Deadline(123)

            “You shared in some embezzled money. I think any jury—”

            “No, I didn’t,” Brown said. “Not the way you think. I never took a penny from any of those weasels.”

            “Then why would you do it?”

            “I gotta talk to a lawyer, but I never took a penny.”

            Virgil looked at him with deep curiosity, working through it. Then, “Dick, what was your salary last year? You might as well tell me, there’s a public record.”

            Brown shrugged. “Seventy thousand.”

            Virgil nodded, and then laughed. “Seventy thousand. Not too many other seventy-thousand-dollar jobs in Trippton.”

            “Not for grease monkeys,” Brown said. “But it’s all right there in the records, all legal and straight-up, voted on by the board. Paid taxes on every nickel of it, too.”

            Virgil said, “Listen, Dick: if we can’t track the money back to you, then you’ve got a chance to stay out of prison. Not much of a chance, but some. Your chances would be a lot better if you, and your attorney if you have one, had a talk with our attorney—a prosecutor for the attorney general’s office. I could work out an appointment for you in Winona this afternoon. Nobody down here would have to know.”

            They talked around it until Virgil got a phone call from the sheriff’s office: “You probably want to get over to Jennifer Houser’s house,” the dispatcher said. “Sheriff Purdy’s on his way there now.”

            “She’s the school board member,” Virgil said.

            “Is, or was,” the dispatcher said. “They think they found blood on her kitchen floor.”

            Virgil got the address and then rang off and said to Brown, “If I were you, I’d get in your car and drive to Winona as fast as I possibly could, and try to get a deal. They found blood on the floor at Jennifer Houser’s house. If she’s dead, that’d be the fifth murder. You guys are about to go big-time on the nightly news.”

            “Look, I got a salary—”

            “Tell that to the grand jury,” Virgil said. “I’ve given you an option. Kidnap your lawyer, force him to drive to Winona.”

            Virgil gave him Dave’s name and phone number, and took off for Houser’s place, leaving Brown standing in the garage with his wrench in his hand.

            —

            JENNIFER HOUSER LIVED, or had lived, in a plain-vanilla fifties house with a tuck-under garage, three bedrooms—one had been converted to an office devoted to school board business—and no obvious expensive decoration or furniture that would indicate extra money. The best that could be said was that the house was nicely painted, and Houser’s best friend, Janet Serna, said that Houser had painted it herself.

            “She did it every five years, like clockwork,” Serna told Virgil. “The landlord took it off the rent.”

            “She doesn’t own it?”

            “She was funny that way—she hardly owned anything. Even leased her car.”

            —

            ALEWORT, the sheriff’s crime-scene guy, was looking at blood on the tan kitchen tile. “It’s blood, all right,” he’d said, when Virgil showed up. “Can’t tell you if it’s human blood, and if it is, if it’s Jen’s blood. But it’s blood.”

            Purdy said, “This is out of control. You gotta do something, Virgil.”

            “I’m hurrying as fast as I can, Jeff,” Virgil said. “I think we’ll wrap things up in a day or so.”