“Right.”
Virgil got on the phone to Johnson.
“You hear them?”
“We all can. Where the hell are you?”
“At the pen. Get up here. Don’t have to be subtle about it, park on the road and come on up.”
When he was off the phone, he said to Muddy, “I owe you one. I don’t think I would have seen that plank.”
Muddy nodded.
“You got any idea of who might’ve done this?”
“Roy Zorn is the one everybody thought did it. His best pal, his assistant, is D. Wayne Sharf — not Duane, but D, the initial, and Wayne, everybody calls him Dee-Wayne. He lives almost straight down the hill, and I’ve seen him up here in the spring, looking for mushrooms. He might’ve been the one who found the cave.”
“Okay. D. Wayne Sharf, we’re already looking for him,” Virgil said. “You go on home. I don’t want anyone to see you up here with me. You’ve got to live here.”
Muddy nodded again and said, “You should get some different insect stuff. I could smell you a mile away.”
And he was gone down the trail.
Johnson parked straight down the hill from the pen and started climbing. He was alone, and when he got to Virgil, gasping for breath, Virgil asked, “Where are the rest of the guys?”
“I called them, they’re coming. I told them to look for my truck and climb straight up from there.” He looked at the dogs. “Where were they?”
Virgil showed him the undercut. Johnson took Virgil’s flashlight and stuck his head into the hole above the undercut, then stood up. Virgil was the tiniest bit claustrophobic, and said, “Careful, think about a cave-in.”
Johnson dropped back to his knees and crawled out of the undercut, handed the flashlight to Virgil. “Stinks like hell. Looks like a regular sandstone cave — they’re all over the place around here. Should have thought of it before. Could have hid a hundred dogs in there. Smells like dog shit and dead animals… probably ought to send somebody up there to look around.”
“Not me,” Virgil said.
“What if they killed somebody and stashed the body up there?” Johnson asked.
“Goddamnit, Johnson, why’d you go and ask that?”
“Because I’d rather have you up there, than me — and you’re skinnier, anyway, so you could walk right up that board, if you did it sideways.”
Virgil thought about it for a while, and Johnson saw him thinking about it, and said, to encourage him, “Try not to be too big a pussy, pussy.”
Eventually, Virgil agreed that he should at least do what Johnson did, which was get his feet on the bottom of the plank and stand up. Sweating a little, he did that. Using his flashlight, he could see the roof of a fairly roomy cave, maybe ten feet high and fifty across, with a floor that showed shovel marks. A pile of fallen rubble sat at one end. The cave got shallower as it went deeper into the bluff, and finally, twenty-five or thirty feet back, twisted out of sight. He couldn’t see much on the floor of the cave, because of the angle he was at.
He called, “How solid you think this plank is?”
“Felt pretty solid to me.”
Virgil edged up the plank until he could see into the cave in some detail. The doggy odor was so strong he could hardly breathe, but he could feel a thin draft of air from the back of the cave. There’s another hole going out, he thought, and maybe another room farther back. With the plank closed from below, the dogs must have been held in total darkness. He didn’t see any bodies.
Enough. He backed down the plank and crawled out of the undercut and Johnson asked, “Why didn’t you go up inside?”
“’Cause I’m not a stupid asshole,” Virgil said.
“You see anything?”
“Not much to see, except dog poop.”
“Bet you could find some old Indian stuff in there, if you dug it out,” Johnson said.
“Good luck with that,” Virgil said. And, “Here are some of the guys.”
A red Chevy pickup had pulled to the side of the road below, and two men got out and looked up the hill. Johnson shouted, “Manny. Winky. Right straight up.”
More trucks started arriving, and a line of climbers stretched down the hill. When the first two came up, one of them said, “I believe those are Dan’s beagles. That one was a rescue, and had fly-bitten ears, and there he is. Are there any more?”
“This is it,” Virgil said. “They had them up in a hidden cave, which is how they could hide them so fast.”
“Six Labs, but not mine,” Butterfield said. “Where’n the fuck are my Labs?”
“Goddamn Sharf took them out in that horse trailer,” the second man said. “Find him, we find the rest of them.”
Butterfield said, “These are all high-grade dogs. They supposedly were snatching some mutts, too. Where are those? Sharf take them, too?”
Johnson said, “I bet they were stealing the high-enders for resale, and the mutts were going to the dog bunchers.”
Butterfield said, “Dan is coming up the hill.” He turned and shouted, “Hey, Dan, might have some of your dogs up here.”
“Hope to Christ nobody has a heart attack climbing that hill,” Johnson said.
“Good thought,” said Virgil. He looked at the roiling swell of dogs. “Let’s see if we can get these dogs wired up or roped up and get them down the hill.”
After some more yelling down the hill, one of the younger men got a roll of twine from a truck and started up the hill.
In the meantime, Dan arrived, a big man in jeans and a cotton work shirt. He looked at the beagles and started to cry, and the beagles gathered around his knees, whimpering, trying to climb on him, and he gave Johnson a big hug, which made Johnson look seriously uncomfortable, and then Dan sat on the ground and the beagles gathered around and tried to lick him to death.
He was followed by the woman who’d been at the Shanker’s meeting, and had spoken about rescue dogs and ordinary mutts being stolen. She looked at the dogs still in the pen and said, “None of my dogs. My God, they could already be in the laboratories.”
The guy with the twine arrived, and while Dan took his dogs down the hill as a pack, they hooked the other dogs together with makeshift collars and the twine, and led them down the hill.
They’d recovered sixteen dogs altogether, and eight of them were immediately identified by owners, either present or known. Johnson called the Humane Society, which sent a truck to collect the rest of them, where they’d be held until they were identified.
It was eleven o’clock before it was all settled, and Virgil went down the hill and called Davenport, and told him about the dogs.
“Are you pulling my leg?”
“No, no, I’m not,” Virgil said.
“Well, Christ, I hope nobody else finds out about it.”
“I’d like to put out a BOLO on Sharf’s truck and horse trailer. Can we at least do that?”
“You’re in the same place as that guy who was killed, right? That Corn guy?”
“Zorn. Yeah.”
“All right. Put your BOLO out, but say it’s in connection with the investigation into the murder of Corn.”
“Zorn.”
“Zorn. Whatever. That could almost be true.”
“When I think about it, it is true,” Virgil said. “That’s what I will do.”
A number of the dog owners were still hanging around, some with dogs, newly recovered, and some without — tears in a few eyes — and Virgil gathered them around and said, “One of the big shots in the BCA just okayed a be-on-the-lookout alert for Sharf’s truck and trailer. We’ll spread it all over southern Minnesota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin.”
“’Bout time,” somebody said.