Deadline(100)

            The others followed them out, at intervals of a half-minute or so. Nobody said good-bye to anyone else.

            Jennifer Barns and Henry Hetfield walked out separately and separately looked at the sky and asked themselves,

            “Is this the end?”





                     19


            EVERY LIGHT IN the school was on when they got back. Shrake called ahead to say that Virgil had survived, and the sheriff was waiting in the school doorway where Virgil had broken in.

            “You sure Bacon’s in here?” he asked.

            “I talked to him on the phone. He said he’d jam the door open for me, and go pull a surveillance camera out of the little auditorium. That was maybe eight, ten minutes before I got here. When I got here, the door was locked, the paper he was gonna jam it with was by the door, and he and the camera were gone.”

            “Surveillance camera?”

            “Yeah. The school board here has been stealing the school system blind—that’s just between you and me and Shrake and Jenkins, for the time being.”

            The sheriff looked as though somebody had hit him between the eyes with a plank. “I know the board, I mean . . . How sure . . . ?”

            “I think their security guy is the one who shot Conley and Zorn—Zorn for no other reason than to pull me away from the schools. Conley had cracked the whole thing, and he was planning to publish it. I think he made the mistake of telling Vike Laughton about it.”

            “Vike . . .” The sheriff turned away and stared sightlessly across the parking lot. “Hate to say it, but I can believe Kerns and Vike. I’m having trouble with all the Jennifers. You think the fire . . . ?”

            “The fire was set to destroy the district’s financial records. I can guarantee they’re not up in a Cloud, somewhere. They were melted. But Conley got copies of enough of them to hang them all. Now, Sheriff, you’re an okay guy, but this ring has feelers all over town. You’d do best not to mention this to anyone, not until I figure out how to pull them in. Kerns is out there with a rifle, and he did his best to kill me tonight, and we can’t find Bacon. He won’t hesitate to shoot a deputy, or a sheriff.”

            “We gotta find that sucker.”

            “Yes, we do. But first we’ve got to find Bacon. I keep hoping that he’s locked up somewhere.”

            “We’re tearing the place apart.”

            “Let me look.”

            —

            THERE WERE EIGHT COPS walking the school. A sergeant who seemed to know what he was doing had them run all the obvious places in a hurry, which had taken twenty minutes or so, he told Virgil.

            Then they’d backtracked, and were doing the whole place inch by inch.

            “The shooter knows the building,” Virgil said. “He could have stuck him someplace weird.”

            With the deputies doing the search better than he could, Virgil took Jenkins, Shrake, and Alewort, the sheriff’s crime-scene guy, up to the attic. Jenkins and Shrake had to bend their necks to walk down to Bacon’s apartment. Virgil spotted the shooter’s blood for Alewort, who began doing his crime-scene routine, and Virgil led Shrake and Jenkins into the apartment.

            “Holy shit,” Jenkins said. He was looking at the splintered walls. “You were in here? You’re living right, Virgil—brick walls on the outside, you should have been killed three times by ricochets.”

            “Or splintered to death,” Jenkins said. He tipped his finger at the side of one of Bacon’s bookcases, which had three six-inch splinters embedded in the wood, like straws in a telephone pole after a tornado.