Deadline (23 page)

“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.

—

H
OUSER HAD MARRIED YOUNG
and had two children right away, back in her twenties, Serna said. Her husband, Vernon, had fallen off a rented houseboat fifteen years earlier and drowned in the Mississippi. He’d left enough money behind to finish raising the children, and to send them to college: they were both now working in the Twin Cities. Vernon Houser’s insurance had not been enough to provide a decent lifestyle for Jennifer, and so she’d gone to work for a real-estate dealer, and had been good at it. “She liked being busy, and being in the public eye, and when an open seat came up on the school board, she ran for it, and she won. She was the public watchdog on spending issues.”

Houser got a small salary for serving on the school board, Serna said, “but very little, really, for the time she put in. Something like five hundred dollars a month.”

“Did she say anything to you about trouble at the schools? About being frightened of anybody?”

“No, nothing like that—although everybody knew that you were sniffing around.”

“That’s the second time today that somebody said I was sniffing,” Virgil said.

“Well, the idea that Jen would take anything from the schools . . . that’s simply ridiculous. If you’re sniffing, you’re sniffing up the wrong tree.”

Virgil left Serna sitting on a couch, and did a quick tour of the house, peering in closets, finding clothes, looking in drawers, finding socks and underwear, probing medicine cabinets, finding a high blood pressure prescription, partly used. A desk in the converted bedroom yielded a checkbook, showing a neatly entered balance of one thousand, six hundred and eighty-four dollars.

The hall leading from the short flight of stairs across the upper floor to the office was decorated with two dozen family photos; most prominent was a fleshy man wearing large plastic-rimmed glasses, and, Virgil thought, a bad brown toupee. Vernon? He thought so.

Back in the living room, Virgil asked Serna, “Was Miz Houser close to her children?”

“Oh . . . I guess. They didn’t really . . . visit back and forth much. Why?”

“I noticed that most of the family photos were older. Kids were small in all of the pictures.”

“Yeah, she wasn’t much for photography, I guess. Not sentimental that way, except for that little picture of her with her mom, when she was a toddler.”

“Where’s that?”

“Right there in the hallway. It’s the little black-and-white one,” Serna said.

“There aren’t any black-and-white ones,” Virgil said.

“Yes, it’s right there in the center, down from that awful picture of Vernon.”

“Show me,” Virgil said.

—

T
HERE WAS NO PHOTO
of Jennifer Houser and her mother. Serna put her fingers to her mouth, puzzled: “Jeez. It’s always been right there. Forever. It was the centerpiece.”

Virgil relaxed.

There was no murder: Houser was running.

And she’d had to take just one little memento.

V
IKE
L
AUGHTON CALLED
for an emergency meeting of the Buchanan County school board in the back storage room of the newspaper. The remaining four members of the board arrived at intervals of a minute or two, slinking in the back door from the busy parking lot that served both Village Pizza and Quartermain’s Bar and BBQ.

Laughton offered beer, but nobody took one, except him. “What happened?” Bob Owens demanded, as Laughton popped the top on a Coors Light. “Why are we here?”

“What do you mean, why are we here?” Jennifer Gedney said. “Randy’s dead. Who knows what he left behind? Obviously, we’ve got to find out—”

Laughton interrupted: “Jen Houser disappeared. The police found blood on her kitchen floor.”

That stopped everybody short.

Then, “She’s been killed?” Jennifer Gedney put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God, what’s going on? I heard that Randy was murdered, too. Some people said it looked like suicide, but now everybody’s saying it was murder. They say the police know for sure—”

“Where’re Henry and Del?” Larry Parsons asked.

“That’s what I want to talk about,” Laughton said. He took one of the folding chairs he’d set out, flopped his hands in the air and flopped them back down on his thighs, sloshing a little beer on the floor without noticing. “The fact of the matter is, this Flowers guy is breaking things down. The biggest thing we always had going for us is that nobody worried about the school board. We’re all upstanding citizens, committed to educating the kids, keeping an eye on things. But once somebody starts looking hard, a police officer or an attorney or a CPA . . . things are going to come bubbling out.”

Jennifer Barns: “You’re telling us that our goose is cooked?”

Laughton shook his head: “Not quite yet. I think I might be able to skate, unless you all decide to take me down with you. I mean, I have no power over the school budget—”

“You sure took the money, that’s all the police would have to know,” said Owens.

