By the time all four board members had emerged, he was no longer interested: he was frightened. He got on his phone and called Hetfield. “Henry. This is Del. Where are you? Right now?”
“Getting gas at the QuikTrip,” Hetfield said. He must have sensed something in Cray’s voice. “What happened?”
“Were you invited to a board meeting at Vike Laughton’s office?”
Hetfield’s voice went cold. “No. You’re saying there was one?”
“Yeah. I’m at Village Pizza, you know, across from Vike’s back door. Not spying, just getting a pizza. All four of them came sneaking out of there, and they were sneaking — they came out one at a time, a minute or two apart, and took off.”
“Sonsofbitches have decided to rat us out,” Hetfield said. “They’re gonna try to give us up, make a deal, convince Flowers that they didn’t know about it.”
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Cray said. “I was hoping you’d come up with something else. ’Cause that’s sorta what I think, too. What’re we gonna do?”
24
Near the end of every successful investigation in the history of the world, the suits show up to take the credit. Both Virgil and his boss, Lucas Davenport, were friendly with the governor, who’d helped find a new boat for Virgil, after his first boat had been blown up by a mad bomber. The governor, however, was planning to vacate the office, perhaps to make a run at the vice presidency.
So, one way or another, there’d be a new suit in town.
The current attorney general had already hinted that he was going to run for the governor’s office, and between now and then, would not be averse to favorable publicity that portrayed him as a protector of the people, a defender of freedom, but also a sincere, heartfelt, and honest spokesman for the larger and richer special interests.
As it happened, the Buchanan County school district presented a perfect chance to protect the public: it largely voted Republican, so, since the AG was a Democrat, a vigorous prosecution wouldn’t piss off anybody critical, and would generally show up the Republicans as the pack of thieving, money-gouging, scheming hyenas that all true-blue Americans knew them to be.
That was the general idea; the actual words would be repackaged into something much softer and much, much more hypocritical.
Which was why Dave, the assistant AG, slapped Virgil on the back before he slipped into the booth at Ma & Pa’s Kettle, then ordered a pitcher of Bloody Marys—“I can’t drink bourbon at breakfast”—and began the debriefing. When Virgil outlined what he had, a slender line appeared in Dave’s forehead. “What you’re telling me is, it’s gonna be easy to nail down, but at this very moment, it’s not quite nailed down.”
“That’s about right,” Virgil said. “I gotta emphasize, it will be. The whole pack of rats is coming apart. Two of them have run. I assume you got decent stuff from Masilla.”
“I did — but you’re telling me it’s the whole school board, and this Viking guy and Masilla have really only handed over the heads of the superintendent and his money guy. Even that will take a little further nailing, since all those records went up in smoke.”
“Not all of them,” Virgil said. He slid the folder of Clancy Conley’s photos across the table. Dave left the folder closed as the waitress delivered two plates of French toast with link sausage, and the pitcher of Bloody Marys for Dave, and Virgil’s Diet Coke. When she was gone, Dave opened the folder, as he sipped the first of his drinks, slowly thumbed through the photos, then said, “My, my.”
“I’ve got some supporting documents for that stuff. They were uncovered by the reporter who got murdered, and he put a bunch of notes in a flash drive file, explaining what it all was… and naming a suspect in his own murder.”
Virgil dug the flash drive out of his pocket and slid it across to Dave. “I’m gonna want a receipt for that, you know, chain of evidence and so on.”
“Who was the reporter’s suspect?” Dave asked.
“A guy named Randolph Kerns, who was murdered night before last.”
“Ain’t that a pisser,” Dave said.
“For Randy, anyway. He’s the guy who tried to shoot me up at the high school, and frankly, I wasn’t all that sad to see him go. I mean, if the bell’s gotta toll, might as well be for an asshole.”
“Who killed Randy?”
“You got the list — one of the school board members, one of the others,” Virgil said. “I’ve got my eye on the newspaper editor, there. He has a nice sociopathic edge on him.”
“Any possible way of getting the killer out in the open? Or do we just start busting people?”
“What I’d do, if I were you, is start taking the school board members aside,” Virgil said. “Be a jerk — I know you can do that. One of them will crack. You only need one, with Masilla already on your side, and those photos.”
“If we go to court, we like to have things pretty well wrapped up.”
“Dave, I’ve been doing this for quite a while,” Virgil said. “You don’t want them wrapped up, you want a goddamned gold-plated guarantee, because otherwise you’re afraid you’ll screw up your conviction stats. Well, by the time you get finished fucking with them all, it oughta be at least silver-plated. Dopey, Sneezy, and Grumpy could get a conviction.”
“Unfortunately, Dopey, Sneezy, and Grumpy aren’t licensed to practice law in Minnesota,” Dave said. “The boss is thinking of handling the prosecution himself.”
“Ah, Jesus, why do I even bother to arrest people?”
If the AG had been a lightbulb instead of a lawyer, he would have been about a twenty-watt.
“He’ll have good advisers,” Dave said. “Like me. But any other little bits and pieces you can find would be welcome.”
Virgil walked him through the records, pointing out the prices for fuel as shown in the fake books, and the discrepancies reported by the garage manager and the bus driver. “Dick, the garage guy, thinks he can walk away, because he got a legal salary, though the salary is way out of line. I told him he ought to call you, and come up and see you—”
“He didn’t.”
“Probably talking to his lawyer. But if you want to give him a little consideration, he’s another straw on the camel’s back.”
“Another log on the fire.”
“Another piss into the wind.”
Dave frowned at his second Bloody Mary and said, “This tastes kinda strange. Wonder what kind of vodka they use?”
Virgil was impatient: “Dave, you’re eating at Ma & Pa’s Kettle in Trippton. Pa probably made it himself, out of possum squeezin’s.”
In the end, Dave was satisfied that the investigation warranted a call for legal assistance. “I’ll have a couple more guys down here tomorrow, and we’ll go see the county attorney about it — courtesy call. You don’t have any reason to think that he might… mmm… have an interest? I mean, this has gone on under his nose for years.”
“I don’t have any reason to think that,” Virgil said.
“Okay,” Dave said. “We’re good. Now I go make a lot of phone calls, and tomorrow morning, rain, fire, and brimstone on the local Republican hyenas.”
“And I’ll go talk to Vike Laughton,” Virgil said. “As a sociopath, it’s possible that he’ll rat out all the others.”
“Don’t get your ass shot,” Dave said.
When Virgil showed up at the newspaper office, Laughton was working on a story about the murders of Bacon and Kerns; he had an old-fashioned telephone receiver pinned between his shoulder and his ear, held a finger up to Virgil, telling him to wait, and two minutes later when he hung up, he said, “You know the problem with cell phones? They won’t stay between your shoulder and your ear.”