“No! I’d never do that!” he said. “But… I gotta think. Give me your phone number.”
Virgil said, “I’ll give you the number, Buster, but this coupon has an expiration date. If you talk to me five minutes too late, you’re going to the joint. The pen. The big house. The Minnesota Correctional Facility at Stillwater. You get up there, a nice-looking guy like you… Well, you know that old country saying, ‘Butter my butt and call me a biscuit’? Well, they’ll be buttering your butt, but not because they think you’re a biscuit.”
“That’s disgusting,” Buster said.
“Sure wouldn’t want it in my future,” Virgil agreed.
Virgil scrawled his phone number on a napkin and pushed it across the table. Buster snatched it up, stood, and said, “You’re a…” He groped for a word. “… a jerk.”
Virgil watched him trot out of the place and, suspecting he might look back, squinted up into the sky; when Buster was gone for good, he sat for a while, wondering what he should do next, and finally opened his laptop and looked up the Mouldy Figs.
He didn’t find much that seemed to apply to the case, but then he thought, Why would Conley drop that hint about the Mouldy Figs if it was meaningless, or hard to figure out? He went back to the Figs’ main site and saw that they’d made a number of CDs. Virgil had a Mac laptop, like Conley, and he also had a SuperDrive. What if Conley had dumped his story on a CD and put it in a Mouldy Figs CD case?
He had nothing better to do, and still had the key to Conley’s trailer, and it was only five minutes away… And if what he’d said about the Figs was actually a tip…
He finished the scone, threw his bag in the trash can, and took the Diet Coke and laptop with him. Ten minutes later, he was looking through Conley’s CD collection. There were no Mouldy Figs albums.…
There were two by Moldy Peaches.
“What?”
He got on the phone to Wendy McComb, who picked up on the fourth ring but couldn’t hear what he was saying because, she said, she was in a supermarket and the music was too loud. He shouted at her to go to a quieter place, and when she had, he said, “Mouldy Figs? Or Moldy Peaches?”
“Oh, Jesus! Moldy Peaches! That’s what it was. I knew about the Mouldy Figs, and I just… just… said the wrong thing. He said the chick singer for the Moldy Peaches.”
“Thank you,” Virgil said, and clicked off.
Chick singer for the Moldy Peaches. He had no computer link for his laptop, but he did for his phone, and quickly figured out that Kimya Dawson was the singer he needed to find. When he punched her name into Google, he instantly came up with a song called “Tire Swing.”
His eyes snapped to the window that led out to the side yard, and the swing that hung over the valley. He turned off the phone and, hardly daring to hope, went out to his truck, got a flashlight from the door pocket, and carried it over to the tire swing.
The flash drive was duct-taped into the top part of the swing, just to the left of the rope tie, where nothing could get at it, where it would be nice and dry and safe. Like a mosquito, it was going to sting somebody.
Virgil held it in the curl of his hand and smiled.
Back at Johnson’s cabin, Virgil got a Diet Coke, plugged in his laptop, and brought up the flash drive, where he found a half-dozen Pages files and a couple hundred photographs.
He started by checking the files. All but one had cryptic titles, meaningless to Virgil but presumably not to Conley. The non-cryptic one was entitled “To Whom IMC,” which to Virgil meant “To whom it may concern,” which certainly included him.
He opened it and found a rambling note:
If this is me reading this, I told you that you were a dumb shit. They’re a bunch of small-town school board members, for God’s sake. They aren’t killers.
If this is not me reading this, and especially if it’s a cop, then, uh-oh, I was right, and I’m probably dead. If I disappeared and you can’t find me, I’m probably dead, too. Probably shot. The guy who probably shot me is named Randolph (Randy) Kerns, the school security officer and a gun nut. If you’re a cop, be careful, because Randy has more guns than any other single human being.
If this is Randy reading this, fuck you.
Anyway, assuming that this is a cop, and you’re reading this because of one of the hints I scattered around, good for you. (And for me.) Here’s the situation, and you might not believe it, but it’s true.
The school board — all of it — with the help of the superintendent of schools, Henry Hetfield, the financial officer, Delbert Cray, the security officer (Randy Kerns, who I mentioned above), and Vike Laughton, the editor of the Republican-River,have been systematically ripping off the school district for years — as of this writing, seven years, ever since Evelyn Hughes was defeated in her effort to be reelected to the board. If you look at my file entitled “Hughesrun” you’ll find the paper’s coverage of that campaign, and you should interview Hughes, who lives in Elixir Springs. Vike drove her off the board so they could start stealing.
What’s the take? At least a half million, and maybe as much as a million dollars a year. As I said, hard to believe, but they rip off some of every single transaction that the board is involved in, and they legitimately spend just under forty million dollars a year on the school system.
The theft is done in a variety of ways: in the transportation area, they over-budget and overspend on fuel and maintenance. The overspending part mostly involves fuel, on which they overstate costs and mileage. They also have a maintenance contract with Lanny Brooks at Brooks and Mann Automotive, on which I believe Brooks kicks back about twenty percent. I can’t prove the Brooks part, but if you look in my file “MainCom” you will find comparative maintenance records for several nearby districts, and for buses of equivalent age and mileage. Maintenance costs in Buchanan are running about twenty percent ahead of where they should be.
I think Viking Laughton gets much of his money from printing what the district lists as “educational materials,” which supposedly are custom lesson sets for social studies, English, and mathematics classes. I have spoken privately to two teachers, whose names I won’t include here, because this might be Randy Kerns (fuck you) reading this, but who will tell you they have never seen these lesson sets. You will need to investigate this on your own. The Minnesota Department of Education issues some of these lesson sets, which supposedly were reprinted here, and you can find the titles purchased by Buchanan County and copies of the reprints filed with the MDE. (Viking actually made reprints with materials from the MDE, but I believe he only made enough copies to file with the school archives and with the MDE, and pocketed the money from the rest of them.)
There are several ghost workers with the school system — they simply don’t exist. This is much harder to see than you would think, because none of the school district’s salary numbers are broken out by job or by salary amounts — they are always aggregated. I can’t tell how much is missing, but I think they could be taking out a quarter of a million dollars with this skim alone. To find these workers you would have to go check by check through the entire system, which I have been unable to do. The system supposedly holds these records for three years and then destroys them, so there might be some way to dig out the amounts for the last three years. One problem: Fred Masilla, the auditor, is in on the deal, and he certifies the payroll as accurate, but only in aggregate amounts. If the district should have a fire, and if the mini-computer in the accounting office should be destroyed, I’m not sure there would be any way to tell what happened.