The good thing about a trailer was that it was a metal box: a capsule. There weren’t a lot of innovative places to hide things. Virgil started with the bedroom, worked toward the kitchen, and took the place apart. He found a pellet gun in a closet, but Skinner had told him about Holland shooting flies. He glanced at a TV, apparently hooked to the satellite dish on the roof, and an old laptop computer.
The key find was in the bedroom, in a cardboard box; in it, a small Epson projector, the kind used for business presentations. Sitting on top of the projector, loosely wrapped to avoid wrinkles, he found a piece of fabric, the sheerest he’d ever seen—something that you might use to make nylon stockings.
The material was two feet wide and six and a half or seven feet long, with a thin Plexiglas rod glued to the top of it. Transparent nylon fishing line was attached to each end of the rod so that the material would dangle from the rod like a transparent banner. And finally, in the box itself, a CD.
He called Jenkins, “How are we doing?”
“I’m in the back room, with a Coke. Wardell’s behind the counter. You done?”
“Come get me in ten.”
He carried the CD to the MacBook, plugged the computer in, loaded the CD, and brought it up. There was only one thing on it: a two-minute movie of Janet Fischer—he was sure it was she—dressed as the Virgin Mary, lifting a hand to bless the crowd, and speaking—“Bienaventurados los mansos, porque ellos heredaran la tierra”—in her best Minnesota Spanish.
He put everything back, then did a six-minute review of the whole place, opening doors and drawers. No .223. rifle, no shells. If Holland had a .223, he could be hiding it somewhere off the premises, simply as a basic precaution.
But Virgil didn’t believe it. Holland was too nice a guy.
One oddity, though: nowhere in the trailer did Virgil see anything to indicate that Holland had ever been in the military—no photos, no memorabilia, no letters from the Veterans Administration.
* * *
—
Jenkins was outside the door eleven minutes after they spoke on the phone. Virgil climbed into the truck, and they headed back downtown. “We were right about one thing—it was Holland and Fischer who pulled off the Virgin Mary thing. It’s gotta be illegal, somehow, but hell if I know the exact statute.”
Jenkins said, “How about Skinner?”
“I’m sure Skinner was in there, too. Anyway, all three of them now have anti-motives for shooting somebody. Shooting anybody. Right from the start, they’ve seemed sort of panic-stricken by the shootings. They’ll lose their asses if the shootings continue . . . By the way, Holland doesn’t have a bow. Neither does Fischer.”
“Then what the fuck are we gonna do, man? We still got nothing.”
Then Holland called on Virgil’s cell, and Virgil took it on the truck’s Bluetooth connection.
“I got the call,” Holland said. “Woman’s voice. I got instructions for the drop spot.”
“How stupid is it?” Virgil asked.
“Surprisingly not stupid, if you’re stupid enough to do this in the first place,” Holland said. “There’s this place west of town, called the East Chain . . .”
“I know it,” Virgil said. “We’ll be at the store in two minutes. We’ll talk then.”
On the way to the store, Virgil called the phone guy at BCA headquarters to tell him the call had come in on Holland’s cell phone. The guy was ready for it, and he said he’d have the caller’s number in five minutes.
“What’s the East Chain?” Jenkins asked, when Virgil was off the phone.
* * *
—
The East Chain was a series of swamps, bogs, marshes, and shallow lakes west of Wheatfield, linked together by a creek. Years earlier, Virgil had done some wildlife photography in the area, hired by a painter who wanted authentic scenes of red foxes and their offspring as models for a painting for a wildlife stamp contest. As Virgil remembered it, East Chain was ten or twelve miles long from north to south, and would be an easy place to run and hide.
At Skinner & Holland, Virgil and Jenkins went straight to the back room, where Holland was waiting with a legal pad and Skinner’s laptop.
“They want you to leave the money on the edge of a bridge abutment on Highway 18 . . . right here . . . at ten o’clock. Exactly ten o’clock. No earlier, no later.”
Holland had a Google map up on the laptop and touched a pencil point to the screen. The satellite image showed an elongated lake coming down from the north, dwindling to a stream, which opened into another shallow lake, or marsh, a couple of hundred yards to the south. The bridge crossed the stream between the two lakes.
Jenkins: “Did they say if we didn’t leave it, the chick is gonna get it?”
Holland frowned. “No, they . . . What?”
“Jenkins humor,” Virgil said. “Ignore it.”
Virgil’s cell phone rang. He looked at it, answered. The phone guy in St. Paul said, “I got the number okay, but you won’t like it. It’s a pay phone at a bowling alley in Albert Lea.”
“They got a pay phone?”
“Yeah, they’re still out there. Sorry about that.”
Virgil rang off, told the others about the phone. “So it looks like we’ve got a stakeout tonight.”
“It’s gonna be way dark out there,” Holland said. “I suspect they’ll get out there early, on foot, to watch for somebody doing surveillance. If they don’t see anybody, they’ll snatch the envelope and sneak off, up or down the creek, to somewhere else, where somebody will pick them up. If it is the Nazis, they’ve lived here all their lives, they probably know the area pretty well.”
Virgil looked at the map for a minute, and Jenkins asked, “Well?” and Virgil said, “I’m gonna run home and get some stuff. Be back in three hours.”
“What are you going to get?” Jenkins asked. “What am I doing?”
“I need my wildlife gear,” Virgil said. “There’s a sporting goods store at the mall in Albert Lea. You need to buy some camo or dark sweatpants and a dark sweatshirt and some cheap gym shoes. It’ll be muddy out there, you could ruin a pair of good shoes.”
“I’d like to help, if I can,” Holland said.
“You can,” Virgil said. “You’ll make the drop. You’re gonna be Virgil Flowers for an hour.”
* * *
—
On the way home, Virgil called Sheriff Zimmer and told him about the letter. “What we’d like is, at ten o’clock, we’d like some patrol cars well out away from the site, maybe five miles and moving, so if these people see them it’ll look like a routine patrol. I don’t want them parked someplace unless they can hide. When they try to make the pickup, and if we don’t get them, we might need your guys to run them down.”
“We can do that,” Zimmer said, after Virgil gave him the details. “Sounds like those Nazis.”
“That’s the general impression,” Virgil said. “I thought about driving out there, but they’d just deny it. Grabbing them and squeezing them, is the thing to do.”
When he was off the phone with Zimmer, he called Frankie and told her he was heading north. “I’ll see you there,” she said.
When he got home, she met him at the back door, and said, “I put all your stuff in your big duffel: your camo, the trail game camera, the thermonuclear flashlight, and those Nikes you were supposed to throw away. Plus, I added your mosquito nets. The mosquitoes were thick at the farm last night, and you’re gonna need them.”
“Great. This’ll be a quick trip.”
She grabbed the front of his shirt. “Not so fast, buster. It’s been a while, and my stomach has finally settled down.”
“I don’t have time. We’ve got three dead . . . Okay, maybe I’ve got a little time, but no more than fifteen minutes. Okay, no more than half an hour. Forty minutes at the outside . . . There are people depending on me . . .”
“Yes. I’m one of them.”
21
Virgil used his flashers going back to Wheatfield, not that there was much traffic, but he could run at ninety miles an hour without worrying about a sheriff’s speed trap. Running that fast, he arrived back in Wheatfield almost exactly three hours after he left. Jenkins was waiting at Skinner & Holland, and said, “You look a little haggard.”