Storm Front (2 page)

I
t was one of the great Minnesota summers of all time—or maybe it just felt that way, after one of the most miserable springs in history. On April 22, in a nasty little snowstorm, he’d skidded off a highway in Apple Valley, and had had to call for a tow to get his four-wheel-drive truck out of the ditch.

On May 1, he’d gone north to a friend’s cabin near Hayward, Wisconsin, to do some early-season fly-fishing for bluegills, and it had snowed the whole day, and the day after that, totaling sixteen inches of the stuff, and then it had spent two days raining old women and sticks, as the Welsh would say, although they’d actually say something more like
mae hi’n bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn.

But the summer . . . ah, the summer, which was now coming to its peak, the summer was a joy to behold, even from the inside of a diner.

—

V
IRGIL
F
LOWERS
was sitting sideways in a booth in a Perkins restaurant on Highway 169 in Mankato, Minnesota, his cowboy boots hanging off the end of the seat. He was talking to Florence “Ma” Nobles about her involvement in a counterfeit lumber ring, of which she denied any knowledge. He’d been investigating her for a while, and had even met three of her five intra-ethnic fatherless boys—Mateo, Tall Bear, and Moses.

Virgil picked up a french fry and jabbed it at her: “Dave Moss said you sold the same barn fifteen times, Ma. He says your boy Rolf has another two thousand board-feet of lumber down at the bottom of the Minnesota River, getting old. Dave says you’ll be peddling that all over New England next year.”

Ma made a rude noise with her lips, and Virgil said, “C’mon, Ma, that’s not necessary.”

Ma said, “That goddamn Moss can kiss my ass—though, to be honest, he already did that and seemed to like it all right. This is more a domestic dispute than anything else, Virgie. I broke it off with him, and he’s just getting back at me.”

Virgil said, “I’m not sure I can believe that, Ma. There’s a fellow named Barry Spurgeon who spent forty-four thousand dollars buying lumber from your boy, so he can build some sort of a barn-mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. He got suspicious and did a tree-ring test and that tree was cut down last year.
Last year
, for Christ’s sakes, Ma. You didn’t even let it go
five
years. Spurgeon wants that money back because he paid for real old-timey barn lumber.”

His phone rang and he picked it up and looked at it: Lucas Davenport.

“I gotta take this,” he said. He pushed the “answer” tab on the phone and said, “Hang on a minute, Lucas,” and to Ma, “You sit right here. Do not run away.”

“Instead of talking about barn lumber we oughta talk about how to scratch my itch,” Ma said, pushing out her lower lip. “Here it is July and I ain’t been laid since March the eighteenth. You’re just the boy to get ’er done, Virgie.”

—

V
IRGIL SLID
out of the booth and walked back toward the men’s room, where nobody was sitting. “What’s up?” he asked Davenport.

“Got an assignment for you . . . easy duty,” Davenport said.

“Aw, man. I left my shotgun at home.”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Davenport said, though he’d been known to lie about such things. “There’s an Israeli investigator who needs to talk to a professor at Gustavus Adolphus, though the professor actually lives there in Mankato. Probably on your block. He’s a minister named, uh, let me look . . . Elijah Jones. A Lutheran minister, like your old man.”

“An Israeli? What’s that about?”

Virgil was keeping an eye on Ma as he spoke to Davenport, and it wasn’t particularly hard to do. She was undeniably a criminal redneck, but she was also a pretty blonde, only thirty-four, though she had five children, including a nineteen-year-old. She had a long, thick pigtail down her back, and a short, slender body. If, purely hypothetically, she were lying on a California king with that hair spread out over her . . .

“. . . some kind of precious artifact—”

“What? Say that over again,” Virgil said. “I’m sorry, I’m trying to keep an eye on a local criminal here . . . that barn-lumber scam I’ve been working.”

“I said, the Israeli’s coming into MSP and it’d be nice if you’d pick her up,” Davenport said. “This Jones guy supposedly stole some kind of precious artifact from an archaeological dig and smuggled it back to the States. He apparently left Israel illegally—the Israeli cops tracked him to a port and he caught a boat to Cyprus and then flew home from there.”

