“Don’t know him that well, but from what I’ve seen, I’d say, probably,” Johnson said. “He’s one of those bureaucrats who thinks about everything in terms of deals and arrangements. With a couple murders in the mix, though, you’d have to be pretty convincing. He’d have to know that even if he makes a deal, he’s gonna spend a few years in jail, at best.”
“I can be convincing, if I have just a piece of evidence,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a little bit, but it’s all sort of hearsay — a dead reporter’s notes. I’ve got the name of a school bus driver who might talk. I’m afraid if I go to her too soon, she’ll let the cat out of the bag. And she might be worried about keeping her job. If I can get a piece of something to stick up Hetfield’s ass, and he points me at the right computer files, I can get a state auditor down here and hang all of them at once.”
“Gonna have to do something. Time to fish or cut bait,” Johnson said.
Virgil dreamed of Frankie and sex, and dogs in caves, and late at night, of a fire in Frankie’s barn. He tried to keep the barn from burning down, but when he ran for the hose, the hose was all tangled in knots; it took forever to undo the knots, and when he did, no water was running, and Frankie was screaming something about the circuit breakers for the pump, and he ran down to the basement but couldn’t find the breaker box in twenty minutes of running from one basement room to another; the rooms were endless. Virgil had a certain ability to edit his dreams, and he finally forced himself to find the circuit-breaker box, but when he did, there were about a thousand breakers, none of them marked. And all the time, the barn was burning, and Frankie was running buckets from a stock tank and screaming to him to start the pump, and he was failing… failing.
He woke then, and sleepily wondered for a few seconds exactly what tangled psychological meanings the dream could possibly have. Then he heard the sirens.
For a moment he thought he’d somehow slipped back into the dream, then realized that the sirens were real, but far away, and had probably caused the dream. At the last moment before tipping back over into a deep sleep, he thought that if it were another killing, that Johnson would be calling, because Johnson never in his life could resist a siren.
What seemed like a quarter-second later, but was probably a couple of hours, Johnson called.
Virgil fumbled the phone off the nightstand and asked, “What?”
“You know that idea about getting the state auditor down here to seize the school books?”
“Johnson…”
“Yeah, well, you can forget it,” Johnson said. “They had an untimely fire at the school district offices that apparently took out every computer in the place.”
“What!”
“I’m told the first firemen in the place backed right out, because the gasoline fumes were so thick. The fire was so hot the desks melted like a bunch of marshmallows.”
“The desks melted? You’ve seen them?” Virgil dropped his feet to the cool floorboards.
“I talked to Henry Hetfield. He knows me because I’m rounding up votes for the sports arena bond issue. Anyway, he said he suspected arson, kids who want to delay the beginning of the school year. He said the firemen say that it looks like a door was pried open.”
“I’m coming,” Virgil said.
Nothing like a fire to get you out of bed. Virgil had been to more than one of them, when he was a cop in St. Paul, and once when investigating a series of murders in western Minnesota. In the early morning, the stink of burning insulation and burned wet boards hangs all around the fire site, and people talk in hushed voices and firemen hustle around and red emergency lights flick off all the surrounding windows and car chrome.
Johnson was standing by himself with his hands in his jean-jacket pockets when Virgil arrived, and he walked over and said, “They wouldn’t let me in, but I talked to Greg Jones, he’s the assistant chief, he says there’s nothing left in the office except a big hole. Henry Hetfield said he had a scrapbook with pictures of his late wife, most of what he had of her, and it apparently burned up.”
“Let’s go look,” Virgil said. “Point me at the chief.”
Virgil talked to the assistant chief, and showed him his ID, and explained that the fire might be entangled with an investigation he was conducting. Jones led him into the building — he allowed Johnson to come along, when Virgil said Johnson was working as a consultant for him.
“The fire itself was mostly restricted to the district offices. There’s quite a bit of smoke damage down the second floor, into the high school. There’ll have to be a lot of cleanup.”
Johnson said, “Henry Hetfield said you suspect arson.”
“Yeah, unfortunately. The door down at the end of the first-floor hallway, at the back of the school, was forced with a crowbar, and so was the door into the offices. The inside of the door is badly burned, but the outside still shows splinters around the lock. Henry thinks it was some kids trying to delay the school year.”
“Then why did they set fire to the district office, instead of the school?” Virgil asked.
The chief shrugged: “Because they’re kids?”
“Some of the guys said they could smell gasoline,” Johnson said.
“The first guys in said so. Not so much anymore, everything’s wrapped in foam. But it was a fast-burning fire. The wall clock there is stopped at three fifty-two, and we were here a couple minutes after four — there’s an automatic alarm system — and we knocked it down in a hurry, but… it was fully engaged. It was a flash fire, and it was hot.”
The offices were a mess. Everything was charred, and soundproofing tiles were either burned or hung from the ceiling like dead black bats. Virgil could see fire-blacked wires and pipes in the ceiling, and water and foam had wrecked anything the fire hadn’t gotten to. A half-dozen computers were literally melted on the burned desks, as though somebody had poured acid on a bunch of oversized mushrooms.
“Nothing to do about this,” Virgil said. “I’m going to get the sheriff’s crime-scene guy up here, see if there are any prints on that door downstairs. See if you can tape it off or something, keep people away.”
“You think it might not be kids?”
“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “What do you think?”
The chief said, “We’ve had vandalism here a few times, and a small fire once, you know, over the years. Usually they come during the school year — a kid freaks out because he’s going to fail, or get kicked out of school, or whatever. Never had one in August.”
It was too early in the morning to start ringing doorbells, so Virgil said good-bye to Johnson, who said, “I hope they had good insurance. I hope they don’t try to take some of the stadium money to fix up the offices,” and went back to the cabin and fell into bed.
No dreams this time, and when Virgil woke up again, it was after nine o’clock. He cleaned up, ate a couple pieces of peanut butter toast, and dug out Conley’s notes. The school bus driver was named Jamie Nelson, but the notes didn’t say whether that was a man or a woman, because, Virgil thought, Conley would know that, and wouldn’t have to write it down.
Jamie Nelson was a woman. He found her at her tiny house, set well up the hill past the school; Virgil lived in a small house himself, but Nelson’s house couldn’t have enclosed more than a few hundred square feet: a living-room-sitting-room-kitchen, a small bedroom, a bath. Maybe some storage up under a pitched roof.
She came to the door carrying a cup of herbal tea. She was in her fifties, Virgil thought, and had once had red hair, now mostly gray, with a few vagrant strands of red threaded through it. She had blue eyes, a long straight nose, a million freckles, and lips as thin as a No. 2 pencil, straight and grim. When she opened the door, she said, “What now?”