“Like I said, you all could drag me down. I know that,” Laughton said. “Listen: if we hang together, we could still make it. But to do that, we may have to throw Henry and Del overboard. They actually moved the money, they’re the ones who always talked with Masilla, they made the deals. They were Randy’s boss—Henry hired Randy himself. I think we could argue that it was a three-man arrangement, and we didn’t know about it.”

“But we knew every step,” Barns said. “If we tried to throw them
overboard, they’d take us down out of revenge. I mean, that’s what I would do, if I was in their shoes.”

“They might try, if they had nothing to lose, but they do have something to lose,” Laughton said. “They both have families.”

The board members looked at each other, and then Parsons said, “Stop beating around the bush. Tell us what you’re thinking.”

“Very simple,” Laughton said. “I’m pretty sure that Flowers is going to tear the house down. He’s smarter than he looks, and he’s been working everybody. Suppose we went to Henry and Del and said, ‘We’re not going to make it. If you take the rap, the other six of us . . . well, five of us, if Jen Houser doesn’t show up . . . we’ll take care of your families. They can go off to live with their folks, and every year they’ll get X amount of dollars in the mail.’”

“How big an X?” Gedney asked. She looked unhappy with the prospect.

“We’d have to work that out,” Laughton said. “I’m thinking, you know, if each one of us put two hundred thousand dollars into a trust at Vanguard or Fidelity, and if we had to have all five signatures to move money, we could probably get both families twenty thousand a year, and still keep the million. We’d just send them the interest, four percent, and anything over that we’d keep. Then, when this is all blown over, and nobody remembers it . . . we cash the fund out. Take our money back.”

They all sat silently for a minute, then Jen 1 said, “You really think . . . I don’t know. It seems crazy. Maybe too easy.”

Owens said, almost conversationally, “You know, Henry and Del have got to know they’ll be the first to go. There’s no way we could
have done any of this without them knowing. So maybe . . . they might buy it.”

“If Henry doesn’t stick a gun in his ear,” Jennifer Gedney said.

“Which would save us all some money,” Laughton said. “Wouldn’t have to take care of his family.”

The other four turned to look at him, then Owens said, “You went out the door with Randy the other night. I saw you talking.”

“Saying good-bye,” Laughton said.

They all looked at him some more, then Parsons said, “I’ll be goddamned. You killed him.”

Laughton started to deny it, but felt the sweat pop out on his forehead, and finally said, “It had to be done. No way he was going to get away—and if he did, he’d have been bleeding us for years. Forever.”

Jen Gedney said, “Viking—that’s awful. You really killed him?”

Laughton waved his hands at them: “He was a dead man, anyway. He would have wound up shooting it out with some cops, somewhere, probably kill one or two of them. I saw the chance, and I took it. Saved us fifty thousand bucks, each.”

They all thought about that for a minute, and Jennifer Gedney made a couple of choking sounds, almost like sobs, but her eyes were dry.

“Let’s skip that for the moment,” Owens said. “Even if we agreed to throw Henry and Del overboard, they’re gonna deny knowing anything about Randy getting killed, or Jennifer Houser—”

“Why’d you kill Jennifer?” Jennifer Gedney demanded. “She was in it with the rest of us, she wasn’t going to tell—”

“I didn’t,” Laughton interrupted. “I don’t know what happened to her, but to tell you the truth, she was always a little too smart for her own good. There’s no sign that she’s dead, except a little smear of blood on her kitchen floor. I think she took off. The way she was acting the other night . . .”

Parsons said, “You’re right. She was a little too . . . pleased . . . going out the door. I think she’s got something tricky set up.”

They sat without speaking for a few more seconds, still digesting it all. Then Barns asked, “If we decide to throw Henry and Del overboard, as we’re calling it, how would we do that?”

“We don’t do it right now, this minute,” Laughton said. “I keep monitoring the investigation. I’ve got a good source inside the sheriff’s office, he’ll keep me up on things. Freedom of the press, and so on. Also, he wants to run for sheriff someday . . .”

“Josh Becker,” Jennifer Gedney guessed.

“Whatever,” Laughton said. “If it looks like it’s all going to come down on us, I’ll go directly to Flowers and tell him that Clancy Conley suspected Henry and Del and Randy of conspiring to do this. I’ll tell Flowers I didn’t believe it, because Clancy was a pill head, and all that. How I told him it was nonsense—making myself look naive. Then I say that I’ve gone to all you board members, and all of you are horrified at the prospect that this may have happened, and that we’d all be willing to testify against Henry and Del if it came to that. Back up any evidence he finds—that Flowers finds—and help reconstruct budgets and amounts, and so on.”

“And we’d get immunity from prosecution?” Jen Gedney asked.