“What kind of artifact?” Virgil asked, now semi-interested. “Does it have mystical powers?”

“I don’t know about mystical powers, but supposedly it’s a piece of a stele—a steelee? I don’t know how you pronounce it—that’s got some ancient writing on it. The whole thing has apparently got the state of Israel in an uproar,” Davenport said. “Anyway, the Israelis want it back and the State Department says if Jones stole it and brought it into the country, he broke about nine laws. I’ll send you a sheet on it.”

“That sounds like a federal case,” Virgil said. “Why don’t the Israelis talk to the FBI?”

“Well, it
is
a federal case. The feds have issued a hold on Jones, based on information from the Israelis, and also because he said he had nothing to declare when he came through customs, which was a lie. The feds asked us in because of local knowledge—that’d be you—and because we owe them one this month, and the boss okayed it,” Davenport said.

“I bet the stone does have mystical powers,” Virgil said. “Maybe the Israelis can use it to blast Iran, or something. Or maybe it curses the person who has it—your balls rot off, or your seed only falls upon barren ground, so to speak.”

“My seed’s already got me in enough trouble, so I don’t care anymore,” Davenport said. “Just bust the fuckin’ minister, get the fuckin’ stone, and get the fuckin’ Israelis out of here. Okay?”

Ma caught Virgil looking at her, and her tongue came out and stroked her upper lip. Just in case Virgil might have missed it, she did it again. Davenport said something else, but Virgil missed
that
, and he said, “Goddamnit, I’m up to my ass on this lumber thing. What time is she coming in?”

After a moment of silence, Davenport said, “I just told you that: I don’t know. Today, tomorrow, the next day. She’ll either call ahead or send you an e-mail when she knows for sure.”

“Sorry, I’m really . . . I’m afraid this guy’s gonna run. What’s her name? The Israeli?”

“Yael Aronov,” Davenport said. He pronounced it “Yale.”

“Is that Y-a-e-l?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s pronounced Ya-el,” Virgil said. “In the Book of Judges, Yael meets this enemy commander named Sisera, and gets him in her tent, where, and I quote, ‘Yael, Heber’s wife, took a nail of the tent, and took a hammer into her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.’ End quote.”

“See, you’re the perfect guy for this,” Davenport said. “You not only know the Bible, but your third wife was just like this Yale chick.”

“Ya-el,” Virgil said. “And when you’re right, you’re right.”

—

T
HE LUMBER SCAM
did not get resolved. As they walked out to the parking lot, Virgil told Ma that she’d have to find another person to scratch her itch. “Not,” he said, “that you don’t have a pretty attractive itch.”

“I appreciate your sayin’ that, but sayin’ it don’t solve the problem,” Ma said.

“You better get it scratched right quick, because if you keep selling that lumber, I am gonna put your ass in jail,” Virgil said.

“You’re one mean cowboy,” Ma said. She left in a new red Ford F-150, which seemed to Virgil to be some sort of a taunt, since she’d been poor-mouthing about the depressed state of the architectural salvage business.

—

V
IRGIL DIDN
’
T HEAR
from the Israeli woman that afternoon, and he didn’t have much on his investigative plate, so he made a quick run over to the Mississippi River, where he hooked up with his old friend Johnson Johnson to do some evening walleye fishing. He wound up spending the night at Johnson’s cabin, where Johnson and his current girlfriend, Shirley, made a nice dinner out of baked walleye and fresh handpicked watercress. Virgil and Johnson did a little northern fishing in the early morning, and then Virgil headed back home.

At Rochester, he stopped at a McDonald’s, got a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, declining the offer of a Double Quarter Pounder, checked his e-mail on his iPad, and found a message from the Israeli: she’d be arriving at Minneapolis–St. Paul at one o’clock. Virgil checked his watch and figured he’d have enough time to cut cross-country to the Cabela’s outdoor superstore at Owatonna on his way north.

—

V
IRGIL
F
LOWERS
was a tall, thin man, two inches over six feet unless he was wearing cowboy boots, which he usually was, and then he was three and a half inches over six feet. He wore his blond hair long, curled over his ears and the back of his neck; in general, he looked like a decent third-baseman, which he’d been in high school and for a while in college, until he found out he couldn’t reliably hit a college-level fastball.

