He bobbed his head: “That might be the way to go. Once you say I can talk, I’ll tell Mary Alice about it, ask her what she thinks. She’s my brain trust.” Mary Alice was his wife.
“We’ll probably move in the next day or two, so you gotta decide what you’re gonna do, and pretty fast. You think Mary Alice can keep her mouth shut?”
“When she needs to,” Ahlquist said.
“Then talk to her,” Virgil said. “Let me know tomorrow morning what you’re gonna do.”
“I’ll tell you tonight,” Ahlquist said. “I want to see your final list, so I’ll be back anyway.”
Virgil went back to work on the list, pushing hard. Lyle McLachlan, he thought, must be an enormous asshole, because he was on about every other list. George Peck was on one list. Virgil checked the number of the letter that nominated Peck, against the secret numbered list, and found that Peck had nominated himself.
Interesting.
The desk officer came in and handed him more letters. He put them in the pile, and went back to sorting names.
Time went by. He was fifteen minutes from finishing when he glanced at his watch and realized he didn’t have fifteen minutes: it was time to get back to LaRouche’s office.
He went out past the front desk, and found he had sixteen more letters. “Hang onto these, will you?” he asked the desk officer. “I’ll be back in a couple hours to finish up.”
When he got to Larouche’s, the office window was dark, and the door locked, but Good Thunder’s Camaro was parked outside. He knocked, and pushed a doorbell, and a minute later, a clerk-like woman came to the door and asked, “Are you Agent Flowers?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She let him in, said, “I’m Coral Schmidt, I’m the reporter,” and he followed her down a hall past LaRouche’s office, to a conference room, where LaRouche and Good Thunder were chatting, while Shepard sat next to LaRouche, listening and toying with her purse. Schmidt sat down next to a black steno machine and, as Virgil took a chair, nodded to Good Thunder and said, “Anytime.”
Good Thunder dictated some time and date stuff to the reporter, the identities and offices of those present, then she and LaRouche agreed that they would abide by the terms of an agreement reached earlier that day, with copies to everyone, etc. With the bureaucratic bullshit out of the way, they started.
Good Thunder said to Shepard, “Mrs. Shepard, you’ve asserted that your husband, Patrick Shepard, a member of the Butternut Falls City Council, received a bribe of twenty-five thousand dollars to change his vote on a zoning application from PyeMart Corporation, in regard to a PyeMart store to be built on Highway 12 West in Butternut Falls. When did you become aware of the offer from PyeMart?”
Shepard unrolled the story: the first contact with a PyeMart expediter named John Dunn, a series of discussions between Dunn and other members of the council. The discussions had the effect of softening up the council members, she said, and when an offer came to “help” Shepard with some credit card and income tax debt, it was not unexpected.
The offer, she said, had not come directly from Dunn, but from Mayor Geraldine Gore, who had also delivered the money. Pat Shepard, she said, had come home and told her excitedly that their problems were over: they might even have enough left to buy a home theater system.
“Did he buy one of those?” Good Thunder asked.
Shepard bit her lip, looked away: “No. I have reason to believe that he’d begun a relationship with another woman, Carol Anne Moore, who works for the county clerk, and that he spent a good deal of money on her.”
Virgil: “Was this a serious relationship? Was this a fling, or did you consider your marriage endangered or over?”
“The marriage was over. I was just picking a time to leave,” she said. “I don’t know how serious the relationship was. Is. I don’t know if it’s still going on; I assume it is. Why would it make any difference?”
Virgil asked, “I wonder if he would confide in Miz Moore.”
She shook her head: “I don’t know.”
Good Thunder: “In regards to your own personal life, I would suggest that you act with discretion. If it comes to a jury trial, it will be… less difficult.”
“You mean, ‘Don’t fuck anyone new’?” Then, with a quick glance at the stenographer, “Oh my God, I’m sorry I said that, I just…”
“A lot of stress,” Good Thunder said.
“It’s completely understandable,” said LaRouche.
Shepard said that her husband had laundered much of the money by giving it to his brother, who owned an auto-body shop in St. Cloud. The brother ran it through his bank, then returned it to Shepard as a “temporary employee.”
“I don’t know if Bob knew where the money was coming from, but Pat told me it was no skin off Bob’s butt. The money came in, he paid it to Pat, deducted Pat’s wages as a temporary employee, and it all came out even, tax-wise.”
After they’d wrung her out, Virgil said, “Mrs. Shepard… your husband will likely be looking at a jail sentence here. Do you think that if he were offered a deal, a reduction in the sentence, that he would be willing to implicate some of the other members of this conspiracy?”
“If you said that you could keep him out of prison if he ran over our daughter with the car, he’d do it,” she said. “He is a coward and a rat. And he cheats at golf.”
Good Thunder: “Do you know a woman named Marilyn Oaks?”
Shepard stared at her for a moment, then closed her eyes and leaned back: “I knew it. That sonofabitch.”
When they were all done, and the stenographer had folded up her machine, Shepard said, “The thing that defeats me is, Pat is a jerk, and his hair is falling out, and he’s got a little potbelly… How does he have two mistresses? That we know of?”
“Lonely people,” Virgil said.
“I’m lonely,” she said.
“Yeah, but Pat apparently can’t fix that for you.”
She shook her head, then looked at Good Thunder and said, “I’m not sure I can act with discretion.”
Out in the parking lot, Good Thunder asked Virgil, “Can you guys give us some technical support? Now that we’ve got Mrs. Shepard nailed down, I’m going to pull in Pat Shepard. You won’t have to be there for that-I can handle it with an investigator-but if Shepard agrees to flip, I’ll need a wire and support.”
“Count on it,” Virgil said. “I’ll talk to my boss tonight, and he’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Deal,” she said.
At the courthouse, the duty officer had another stack of letters for him, and Virgil asked the officer to find George Peck’s phone number. He waited, got the number, and dialed. Peck picked up, saying, “Peck.”
Virgil suppressed the urge to tell him he sounded like a chicken, and instead, said, “George? Virgil. Listen, I’m over at the courthouse, compiling those names. If you’ve got time, you could come over and take a look.”
“As a matter of fact, I do have time,” Peck said. “I was just about to get in the bathtub. I’ll be an hour or so, if that’s okay.”
“See you then.”
Virgil had set up the spreadsheet to rank the names by the number of entries in each name-cell; McLachlan had one hundred and eight nominations. The second most, a man named Greg Sawyer, had seventy-four. After that, the numbers dropped sharply. There were four ties with eight, five with seven, eight with six nominations, lots of names with five, four, three, or two nominations, and the rest were scattered, with one each; a total of more than five hundred names.
When he finished, he went out and found two more letters, entered those, with no change in the standings; he was just finishing when Peck showed up.
Virgil asked, “Why the hell did you nominate yourself, George?”
“IQ test,” Peck said. “I wondered if you were smart enough to keep a secret list of which letter went to who. What’d you use, something that shows up under ultraviolet?”
“Nope. Just added a dot in one of the letters on the rightnumbered word in the letter.”