“Asking for that would be touchy,” Laughton said. “If we’re innocent, why would we need it? I could come up with some reasons,
but the best reason would be that our individual attorneys insist on it before we testify. Not us. Our attorneys. We’d say we feel that we have to go with their advice, which we’re paying them for.”

“I wonder if we could get the board attorneys to cover that, charge it off to the schools,” Owens wondered.

“Possibly,” said the chairwoman. “If we were innocent, it’d be a legitimate expense.”

“This idea sounds pretty sketchy, the whole story,” Gedney said.

“It is sketchy. And it’s getting sketchier by the minute,” Laughton said. “If we wait too long, it won’t even be an option. You have to remember, though, that if we get charged, the state has to prove us guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. We don’t have to create a great story—just a serious doubt.”

—

T
HEY ARGUED ABOUT IT
for a half hour, all the time feeling the prison walls closing down on them. Finally Barns asked, “If it’s our only way out, it’s worth a try. Should we tell Henry what we’re going to do? You know, about supporting the families?”

“Not yet,” Laughton said. “Things could change. Let’s see what Flowers does next. If anyone hears anything that makes you think we’ve got to move, we’ll talk by phone, instead of trying to meet. Everybody keep your ears open. If Flowers comes to visit anyone—Jen Gedney, I’m thinking of you, since he’s already talked to you—let us know.”

The meeting broke up, and they left a couple minutes apart. When only Laughton and Jennifer Barns were left in the newspaper office, she asked, “What about Randy? Was it awful?”

“Awful for me,” Laughton said. He leaned toward her, talking in a hoarse whisper. “He never saw it coming. One minute he was there, and the next he wasn’t. Fast, painless. Not a bad way to go. But I’ll remember it forever.”

She looked him over for a moment, then said, “You couldn’t kill all of us, and get away with it.”

“I know. Not that I didn’t think about it,” Laughton said. “It’s just not feasible. I try to stick to that standard—doing what’s feasible. If Flowers had any hard evidence against us, he would have moved already. That makes me think we’ve still got a chance.”

“Unless he’s focused on catching the killer, and is letting the money thing go until that’s done,” Barns said.

“I don’t think that’s likely. That’s just not the way cops think,” Laughton said. He looked at his watch. “It’s been a couple minutes. You better get out of here.”

—

B
ARNS WALKED ACROSS
the parking lot and got into her Subaru, and it occurred to her that Flowers probably would place a premium on finding the killer, rather than the money thing. And Laughton had just confessed to the four board members that he’d killed Kerns. That had to be a chip worth something.

Her phone rang, and she glanced at it: Owens.

“What’s up?”

“Vike just confessed to killing Randy.”

“I was thinking that exact thought, just now,” Barns said. “It’s like you pulled it out of my brain.”

“If the four of us board members stuck together, we might be
able to throw Vike overboard along with Henry and Del,” Owens said. “We might claim that Henry and Del directed Randy, and that Vike was in on all of that. We could say that we met and that Jen Houser said she was going to confront Vike about all of this, on our behalf, and then she disappeared—”

“But how do we explain that Vike confessed to us?”

“Well, it’s a little weak, but we could say that Jen Houser saw him with Randy, in Randy’s truck, just before Randy was killed, and told us about it. Then Jen Houser disappeared, and we all went together and confronted him. He told us he was going to drag us all down if we didn’t support him—”

“Okay. Listen, Bob, we need to talk to the others . . . the other board members. I think you’ve got something there, a kernel of something, but it’s not quite right yet. For example, if Vike confessed to us, why didn’t we drive right over and tell Flowers?”

“Okay. Okay, we have to work on it. Maybe we don’t say he confessed—just that Jen Houser saw them together. Listen, let’s call the others and let it cook for a while, see what we come up with. In the meantime, stay the hell away from Vike. He has wigged out. As they used to say many years ago.”

“Many,” Barns said. “All right. Let’s talk. If we can give them all the killers, all wrapped up . . . we might slip through this.”

—

S
HE PUT THE
S
UBARU
in gear, drove across the parking lot, and never saw Del Cray in his aging gray Pathfinder, slumped in his seat, eating a slice of mushroom and sausage.

The pizza smelled so good that he hadn’t been able to wait until
he got back to his house, so he opened the box and pulled a slice free . . . and saw Gedney come out the back of the newspaper office. That was interesting, but not astonishing. Then, a minute later, Owens emerged, looking guilty, checking around, before scurrying over to his car. That was even more interesting.

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?”