After college, he did time in the army, expecting an assignment in the infantry or intelligence. The army made him a cop, which, to his surprise, he liked. He was a captain when he got out, landed a job with the St. Paul cops, and a few years later, moved to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Now he was the only resident agent in the southern end of the state. He would work six or eight murders in the course of an average year, and spend the rest of his time chasing down people whose criminal activities required more range than an individual sheriff’s office could normally cover. Ma Nobles, for example, lived in one county, her son in another, a suspected accomplice in a third, and the lumber might well be hidden underwater, precisely on a county line.

In addition to his cop duties, Virgil was an outdoor writer, though he’d recently branched out and had stories printed in both the
New York Times
magazine and
Vanity Fair
. Despite a mild disregard for money, between the state job and the writing, he found himself edging toward affluence.

So that’s what he did. Meth labs had been his special curse for quite a while, generating a number of the killings he’d worked, but now they were beginning to fade away.

Tough, on-the-ball law enforcement, Virgil was proud to say, had forced Minnesota criminals to go back to stealing.

—

V
IRGIL GOT OUT
of Cabela’s for two hundred dollars, not a bad price, considering the possibilities, and made it into the airport’s short-term parking a half hour before Yael Aronov’s plane was scheduled to land. He bought a fishing magazine at a newsstand and a croissant at Starbucks, and settled in to wait.

He was deep into a pro-and-con article on the use of bucktails when his phone rang, a call from an unknown number.

“Yes?”

“Is this Agent Flowers?”

“Yes, it is.”

“The plane has landed. Your supervisor gave me this number and said you would meet me. Are you here?”

“Yes. In baggage claim. You’re at carousel nine. I’m a tall, thin man with cowboy boots and a straw hat, sitting in the chairs facing the carousel.”

“Very good. I will be there as soon as I can.”

—

S
HE WAS
another twenty minutes. Virgil finished the bucktails story and was reading about Bulldawg technique when people began gathering around the carousel. He put the magazine away, and two minutes later, a woman walked up and said, “You’re the only cowboy. You must be Virgil?”

“Yes, I am,” Virgil said, unfolding from the chair.

They shook hands and she said, “Yael Aronov,” and, “I have two large bags.”

“That’s fine,” Virgil said. “Where are you staying?”

“At the Mankato Downtown Inn? Is that correct?”

“That’s correct,” Virgil said.

Yael was a tall woman in her late twenties or early thirties, athletic, with dark hair cut short, regular features, an olive complexion, and quick, dark eyes. She was pretty, but if Virgil had been asked what she looked like, he would have said, “Tough.”

“I’m tired. It was straight through—Tel Aviv to Newark, and then a long layover in Newark and then to here,” she said. “I need to sleep.”

“I was never told who you work for, exactly,” Virgil said. “I understand you’re looking for an artifact of some kind.”

“I work for the Israel Antiquities Authority, the IAA. I’m an investigator—really, the only investigator,” she said. “We’re looking for part of a stele”—she pronounced it
stella
—“that was stolen by this Reverend Jones.”

“I don’t know exactly what a stele is.”

“Okay, I will tell you,” she said. “In the ancient Middle East, the various kings, Persian, Egyptian, Assyrian, when they conquered a place, would sometimes put up a stone pillar boasting about their conquest. They often inscribed the pillar with more than one language, usually their own and the local language. Then, after they died, another conqueror would come along, and the old pillars would get thrown down and broken up, and maybe new pillars set up. What Reverend Jones found was a piece of one of these pillars, a piece of a stele. Unfortunately, he stole it, and carried it out of the country.”

“You’re sure?”

“One hundred percent,” she said.

Jones, she said, had been working on Israeli digs since the late sixties, most recently at an excavation on the Jordan River east of the town of Beth Shean. He was one of the most trusted diggers—a man with long experience, decent Hebrew, and good friends all over Israel.

Then, a little more than a week earlier, there’d been a stunning find: a fragment of a black limestone stele, a little more than a foot long and about ten inches thick at the thickest part.

—

S
HE BROKE OFF TO SAY
,
“Here are my bags.”