Johnson was more than pleased by the discovery of the dog note. “I’ll get the posse together, see if anybody knows where this thing is.”
“It’s gonna be more complicated than that, Johnson,” Virgil said around his cheeseburger. “For one thing, the dog sale itself isn’t illegal, and the ownership of the dogs will probably be contentious. And—”
“Hey, no need to harelip the Pope. We’ll just get the boys together and hammer the place flat. You cops can pick up the pieces.”
They lingered over lunch, because Virgil had nothing to do until it was time to meet Bacon, the school janitor. When they left the Kettle, it was almost two o’clock. Johnson gave him the bag with the video camera, an integral telescopic mike, a remote control, a battery charger, a set of earphones, and a roll of dull black gaffer’s tape. Virgil went back to the cabin, checked the approach road for unknown parked cars, and found none. At the cabin he made sure he knew how to operate the camera and that the batteries were charged, then took a nap.
At five o’clock he hurried across the school’s parking lot to the back door, where Will Bacon was waiting. “There are still a few people around, but we can go in through the stage entrance to the little auditorium, and that comes off the gym, and there’s nobody in there, because I checked,” Bacon said. “You got the camera?”
Virgiclass="underline" “Here,” and he patted the bag.
“Let’s go. Stay close, listen for voices.”
They were at the back of the school, walking past metal- and wood-shop classrooms and then hesitated outside the gym while Bacon poked his head in. “Let’s go,” he said, waving Virgil through the door.
They crossed the gym, went through a double door into a long narrow hallway with closed, knobless doors all along the way. “These are the emergency exits from the shops and the little auditorium,” Bacon said. He used a key on his key ring to open the door at the end of the hall, and peeked inside. “All clear.”
The auditorium was small — no more than a hundred or so seats arranged in eight curved rows, each row eight inches or so higher than the one in front of it.
Bacon had left a ladder in the auditorium earlier in the day. Together, they extended it up to a light rack along the ceiling. “Got tape?”
“Yeah.” Virgil threw the bag over his shoulder and climbed to the rack. There were lots of crossbars — the rack was made to hold lights and other equipment — and he turned the camera on, adjusted the volume to “8,” placed it on a crossbar, aimed it toward the stage, and checked the monitor. When he had it aimed right, he started taping, and when he was satisfied, turned the camera off and on with the remote. Everything worked.
“Go on down to the stage and say something,” Virgil said to Bacon.
Bacon went down to the stage, looked up, and said, “Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”
“Forrest Gump,” Virgil said.
“My favorite movie,” Bacon said. “Is that enough?”
Virgil plugged in the earphones, listened to the recording. Good and clear. He turned the camera off and backed down the ladder.
“We’re good,” he said. “Let me show you how the remote works. When you turn it on, you’ll see just a tiny green LED come on.…”
Virgil gave him a demonstration, and Bacon was sure he could handle it.
“Just be careful you don’t re-push it. Just push it once, and look for the light,” Virgil said. “We’ve got four hours of recording time, which should be plenty.”
Bacon nodded: “I’ll call you when everybody’s cleared out.”
“Do not take any chances,” Virgil said. “We’ve got a killer on our hands.”
Virgil helped him get the ladder down. He’d put it in a storage area behind the stage, he said. Then he frowned, and cocked his head, and Virgil asked, “What?”
“There’s somebody else in the school.… Can you feel that?”
Virgil couldn’t feel anything. “What?”
“It’s like a vibration… people make it when they walk…”
“I don’t feel anything.”
“Shhh…”
They listened for another minute, then Bacon said, “Gone now. Listen, there’s somebody around. I’m going to stash the ladder, make a little noise doing it. You go on out that hallway, and at the main hall, turn left instead of right. That’ll take you to the door that goes out to the baseball diamond. You’ll have to walk around the school to your right to get back to your car. You won’t be in the school so much that way.”
“You be careful,” Virgil said.
“You, too,” Bacon said.
Virgil was out of the school in a minute, stayed close to the outer wall as he walked around the building, beneath the windows that looked out over the playing fields. He saw nobody as he crossed the parking lot to his car, and drove away. He’d turned off his phone to go into the school, and when he turned it back on, he found a message from Johnson: “I got your dog posse. We’re ready to roll.”
Was that good? Virgil wasn’t sure.
17
The school board meeting didn’t start until seven o’clock, so Virgil had a few hours to kill, and not much to do. He didn’t want to put further pressure on anyone, because they might call off the board meeting — and the after-meeting.
He went back to Johnson’s cabin and found Jenkins’s Crown Vic parked at the most visible spot in the driveway. Jenkins and Shrake were sitting on the glider drinking gin and tonics.
“The key thing,” Shrake said, “is to keep Kerns away from here when we’re not ready for him. Hence, we park in the driveway, and if he’s watching, he’ll see us driving away.”
“Leaving you alone, ripe for the picking,” Jenkins said.
Shrake added, “It wouldn’t work, except we found a back way in. Fortunately, I’m driving a Crown Vic, which can handle it. If it’d been a Prius, we’d of had to let him shoot you.”
They sat around and talked about Davenport’s Black Hole case, in which a BCA agent had been killed; and about Del Capslock, another agent, who’d been seriously wounded by old people, gunrunners, in Texas.
“Not been a good month for the BCA,” Jenkins said. “I recommend that we all keep our asses down.”
At seven o’clock, while it was still light, Jenkins and Shrake left, and Virgil bumped out after them. Virgil would call them before he came back, and give the two of them time to set up behind the cabin again.
Virgil wandered around town for a while, parked by the turnout over the river, and called Frankie, who told him how lonely she was, and he said he was lonely himself; went to the only store in town that had magazines and bought one on the upcoming deer season; went to a diner and got a grilled cheese sandwich and read the magazine, and kept looking at his watch.
Bacon called at nine o’clock, talking in a hushed voice. “They’re all gone. They had the extra meeting, too. The whole bunch of them. Kerns kicked everybody else out and went sneaking around the hallways making sure everything was clear.”
“And the camera was rolling?”
“The green light was on. Had to look to see it, but it was,” Bacon said.
“You take it down yet?” Virgil asked.
“Nope. I was afraid I’d push the wrong button and erase everything.”
“Won’t happen. Anyway, doesn’t make any difference. I can be there in five minutes.”
“Might want to bring a flashlight, so we don’t have to turn the hall lights on. Come in the same door as yesterday — I’ll go down right now and stick a newspaper in the door so it won’t lock. And I’ll go ahead and take the camera down.”