“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 Carlsons’ 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.”
Virgiclass="underline" “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.”