“Did Clancy Conley ever ask?”
“Nope. I knew the man, he used to try to sell me ads, but I told him the same thing I just told you: Why in the hell would I buy an ad, when everybody knows I’m the only guy who delivers fuel oil? Diesel? Anyway, you sayin’ that’s why he was killed, because of the fuel numbers?”
“Because of all the numbers,” Virgil said.
“How much are they stealing?” Ross asked.
“Don’t know yet. A lot. They’re buying houses in Tucson.”
Ross whistled: “You gotta expect a little leakage, but that’s more like a mountain stream. No taxes, either.”
Virgil asked, “You have records of all your deliveries and the amounts?”
“Going back six years. In case the IRS asks.”
“Hang on to them,” Virgil said. “Somebody’s gonna want to take a look.”
Virgil got up to leave, but as he was scuffing out the door, Ross said, “Something occurs to me…”
“Yeah?”
“Of course Dick would know. He knows how much I deliver, and how much the buses burn. And sitting where he does, he’s gotta know what the schools report on fuel prices. No matter how they do it, he’d know.”
Although Virgil didn’t necessarily have to believe what Ross said, he did — he’d been reasonably convinced by the no-option argument that Ross had made, and also by the fact that he had six years’ worth of records. It was likely that Ross gave away more than a few bottles of booze at Christmas, but it probably wouldn’t be much more… because he didn’t have to. He didn’t look like a guy who would pay a bill he didn’t have to pay.
Dick Brown was sitting at a greasy-looking desk in the school motor pool, working over some greasy-looking paper. He took one look at Virgil and said, “Ah, shit.”
“You knew I was coming,” Virgil said.
“I gotta talk to a lawyer. I haven’t done anything illegal, I just did what I was told,” Brown said.
“You shared in some embezzled money. I think any jury—”
“No, I didn’t,” Brown said. “Not the way you think. I never took a penny from any of those weasels.”
“Then why would you do it?”
“I gotta talk to a lawyer, but I never took a penny.”
Virgil looked at him with deep curiosity, working through it. Then, “Dick, what was your salary last year? You might as well tell me, there’s a public record.”
Brown shrugged. “Seventy thousand.”
Virgil nodded, and then laughed. “Seventy thousand. Not too many other seventy-thousand-dollar jobs in Trippton.”
“Not for grease monkeys,” Brown said. “But it’s all right there in the records, all legal and straight-up, voted on by the board. Paid taxes on every nickel of it, too.”
Virgil said, “Listen, Dick: if we can’t track the money back to you, then you’ve got a chance to stay out of prison. Not much of a chance, but some. Your chances would be a lot better if you, and your attorney if you have one, had a talk with our attorney — a prosecutor for the attorney general’s office. I could work out an appointment for you in Winona this afternoon. Nobody down here would have to know.”
They talked around it until Virgil got a phone call from the sheriff’s office: “You probably want to get over to Jennifer Houser’s house,” the dispatcher said. “Sheriff Purdy’s on his way there now.”
“She’s the school board member,” Virgil said.
“Is, or was,” the dispatcher said. “They think they found blood on her kitchen floor.”
Virgil got the address and then rang off and said to Brown, “If I were you, I’d get in your car and drive to Winona as fast as I possibly could, and try to get a deal. They found blood on the floor at Jennifer Houser’s house. If she’s dead, that’d be the fifth murder. You guys are about to go big-time on the nightly news.”
“Look, I got a salary—”
“Tell that to the grand jury,” Virgil said. “I’ve given you an option. Kidnap your lawyer, force him to drive to Winona.”
Virgil gave him Dave’s name and phone number, and took off for Houser’s place, leaving Brown standing in the garage with his wrench in his hand.
Jennifer Houser lived, or had lived, in a plain-vanilla fifties house with a tuck-under garage, three bedrooms — one had been converted to an office devoted to school board business — and no obvious expensive decoration or furniture that would indicate extra money. The best that could be said was that the house was nicely painted, and Houser’s best friend, Janet Serna, said that Houser had painted it herself.
“She did it every five years, like clockwork,” Serna told Virgil. “The landlord took it off the rent.”
“She doesn’t own it?”
“She was funny that way — she hardly owned anything. Even leased her car.”
Alewort, the sheriff’s crime-scene guy, was looking at blood on the tan kitchen tile. “It’s blood, all right,” he’d said, when Virgil showed up. “Can’t tell you if it’s human blood, and if it is, if it’s Jen’s blood. But it’s blood.”
Purdy said, “This is out of control. You gotta do something, Virgil.”
“I’m hurrying as fast as I can, Jeff,” Virgil said. “I think we’ll wrap things up in a day or so.”
Purdy said, “Hey — I’ll buy Kerns as the killer of Conley and Zorn and poor old Bacon, but who killed Kerns? And who killed Jen? I mean, maybe it isn’t a homicide, but I’ve got to believe that blood is hers.”
“Probably,” Virgil said. “Kinda weird, though. It looks like a footprint.”
“It does,” said Alewort. “I’ve seen a bloody footprint before, in a training film. They’re not uncommon, I’m told.”
“They’re really uncommon if there’s not a puddle of blood to track through,” Virgil said. “Look around — where’s the puddle?”
“Well, say he caught her in the bathroom, killed her there, cleaned up the blood with toilet paper, flushed it, but missed some…”
“How come there aren’t any tracks to the kitchen?” Virgil asked.
Alewort considered that for a few seconds then said, “All right, he whacks her in the kitchen, cleans up the blood, hauls her out to his car, doesn’t see the one track—”
“The track is pretty big,” Virgil said. To Serna: “You saw it as soon as you came in, right?”
“Oh, yeah, right away,” she said. “I mean… it’s pretty obvious.”
Serna said that Houser was supposed to come to her house the night before to play canasta. “She never missed. When she didn’t call, didn’t come by… I thought maybe there was some new emergency with the school board, and she was distracted. But we have coffee every morning, and when she didn’t come over… We both have each other’s keys, so I came over, and knocked on the door, and when she didn’t answer, I came in and saw the footprint and called the sheriff.”
The first cops had noticed that her car was gone, the garage was empty.
“Just like Kerns,” Purdy said, “transported in his own vehicle. I’ve got to get some guys looking down by the river, and out on the back roads, walking distance to town.”
“That’s an idea,” Virgil said, and Purdy went to get a search started.
Virgil sat Serna on a living room couch and asked about Houser: money, boyfriends, or girlfriends—“Well, she’s certainly not a lesbian, I would have noticed that, I think”—or anybody she might have been visiting.
Serna said not only did she not have any ideas about that, she’d talked to Houser the morning before, and Houser had been planning to come to the card game, and apparently planned to go about her usual routine.