Vike walked out behind him, shook his hand. “You got enough cash?”
“I got some, as long as I can get to the bank box tomorrow. Most of it’s up in Canada. If I can just get up there, get out to my island, I’m okay.”
“I could give you a few thousand right now, if that would help.”
“That would help. If they put me on TV tonight, I’ll just have to keep going north.”
The others followed them out, at intervals of a half-minute or so. Nobody said good-bye to anyone else.
Jennifer Barns and Henry Hetfield walked out separately and separately looked at the sky and asked themselves,
“Is this the end?”
19
Every light in the school was on when they got back. Shrake called ahead to say that Virgil had survived, and the sheriff was waiting in the school doorway where Virgil had broken in.
“You sure Bacon’s in here?” he asked.
“I talked to him on the phone. He said he’d jam the door open for me, and go pull a surveillance camera out of the little auditorium. That was maybe eight, ten minutes before I got here. When I got here, the door was locked, the paper he was gonna jam it with was by the door, and he and the camera were gone.”
“Surveillance camera?”
“Yeah. The school board here has been stealing the school system blind — that’s just between you and me and Shrake and Jenkins, for the time being.”
The sheriff looked as though somebody had hit him between the eyes with a plank. “I know the board, I mean… How sure…?”
“I think their security guy is the one who shot Conley and Zorn — Zorn for no other reason than to pull me away from the schools. Conley had cracked the whole thing, and he was planning to publish it. I think he made the mistake of telling Vike Laughton about it.”
“Vike…” The sheriff turned away and stared sightlessly across the parking lot. “Hate to say it, but I can believe Kerns and Vike. I’m having trouble with all the Jennifers. You think the fire…?”
“The fire was set to destroy the district’s financial records. I can guarantee they’re not up in a Cloud, somewhere. They were melted. But Conley got copies of enough of them to hang them all. Now, Sheriff, you’re an okay guy, but this ring has feelers all over town. You’d do best not to mention this to anyone, not until I figure out how to pull them in. Kerns is out there with a rifle, and he did his best to kill me tonight, and we can’t find Bacon. He won’t hesitate to shoot a deputy, or a sheriff.”
“We gotta find that sucker.”
“Yes, we do. But first we’ve got to find Bacon. I keep hoping that he’s locked up somewhere.”
“We’re tearing the place apart.”
“Let me look.”
There were eight cops walking the school. A sergeant who seemed to know what he was doing had them run all the obvious places in a hurry, which had taken twenty minutes or so, he told Virgil.
Then they’d backtracked, and were doing the whole place inch by inch.
“The shooter knows the building,” Virgil said. “He could have stuck him someplace weird.”
With the deputies doing the search better than he could, Virgil took Jenkins, Shrake, and Alewort, the sheriff’s crime-scene guy, up to the attic. Jenkins and Shrake had to bend their necks to walk down to Bacon’s apartment. Virgil spotted the shooter’s blood for Alewort, who began doing his crime-scene routine, and Virgil led Shrake and Jenkins into the apartment.
“Holy shit,” Jenkins said. He was looking at the splintered walls. “You were in here? You’re living right, Virgil — brick walls on the outside, you should have been killed three times by ricochets.”
“Or splintered to death,” Jenkins said. He tipped his finger at the side of one of Bacon’s bookcases, which had three six-inch splinters embedded in the wood, like straws in a telephone pole after a tornado.
Virgil explained how he’d huddled down at the far end of the room, stretched on the floor with the book boxes on the other side. “He couldn’t get the angle on me,” Virgil said. “I got lucky.”
They left Alewort to do his work and went back to the auditorium, where Virgil climbed the ladder to make sure the camera was really gone, although he was sure that it was. When he got to the top, he saw that it was, indeed, gone; and then turned and looked down at the stage, where he saw five bumps arrayed across it, four small and one a bit taller and longer.
A phrase popped into his head: prompter box.
And he thought something he should have thought of sooner: in the small space of ten minutes, Kerns wouldn’t have had time to kill Bacon and carry him all over the school. He would have hidden him quickly, if, in fact, he’d killed him.
And if he knew every nook and cranny…
With a growing dread, he backed down the ladder in a hurry, and then hustled over to the stage, hopped up on it, walked over to the prompter box, and looked down into it. The opening in the box was only a foot high and three feet wide, big enough for perhaps two people. He looked down into it, but couldn’t see anything.
Shrake: “What you got?”
“How do you get down into this?”
Jenkins looked at the outside of the box, down below the stage level, facing the audience, and said, “Nothing on this side. Must go under the stage.”
They found a trapdoor on the left side of the stage, half-covered with a pile of ropes and canvas. “It’s been moved,” Virgil said. “Let’s pull it off.”
“Could be prints and DNA,” Shrake said.
“So don’t touch the pile, push it off with your shoes.”
They did that, and Shrake pulled up the handle set into the trapdoor, and then lifted the trapdoor on its hinges. A set of narrow stairs went to the area under the stage, a space perhaps five feet deep.
Will Bacon’s body was crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.
“Ah, shit!” Virgil went down the stairs, clumsily stepping over the body. “We need a light, get a light.”
Jenkins shouted at a deputy, and a minute later Jenkins dropped down the stairs with a Maglite.
Bacon was dead. His head looked like he’d been beaten with a baseball bat, or a fat pipe of some kind, his shiny broken teeth grinning up at them through a mass of pulped flesh, bone, and blood.
Virgil looked down at him, locked his hands on top of his head, and started rocking back and forth, unbelieving, and Jenkins was saying, Virgil-Virgil-Virgil, and then Jenkins said, “Shrake, get him out of here, he’s fucked up.”
Virgil was locked up for a while, sitting in a chair in the auditorium, remembering and replaying his meeting with Bacon, thinking that Bacon was a good guy making a tough way in the world, and that he’d been killed because Virgil hadn’t taken enough care. Because Virgil worked alone, he tended sometimes to lean on civilians; other cops had thought that was weird, but that was because they fundamentally didn’t trust civilians, it wasn’t because they’d get the civilians killed.
Virgil was somewhat aware of the arrival of a doctor, who went down the stairs and said what everybody already knew, that Bacon was dead. Alewort then kicked everybody out of the space around the trapdoor.
But Virgil didn’t pay much attention for a while, just sat and rocked back and forth, and then Jenkins came over and slapped him on the back and asked, “How you doin’, buddy?”
Virgil nodded, more of a body-humping than a real nod, and said, “I am kinda fucked up. I killed that guy, and he was a good guy. Jesus. I just—”