Frankie asked from under the sheet, “He there?”
“Yup.”
“Don’t think this should take much longer.”
“Nope.”
But then it did, because they wound up in the shower, and he wrestled her back to the bed for Dr. Flowers’s Female Cure, and then they had to get back in the shower again, and they were still damp when they got to the Kettle, running late.
Jenkins and Shrake were in a booth when they arrived, and Shrake patted the seat next to himself for Frankie, and said to Virgil, “You don’t look all that injured anymore.”
“I’ll tell you what I am,” Virgil said, deflecting the insinuation and picking up a menu, “I’m as angry as I’ve ever been in my life. I never in my life really wanted to kill anyone. That has changed. If I had the money, I’d put a bounty on Kerns.”
“Then you should stay away from him, wherever he pops up,” Jenkins said. “Leave it to the unbiased professionals.”
Shrake said, “Kerns is safe as long as Flowers is carrying a pistol.”
Virgiclass="underline" “Fuck you. No wait: fuck you both.”
Shrake said, “No sign of Kerns, anywhere. Crime Scene is here. They’re working the school. You gotta go over there, pretty quick.”
Jenkins and Shrake gave him a rundown of everything that had happened overnight, and when they finished eating, Virgil told Frankie to stay away from the cabin, because Kerns could show up there. She said, “I’m gonna stay away from Trippton — I got hay to put up, and small children to oversee. Besides, I been cured, so I’m going home.”
She’d drive Virgil’s truck back to the cabin and leave it there, and take her own truck home. Virgil would ride with Jenkins and Shrake until he could get back to the cabin.
Virgil kissed Frankie good-bye in the parking lot, and then he, Jenkins, and Shrake drove over to the high school. The state crime-scene truck was parked at the back door closest to the auditorium, along with a couple of sheriff’s cars.
Inside, the crime-scene crew, Beatrice Sawyer and Don Baldwin, were working around the pit where Bacon’s body had been found.
“We’re getting stuff, but we won’t know what it is until we get to a lab,” Sawyer said. She was a middle-aged woman who carried a few extra pounds, with carefully coiffed hair that changed color weekly.
“Let me show you the guy’s blood,” Virgil said.
Sawyer had already been up to Bacon’s secret apartment, but had not begun processing it, waiting for Virgil to show up and tell her what had happened. He pointed out the brass from the shooter’s gun, and his own brass, and his blood, and the shooter’s. The shooter’s had already been sampled by Alewort, but he’d carefully left enough for a second sample.
The blood made Sawyer happy: “With your description, we can nail down precisely what happened, all the technical details, right down to who did the shooting and when. Take a little time, but we can do it. We need to get into Kerns’s house, get some samples off his bed, but there seems to be some problem with that.”
“I’ll talk to the sheriff.”
Virgil talked to Purdy, who said he was working with a judge on the county court, but the judge was reluctant to issue a warrant. “I did my tap dance, and he says he’ll give us a warrant, as soon as we can, quote, Give me one single piece of evidence that he was involved.”
“We’ll get it — I could get it this afternoon,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a guy I can squeeze, I think. If I get it, I’ll call you.”
With the crime-scene crew occupied, Virgil, Shrake, and Jenkins dropped Jenkins’s Crown Vic at the cabin and headed north on Highway 26 to Winona.
Masilla, oder occupied a restored four-story redbrick warehouse-style building on the corner of Walnut and E. Third, between the Merchants bank on one side, and a car repair place across the street; inside it was glass, exposed wooden beams, and hanging stairways. The interior of the building was blocked by thick glass doors; two receptionists sat at a curving Plexiglas desk out front. Virgil, dressed in jeans, a black sport coat, cowboy boots, and a new pumpkin-colored T-shirt from the band Pup, with a pale white bandage on top of his head, led the way in; Jenkins and Shrake, both in overly expensive gray suits with silvery-gray neckties and sunglasses, moved in at his elbows.
Virgil said to the receptionists, “We’re here to see Fred Masilla.” He dropped open his BCA identification. “We’re with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”
In the silence that followed, Shrake leaned toward them and said, “Apprehension.”
One of the receptionists said, “Let me see if Mr. Masilla is in.”
“Oh, he’s in,” Shrake said.
The receptionist made a call, then hung up and said, “Somebody will come down to get you.”
A painting hung from the wall on the visitor’s side of the reception desk, an impressionistic oil of a dozen or so colorful river barges parked in an upriver pond, surrounded by red and yellow autumn foliage. Shrake put his nose three inches from it, studied it, then turned to Jenkins and asked, “Where do they get this shit?”
“Well, you know, impressionism has become a technique that you learn about in magazines, rather than an exploration of light,” Jenkins said. “Slap a little pretty paint around a canvas, sell that sucker. I’d call this late Monet. Very late.”
“Yeah. So late he’s dead and buried,” Shrake said.
One of the receptionists, a thin woman with short black hair and tight eyeglasses, said to Virgil, “I really like Pup.”
The other woman, a carefully coiffed blonde with daylight pearls, said, “They somewhat rock, but they’re a little too… out there… for me.”
Virgil didn’t know what to say, but was saved when an elevator dinged, a door opened, and a woman stepped out and asked, “You’re BCA officials?”
Virgil showed her his ID, and they all stepped inside the elevator. When the door closed, Shrake said to Virgil, “You radical rocker, you.”
Fred Masilla worked in a corner office that was veneered in walnut on two sides, and had floor-to-ceiling windows on the other two, the windows carefully shaded by razor-thin venetian blinds. His large walnut veneer desk was covered with a sheet of glass, on which there was a neat stack of papers and a ledger book, which he closed when they walked in. The secretary said, “Mr. Flowers and his associates.”
Masilla was a tall, thin man, with a passing resemblance to the Grant Wood character in the American Gothic painting: old for his age, with a hound-dog face and thin sandy hair, cut short, and steel-rimmed eyeglasses. He was sunburned from the nose down, a weekend boater’s burn. He said, “What can I do for you gentlemen?”
Virgil could see fear in his eyes.
“We need to talk to you about your audits of the Buchanan County school system books.”
The secretary left on clacking sandals, pulling the door closed behind her.
Virgil said, “We believe that you have been falsifying your audits of the Buchanan County school system finances. We think that you don’t know the extent to which your coconspirators have gone off the rails, because you don’t go to their after-meetings, when they make their plans. We want you to tell us what they’ve done. What you’ve done.”
Masilla sat down suddenly, took off his glasses, and said, “Ah, no.”
Virgil didn’t say anything. He was still standing, but Jenkins and Shrake took side chairs and sat, and so Virgil moved to the chair directly in front of Masilla’s desk, and sat.
Masilla finally said, “I should have an attorney.”