“Our guy here is ready to pop, but you’re going to have to deal with him. You know what we’ve got, and we don’t think this guy knew about the murders. You can shape the deal so that if he lies about that, and we find out otherwise, you can hang him. I gotta tell you, if these folks down in Trippton walk, it’s gonna look bad when your guy runs for governor, and you let them get away.”
“You motherfucker, Flowers, this is blackmail—”
“Careful, you’re impugning my integrity. Tell you what — talk to this guy’s attorney, his name is Rogers, he’s probably on your other line right now, pretend you know all about it. But, Dave — we got no time. We’ve got three dead, and a guy running, and we got no time.”
“Flowers—”
“I’ll buy you a handcrafted boutique beer the next time you see me.”
“Fuck you, and your girlfriend, and all her children.… Shit, here’s Rogers, fuck you again.”
He slammed the phone down and Virgil said to Jenkins and Shrake, “Everything’s running smooth.”
“I got that impression,” Shrake said. To Jenkins: “How fast can we get to the Iowa border?”
Virgil sat in Masilla’s outer office for nearly an hour, while Jenkins and Shrake went down to the lobby to talk to the two attractive receptionists. After an hour, he took a call from his friend in the AG’s office, who was calmer, and perhaps even collegiaclass="underline" “Mr. Masilla will cooperate in every way he can, and we have faxed him a letter saying that we will give strong consideration to leniency should it prove that he inadvertently violated any Minnesota statutes.”
“What if he violated them on purpose?”
“Rogers insisted on a wording that makes the intent of the letter… mmm… questionable, so that if it goes to court, a court might reasonably find that we have offered him immunity. Or, a court could find the other way, and decide we didn’t, but there would be a strong presumption of a leniency.”
“Jesus, sometimes I feel like my hands are dirty.”
“You owe me a beer, my friend, and, Virgil, if you ever do this again, I’ll put you in jail for contempt of attorney, I swear to God.”
Virgil called Shrake and Jenkins, who came up a minute later and looked happy as they got off the elevator, and Virgil asked, “You got dates?”
“We do,” Jenkins said. “They’re golfers, can you believe that? We’re playing golf tomorrow afternoon, unless we have to shoot somebody. What happened with Masilla?”
“We’re about to find out.”
Rogers said, “My client is eager to help. We’ve spoken with the AG’s office, and so we’re ready to go ahead. If you don’t mind, we’d like to record this session, just so there’s no question afterwards about what was said.”
“It’s okay with me,” Virgil said. “We’ll all have to make some speeches before we start asking questions.”
Rogers had a recorder, a small but high-fidelity pocket recorder of the kind used by musicians and lawyers. He made his speech, beginning with, “As you know, we’ve spoken to the attorney general’s office, and as we understand it, we have been given blanket immunity from prosecution as long as Mr. Masilla gives you his frank cooperation.”
Virgil identified himself on the tape and replied with, “We have no idea of the details of the agreement you worked out with the attorney general’s office, what degree of immunity your client may or may not have been given, so you’ll have to decide on a case-by-case basis which questions you will answer or refuse to answer, depending on your understanding.”
They argued about that, politely, for a few minutes, and then Virgil turned to Masilla and asked, “Mr. Masilla, have you, in your position as auditor of the Buchanan County school system, noticed any fiscal irregularities—”
Masilla replied with, “I was given only limited access to the school records, but in my examination I noticed what seemed to be some inconsistent reporting of costs.…”
That went on for more than an hour. Virgil was able to build a picture that implicated the school superintendent, the finance officer, and all the members of the school board in fiscal irregularities “which I pointed out from time to time, and recommended strong action upon.”
Masilla noted the presence of Viking Laughton and Randolph Kerns during some of the meetings with school officials. The discussion was moderated by Rogers, who tried to keep responsibility as fuzzy as possible, while delivering the goods, which was required by the deal.
They were still hard at it when Virgil’s phone rang. He glanced at it, intending to let the call go, but saw it was from Buchanan County’s Sheriff Purdy. He said, “Gotta take this. Let’s recess for one minute.”
He answered while he was headed for the hall. Purdy said, “We found Randy Kerns.”
“Where is he?”
“Sitting in his truck, off Thunderbolt Road.”
“When you say sitting…” That sounded bad.
“Looks like he shot himself,” Purdy said. “Bullet went through his head and the driver’s-side window.”
“Ah… God.”
“You coming down?”
“I’m up in Winona. I’ll be down as fast as I can get there. Don’t touch anything.”
“We knew you’d say that, so we haven’t,” Purdy said. “I see a couple of gun suicides every year, somewhere in the county. This one is somewhat unusual.”
“Why is that?”
“Never seen a guy shoot himself in the eye.”
Virgil excused himself, Jenkins, and Shrake from the meeting: “We will resume soon.”
Rogers asked, “When?”
“Don’t know. We have another murder related to the first three. That’s four murders,” Virgil said. “There’s not going to be much judicial mercy here. If I were you, I’d try to tighten up that deal with the AG.”
When they got back to Trippton, they went down Thunderbolt Road past the town prostitute’s house — she was standing on her porch, looking down the road, and when she saw Virgil’s truck coming, pointed him farther on down. There was a turnout where the road bent closest to the Mississippi, a lovers’ lane, perhaps, and three sheriff’s cars were parked in the dirt circle, along with a couple of unmarked trucks. Purdy was there, talking with Alewort, his crime-scene guy, and they were all facing a narrow overgrown track that apparently led down to the river. Virgil could see the grille of a truck down through the brush, and Beatrice Sawyer, his own crime-scene investigator, looking in the passenger-side window.
Alewort said, “We didn’t touch, just called Beatrice in, except that I was worried about blood and bone and brain tissue soaking further into the dirt outside the truck, where it’d be harder to recover, so I thought I’d go ahead and start that process.”
“That’s fine,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, well, it was pretty interesting, is what it was, just like that shot-in-the-eye thing,” Alewort said. “There was no blood or bone or brain matter. Not that I could find. Or Beatrice, either. And there should have been, there’s plenty of it on the window, around the gunshot hole.”
“So what you’re saying is,” Jenkins offered, “this guy Kerns shot himself through the eye, blowing his brains out, and then drove over here from somewhere else.”
“That would be one interpretation,” Alewort said.
Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake walked down the track. Virgil said, “Hey, Bea.”
Sawyer said, “What with that Black Hole case, and now your two here, I’m getting pretty goddamned tired of looking at dead bodies.”
“So go apply at Target, I hear they’re hiring,” Virgil said. He wasn’t much interested in any complaints, given what had happened to the subjects of her research: he thought of Will Bacon stuffed under the stage.