s not nearly enough. She’ll wind up in a warehouse, minimal care, minimal conditions, unless we can come up with a solution. That’s what this auction is—a solution. I don’t know how he can set up the payments, but he’s a smart man, and apparently thought of something.”

&nbs
p; “But . . .” Virgil took off his hat and smoothed his hair back. “But it came down to finding this stone? That’s the solution? That’s less likely than winning the lottery.”

  “I don’t think he had a solution,” she said. “He went to Israel to say good-bye to friends. He just saw his chance and took it.”

  “A miserable situation,” Virgil said. He made a sneaky mental note to check on Jones’s wife’s location. Jones was probably looking in on her, he thought; but he couldn’t ask Ellen where her mother was, because she might warn Jones away.

  “Anyway,” she said after a moment, “what did Dad put in that note?”

  “He said he loved you kids, and the worst pain was thinking that he wouldn’t see you again. He said he’d hidden the stone. Obviously, he hid it where you could find it. He was depending on you to sell it, apparently.”

  “Where did he put it?” she asked.

  “You’ll know where it is, and you have to tell me,” Virgil said. “Ellen—three people have been shot. It’s not reasonable to let people die, to make things better for a woman who won’t even know that they’re better.”

  She thought about that and said, “If I know where it is, I’ll tell you.”

  Virgil took the chance. “He said it’s where the sun comes through.”

  “Yeah.” She stood up and dusted off the seat of her shorts, and said, “It’s at the house. His house.”

  “We’ve looked through there pretty thoroughly,” Virgil said. “I was there today, looking around.”

  “It’s not inside, it’s outside,” she said. “The house next door to his has a big tree in the backyard, next to the garage. On exactly the day of the summer solstice, and only on that day, you can see the sun come up in the crack of space between the tree and the garage. He used to say it was like one of those ancient observatories. It’d put this shaft of light across our yard, and it’d hit this clump of hollyhocks on the fence on the west side of the yard. He’d get up at dawn on the first day of summer just to see it, and he’d make Mom and me and Danny get up, too.”

  “All right,” Virgil said. “Let’s go look.”

  “Might not be there,” she said. “He might’ve figured you’d find that note, and that’s why he ran away last night. He might’ve gone over to get it.”

  “Let’s look anyway,” Virgil said. “Then we’ll know.”

  14

  Virgil followed Ellen back into town, the sun sinking in his rearview mirror as they headed southeast through the bugs along the river, and the late-day heat waves coming off the tarmac. The evening would be spectacular, he thought, the air soft and cooling after the hot day, the moon coming up big and yellow; a good night for sitting on the back patio of a bar, talking with friends, the jukebox playing low, Guy Clark’s “Rita Ballou,” two-stepping with Georgina . . . or Ma.

  The sun was down by the time they got to Jones’s house. Virgil got a flashlight and Ellen led the way into the backyard, and pointed at the tree and the edge of the neighbor’s garage, and by stepping back and forth and cocking their heads, they figured out where the shaft of sunlight would fall along the west fence.

  The search took a few minutes: Jones had scraped fallen leaves and grass back over the hole he’d dug, and it was hard to see in the heavy shadows cast by the flashlight. Virgil eventually encountered a spot with an unnatural texture, and pushed into the earth with an index finger. After a half-inch of soft, loose soil, his finger hit stone.

  He was shoulder to shoulder with Ellen—she smelled of woman work-sweat with a touch of something, maybe Obsession—both of them on their knees, and he said, “Here’s something.”

  He scraped the dirt away, then more dirt, found the stone was dark, at least, in the light of the flash, and heavy. They both worked at it, clawing up the soil. Three or four minutes after Virgil located it, the stone came loose, and he lifted it out onto the lawn.

  “Oh my God,” Ellen said. “It really is . . .”

  “That’s it,” Virgil said, shining the flash on the side of it. He could feel the carvings, but not see them through the dirt.

  “What should we do with it?”

  “Take it back to my place, where we’ve got some good light,” Virgil suggested.

  —

  VIRGIL CALLED SHRAKE and told him to get Jenkins and go home. “I’ve got the stone. I don’t care what the Hezbollah guy does.”

  “Good. I’ve been here so long I’ve been thinking about starting a family,” Shrake said.

  Virgil called Yael. “Did you go shopping?”

  “For a short time only, to survey the possibilities,” she said. “Has there been any progress in finding Jones?”

  “No, but I’ve got the stone,” Virgil said.

  “You have the stone? This is wonderful. May I see it?” she asked.

  “Sure. I’ll come by and get you.”

