Deadline(132)
Laughton shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s a nice lady, but . . . who knows? Maybe she was in on it, maybe they needed a board member to tip them in case anybody on the board got curious about spending amounts, or something. You know, sometimes the board just throws everybody out . . . they can do that when they discuss personnel matters . . . and they talk privately. Maybe Henry and the others were worried about that, and brought Jen into it.”
“I’ve got to think about that. I’d like to tell you something off the record here . . . you could probably get some official word on it tomorrow, if you inquire around . . . off the record?”
Laughton nodded. “Sure. Unless I get it from another source.”
“The attorney general’s office is sending down a really hard-nosed hit team—prosecutors. They’re going to start taking the school board apart tomorrow, and then home in on the others. The feeling is, somebody’s going to crack.”
Laughton shook his head. “I’ll be amazed if any of them are involved. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, if you want. The board members are my friends. I’ll call them, one at a time, and see what they have to say—maybe somebody will tell me that they do know something. Or suspect something. Maybe we could work out some kind of arrangement where the board members tell you everything about Henry and Del and Kerns, instead of getting all frozen up. I mean, if they think you’re after them, they’re going to be talking to lawyers and you might not get anything at all.”
Virgil said, “That’s . . . a possibility. I could tell the AG’s main guy to talk to you first, see what you’ve found out.”
They both took a moment to lick around the sides of their cones, then Laughton said, “Go ahead and tell him. Tell him to give me a call. I’ll do what I can to help.”
“Wish that goddamned Kerns hadn’t been killed,” Virgil said. “I wish I knew the sequence of events when he killed Bacon. I talked to Bacon, on my phone, not ten minutes before he was murdered. And when I get there, he’d already disappeared—dead. And Kerns tries to shoot me. Which I find pretty goddamned interesting.”
“I wouldn’t find it so much interesting, as I would freakin’ horrifying. Somebody shooting at you? No thanks. I’ll stick to keyboards.”
Virgil said, “The question I’d like to ask him is, why? Why shoot at me? There was nobody else in the school. He’d already killed Bacon, he could have snuck out the back, nobody the wiser.”
“I don’t know. Sounds stupid,” Laughton said.
“He might not have been the sharpest knife in the dishwasher, Vike, but I believe he had a reason. That camera took two memory cards—you could either run them sequentially, to make a longer recording, or simultaneously, to make a duplicate. We had it set for a duplicate. I suspect that Kerns caught Bacon putting up the ladder to get the camera down, waited to see what he was doing, and then came in and challenged him. And Bacon knew Kerns was probably a killer, because I told him. So I think old Will Bacon pulled out either one or both of those cards, and hid them. Maybe up on top, in the rafters. I think that’s why he was beaten to death—Kerns was trying to find out where he put them. The crime-scene people will be done in there by the end of the day, so I can get in. I’m going in there tonight and I’m gonna crawl all over that room. Bacon would have left it somewhere I could find it. And I’m going to.”
“Well, good luck with that,” Laughton said. “Some of those memory cards are about the size of my dick.”
That made Virgil chuckle, and they finished the cones, and Laughton sighed and said, “Glad I decided to stick around my little river town, instead of going up to the Cities. Nothing like peace and quiet, and then four or five murders.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe we’ll know more tonight. Whatever, there’s gonna be a genuine North Dakota goat-fuck tomorrow, when the AG’s people hit town. You wouldn’t want to miss that.”