—
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.”
“Anybody would be haggard, working this fuckin’ disaster. Are we wasting our time?”
“I suspect we are, but we don’t have a choice,” Jenkins said. “If it turned out these idiots actually know something, and we didn’t follow up, there’d be hell to pay. Besides, I already learned something very worthwhile.”
“About the killings?”
“No, about clothing. I bought some black jeans and a long-sleeved black polo shirt. Black really is slimming. I give off this terrific artist vibe. When I get back to the Cities, I’m gonna head go over the Art Institute. Horny art women are stacked up like cordwood over there.”
“What happens when they find out the truth, that you’re nothing but a sexual predator?” Virgil asked.
“By that time, they’ll have gotten a dose of Dr. Jenkins’s female cure and they won’t care.”
“Yeah, they’ll probably have gotten a dose of something,” Virgil said.
“Hey! Is that kind? You gotta try harder to be kind, man. We’re all trapped on this earth together.”
* * *
—
Holland came in, and asked, “What are we doing?”
“You’re delivering the envelope and a game-trail camera in my Tahoe, wearing my cowboy hat so they think it’s me.” The camera was sitting on the table, and Virgil turned it toward him. “The camera’s got an infrared flash and a five-second delay. You’ll get flashed a few times when you plant it, but, since it’s IR, you won’t see it. You need to set it up about fifteen feet from where you put the envelope. You don’t want it facing anything that might move. You don’t want any swaying tree branches, or anything. Point it at the bridge, if you can. You’re gonna have to be fast so they don’t get suspicious.”