his face is on that video, we got him.”
“Keep your fingers crossed,” Virgil said. “Where do I go to see Sarah Erikson?”
“She’s coming in here. So’s Barlow. We figured we’d kill all the birds with one stone.”
“We’re birds?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Bad metaphor, Earl,” said Virgil.
“Tough titty. Go investigate your list.”
“Which Erikson isn’t on,” Virgil said.
“Unfortunately,” Ahlquist said.
Virgil pushed himself out of his chair. “I better get investigating.”
“Somebody’s got to do it,” Ahlquist said. “Nice job on that camera, Virgil.”
A few more letters had come back with lists of possible bombers. Virgil spent a half hour going through them, but nothing much had changed. Then Good Thunder called:
“We flipped Pat Shepard, and your guy from the BCA is here with the recording equipment. We’re going to send Shepard to see Burt Block right away: we’re starting to pile up people who know about this, and we need to move. We’d like you to come and help brief Shepard.” Block was the second of the three city councilmen bribed by PyeMart through Geraldine Gore.
“When do you want me?” Virgil asked.
“How fast can you get here?”
The county attorney’s office was upstairs. Virgil looked at his watch: “About twenty-two seconds, if I take the stairs.”
“We’ll leave the light on for you,” Good Thunder said.
Pat Shepard was a middle-sized guy, tanned from the summer golf course, with a tight haircut; and he was pathetic and about the only person in the room who didn’t feel sorry for him was the county attorney, a beefy man named Theodore Wills, who introduced himself as “Theodore.” Wills was openly ecstatic about Shepard’s confession, and scornful of the man himself.
Shepard, who’d been arrested, sat in his chair and wept, and Virgil had to look away. Good Thunder kept passing Shepard paper towels from a roll, which he pressed against his eyes. Shepard’s public defender kept saying, “C’mon, Pat, it’s gonna work out.”
A BCA technician, who’d brought the sound equipment, sat in a corner and read a new copy of Sail magazine.
“Wife gone, job gone, gonna lose everything. My life is over,” Shepard said.
“Can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” Wills said, and Good Thunder’s eyes touched Virgil’s with a slight disgusted roll.
Bill Check, the public defender, said, “Jesus, Theodore, you wanna take it easy? You’re getting everything you wanted.”
But, Virgil thought, as he watched Shepard, Wills was essentially correct. The guy had been entrusted to take care of the town, the best he could, and he’d sold his vote on a critical issue. His confession had been taken down by a court reporter, and had been signed and sealed. For his cooperation in bagging the rest of the gang, he’d get no jail time.
Wills said to Check, “No, I’m not getting everything I wanted. I wanted the sucker in jail for at least a year and Good Thunder talked me out of it. He’s the last one that’s getting a break like that. Everybody else goes down.”
Virgil leaned across to Shepard and said, “You’ve got to pull yourself together. You need to tighten up. If you can’t do this, if you blow this meeting with Burt Block, then the agreement won’t hold, and you will do time.”
“No, no,” said Check, the public defender. “There are no guarantees that this is gonna work…”
“But he has to make a good-faith effort, and if he goes in there fumbling around, and Block smells a rat, then the deal’s off,” Wills said.
Virgil reached over and patted Shepard on the shoulder. “Being upset is okay. If you show Block you’re upset, that’s fine, that’s what he’d expect. Upset’s okay, but you have to have your head under control. C’mon. Why don’t you and I take a walk and we’ll get you calmed down and talk about it.”
“Good idea,” Good Thunder said.
“I’m not so sure,” Check said. “Leaving him alone with a police officer…”
“I’m not taking testimony,” Virgil said. “I’m just trying to get him some fresh air.”
So Virgil and Shepard took a walk around the courthouse. Shepard looked around, at the sky and the sidewalks and at some kids walking down the other side of a street toward a Dairy Queen, and said, “Everything looks just like it did when I went to work yesterday and I was a happy guy. Today, everything’s gone.”
“You know what? It’s bad now, but three years from now, you’ll have another job, probably in another town. You’ll probably have a new wife, and it’ll all start over,” Virgil said. “I see this all the time. You’re basically not a bad guy, but you made one big god-awful mistake. You’ll pay for it, but then, you’ll be done. If you can hold yourself together, you won’t go to jail. That’s huge. Not going to jail… that’s a big deal. If you can hold together.”
Shepard sniffed and said, “I can hold together.”
“Well, you look like shit,” Virgil said. He handed over a couple more towels. “Stop for a minute and press these on your eyeballs, and while you’re doing that, stop crying. Let’s get this over.”
Shepard pressed the wads of paper into his eye sockets, and when he took the towels away, he asked, “You think I’ll really get back?”
“Look. You’re a smart guy,” Virgil said. “You’ll move to some place like Tucson, where they just really won’t give a shit about your problem here, and you’ll get a job. I’d bet you in three years you’re making twice as much as a schoolteacher in Butternut Falls. I mean, that’s what people make now-twice as much as teachers.”
“Ah, man,” Shepard said. But he didn’t start crying again, and they walked back. “All my students are going to find out. I keep talking to them about good citizenship and all that… and look what I did. Now I’m going to drag everybody else down with me, just to save my ass. I’m such a fuck-up. I mean, even if I get another job, I can’t stay here-I have to leave home. Leave my daughter, go someplace strange. I like it here.”
Virgil asked, “Is this Burt guy an old friend?”
“No. I don’t know him that well. I don’t much like him, though.” Then, thinking about what he was going to do, he said, “I’m such an asshole. I don’t like him, but I don’t like… dragging him down.”
He’d calmed down by the time Virgil got him back to the county attorney’s office, and they talked about his meeting with Block. “Don’t lead him. Just refer to stuff that you’ve done,” Virgil said. “You want to be a little shaky, a little remorseful. Tell him that sad story about Jeanne leaving you. He’ll believe that. He’ll try to pull you together, and when he does that, he’ll give himself up.”
They wired him up, and tested him for sound, and headed downtown, Virgil, the tech, Good Thunder, and Wills in one truck, with the sound equipment, Shepard on his own, in his Chevy.
Shepard was to meet Burt Block in Block’s office-Block ran a temp service and employment agency in downtown Butternut. The tech, whose name was Jack Thompson, said, on the way over, “Wish we had a little more time to set this up. Be nice to have some video.”
“I thought you hid cameras inside of briefcases and like that,” Virgil said.
“Not so much. Tape recorders, we do.”
“Yeah, I used one of those, once,” Virgil said.
“Cameras would have been nice,” Good Thunder said. “Juries like to see faces. I just hope the audio works through brick walls, or whatever.”
“It’ll be fine. This is state-of-the-art stuff,” Thompson said. “Long as he doesn’t fall in the lake.”
Virgil told him about the recorder at the bottom of the Butternut, and Thompson said, “If he didn’t punch a hole in the hard drive, you’re good.”
“Hope so,” Virgil said.
The wire they’d put on Shepard was strictly one-way-they had no way to communicate with Shepard, except by cell phone. As Shepard pulled into a diagonal parking space in front of Block’s office, Thompson started the recorder. Shepard sat in his car for a full minute-they could hear him breathing-then slowly got out. “I’m such an asshole,” he muttered.
“C’mon, c’mon, move,” Wills said, impatiently, from the backseat.