  Ellen said she wanted to take a shower, and so she’d wait at her father’s house until Virgil got back from picking up Yael. “But I’d like to be there when you guys look at it.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Virgil said.

  —

  YAEL WAS WAITING on the curb outside the motel. Virgil popped the passenger-side door for her, said, “Don’t step on the stone,” which he’d placed on the floor. Yael climbed in, then bent and lifted the stone into her lap. “Wonderful,” she said. “I will ask my department to issue you a commendation.”

  “All part of the job,” Virgil said.

  They went past Jones’s house again, waited a couple of minutes for Ellen to finish dressing, and then did a caravan over to Virgil’s house. Virgil lugged the stone inside and said, “If it stayed buried for three thousand years, and is still okay, I don’t think rinsing it off would hurt.”

  “That would be fine,” Yael said.

  They put it in the kitchen sink and sprayed it with warm water, until the dirt was gone and the water came clean. Virgil dried it with a dish towel, carried it into his study, put it on the desk, and pulled a reading light over.

  The Solomon stone was pretty much as advertised—not quite a cube, a little longer than it was thick. The top was broken off nearly square, but the bottom had a fist-sized hole in it, as if there’d been some kind of inclusion there that had remained with the stone that this chunk had been broken from.

  Under the raking light, they could clearly see the hieroglyphs, a lighter gray on a dark gray, densely covering two sides of the four-sided stele. The glyphs were small, about the height of a dime. The other two sides were covered with alphabetic forms. “Some of these could almost be modern—but some of them I don’t even know,” Yael said. “It’s Hebrew, though, and very, very old.”

  She gently touched the Hebrew lettering, as if for good luck, or as a prayer.

  “Can you read any of it?” Ellen asked.

  “No, not really. I can read some of the letters . . . but the words elude me. This will take a lot of study. I think this”—she touched a group of letters—“could be the name of Solomon.”

  “Pretty cool,” Virgil said.

  “More cool than you know,” Yael said. “Solomon, in the legend, was the last great king of the United Israel and Judah. Despite that, there is no contemporary mention of him. We have never found a stele, a coin, an inscription, anything, by anyone who lived around his time, who mentions him. Until now. This is the only thing, sitting here in Mankato, in the state of Minnesota.”

  “Amazing,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you what: I’ll keep it here overnight, then move it up to St. Paul tomorrow. We’ll let the big shots turn it over to you, all official and so on.”

  “This would be very fine,” Yael said.

  “I wonder where the first Yael is?” Ellen asked.

  “This I am not curious about,” Yael said. “I hope she stays where she is, not in my sight.”

  “I’d
like to know,” Virgil said. “Maybe she went home, like the Turks.”

  “If my father calls me again, I’m going to tell him that you’ve got the stone,” Ellen said. “Once everybody knows where the stone is, and that nobody’s going to make a profit from it, maybe they’ll all go home. And Dad can go back to the Mayo.”

  Virgil said, “He’s got a legal problem.”

  She nodded. “Of course. But his time is very short. We’ve been told that when the final decline sets in, he will progress from a lucid state to death in a matter of a few days. He’s already begun to lose bladder and bowel control, and that’s the end.”

  “Then maybe he should just stay out,” Virgil said. “If everybody agrees that this is the stone, it’s not a decoy or something . . . I won’t look for him at your house. Or at the Mayo, for that matter.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “My brother is coming next week, or sooner, if Dad goes. So . . . I appreciate that.”

  “I am very sorry for your family,” Yael said. “It comes to everybody, but is nevertheless a sad thing.”

  —

  THEY TALKED for another five minutes, about the stone, and about where Jones might be, and then Ellen left, to go back to the Twin Cities and home. Virgil put the stone in the dishwasher, hidden behind a couple of plates, locked all the doors, then took Yael back to the Holiday Inn.

  “I’ll come for you at eight o’clock,” he told her.

  “I will stand here,” she said, pointing down at the curb.

  Back home, Virgil took the stone out of the dishwasher, made several high-res photos with his Nikon, and e-mailed a couple to his father, with a brief explanation. Then called Davenport.

  Davenport picked up and asked, “You got Jones?”

  “No, but I’ve got the stone.”

  “Good. If you’ve got the stone, you don’t need Jones,” Davenport said. “If everybody’s reading this right, he’ll be dead in a few days, and I suspect he’ll turn up then. What’re you doing with the stone?”

  “I thought I’d bring it up there tomorrow morning, stick it in an evidence locker, and then let you guys talk to the embassy and authorize its return. Probably with the second Yael. Anyway, that’s all diplomatic, it’s not for a humble flatfoot like myself.”