coming at them, and Virgil could smell the brats and sweet corn, and the fishy scent of the river. Hunt unslung the pack, took out a pair of binoculars, looked over the gathering. After a moment, he said, “Huh,” just like he had in the car. A rime of skepticism.
“What?” Virgil asked.
“There’s a guy in a red shirt and a black do-rag… but he sort of doesn’t look exactly like the guy I saw.”
“Let me look.” Virgil took the glasses and scanned the gathering, found the man in the red shirt, studied him, took the glasses down, and said, “We’re too far away. We need a closer look.”
Hunt asked, “You want more backup?”
“Ah… nah. If it’s him, and he sees me, he’ll either run or try to get the other guys to back him up. These other guys-they’re not bad guys. I don’t think they’ll have a problem with an arrest for assault on a cop. And if he runs… we’ll take him.”
Anderson, the Grand Rapids cop, took a radio out of his pocket. “We’ve got a couple more guys around. We got a car across the bridge, we could block that.”
“Do that,” Virgil said.
ANDERSON MADE A CALL, then the three of them walked down to the pavilion. Something about cops, Virgil thought, got everybody looking your way. By the time they got to the group, most of the men were looking at them, but not the guy in the red shirt. He’d turned his back. Virgil let Hunt take the lead. He produced an ID and asked a guy, “Is there somebody in charge? We’ve had an issue come up…”
While he was talking, Virgil walked over to the barbecue to get a closer look at the man in the shirt. As he walked around him, the guy first looked away, then glanced up. Not Bunton. But Bunton had been there-the way the guy looked at Virgil, half defiant, half placating, meant that he was wearing the red shirt and do-rag as a decoy. Virgil could see it in his eyes.
Virgil said, “Goddamnit,” and turned and walked back to Hunt, who was talking to a gaunt, gray-bearded man who must have been pushing seventy.
“Darrell Johnson,” Hunt said when Virgil came up. “He’s the president.”
Virgil stepped close to Johnson. “How long ago did he leave? Is he on his bike?”
Johnson’s eyes shifted and he started, “You know…”
“Darrell, don’t give us any trouble,” Virgil said. “There’s a felony warrant out on Bunton. I’m amazed you don’t know-it’s been all over the radio and television.”
“We been ridin’. We didn’t know,” Johnson said.
“It’s part of an investigation into the murders of four people- including the three guys whose bodies got dumped on the veterans’ memorials. You know about those? I guess the question is, are you guys only going to funerals? Or are you manufacturing them?”
Johnson sputtered, “What’re you talking about? We didn’t know Ray had anything to do with that. He said it was traffic tickets.”
“It’s murder, Darrell,” Virgil said. “When did he leave?”
A couple more bikers had eased up to the conversation, including a woman with a plastic bowl of potato salad. Before Johnson could answer, one of the other bikers said, “I told you he was bad news. Something was up.”
Johnson said, “Look, we came up here for this funeral. Those crazies are coming up, and we’re gonna get between them and this boy who got killed.”
Virgil said, “I’m a veteran, Darrell. I appreciate what you do. But we got four bodies. We gotta deal with that.”
Johnson nodded, and sighed. “He got out of here probably fifteen minutes after we rode in. He went out the back. He said he was meeting a friend here.”
“You see the friend?”
A few more of the bikers had stepped up. “I did,” one of them said. “He was driving a piece-of-shit old white Astro van. Said something on the side about carpet service. Somebody’s carpet-cleaning service. I think they put the bike inside of it.”
Virgil nodded. “Thanks for that. Now, could you ask this guy in the red shirt to come over here? We don’t want to disturb anybody, but we need to talk.”
The guy in the red shirt was named Bill Schmidt. “He said he was dodging parking tickets,” Schmidt said, not quite whining. “I don’t know anything about any murders. He said the cops had a scofflaw warrant out for him.”
Schmidt said Bunton was headed for the res, that a cousin had picked him up. He asked, “Are you gonna arrest me?”
“Not unless I find out you’re holding something back,” Virgil said. “This is serious stuff, Bill.”
“He said
Virgil looked at Hunt: “He sucker punched me again.”
VIRGIL LEFT Hunt and the others in Grand Rapids, put the truck on Highway 2 and headed northwest toward Bemidji, and called into the BCA regional office. The agent in charge, Charles Whiting, said he would touch base with every cop and highway patrolman between Grand Rapids and Red Lake.
“We can’t play man-to-man, we’ve gotta set up a zone defense,” Virgil said. “We need to get as many people as we can, sheriff’s deputies and patrolmen and any town cops who want to go along, get them up on the east and south sides of Red Lake.”
“ ’Bout a million back roads up there.”
“I know, but hell-he’s trying to make time, he won’t be sneaking around the lakes, he’ll try to get up there quick as he can. If we flood the area up there, keep people moving, we should spot him.”
“Flood the area? Virgil, we’re talking about maybe twenty guys between here and Canada.”
“Do what you can, Chuck. I’m thinking he probably won’t risk Highway 2 all the way, there’ll be too many cops,” Virgil said. “He’d have to go through Cass Lake and Bemidji -I’m thinking he’s more likely to take 46 up past Squaw Lake and then cut over.”
“What if he’s not going to Red Lake? What if he’s going to Leech Lake?”
“Then he’s already there and we’re out of luck. But he’s enrolled at Red Lake, that’s where his family is, that’s where they know him… You get the people up there, I’m getting off 2, I’m turning up 46.”
Virgil figured Bunton and his cousin had a half hour head start. They’d be moving fast, but not too fast, to avoid attention from cops.
Virgil, on the other hand, running with lights and occasionally with the siren, tried to keep the truck as close to a hundred as he could. He didn’t know exactly how far it was from Grand Rapids to Red Lake, but he’d fished the area a lot and had the feeling that it was about a hundred miles by the most direct route. Longer, if you were sliding around on back roads.
Did the math; and he had to move his lips to do it. He’d take a bit more than an hour to get to Red Lake, he thought. If they had a thirty-mile jump on him, and were going sixty-five, and went straight through… it’d damn near be a tie. Even closer, if they were staying on back roads, where it’d be hard to keep an average speed over fifty.
Red Lake, unlike the other Minnesota reservations for the Sioux and Chippewa, had chosen independence from the state and effectively ran its own state, and even issued its own license plates and ran its own law-enforcement system, including courts, except for major crimes. And for major crimes, the FBI was the agency in charge.
In addition, the relationship between the Red Lake cops and the state and town cops had always been testy, and sometimes hostile.
Though it wasn’t all precisely that clear, precisely that cut-and-dried. Some of the reservation’s boundaries were obscure, some of the reservation land had been sold off, scattered, checkerboarded. Sometimes, it wasn’t possible to tell whether you were on the res or off… and sometimes, maybe most of the time, all the cops got along fine. A complicated situation, Virgil thought.
Virgil came up behind an aging Volkswagen camper-van, blew past, listened to the road whine; lakes and swamp, lakes and swamp, and road-kill. A coyote limped across the road ahead of him, then sat down on the shoulder to watch him pass, not impressed by the LED flashers.
WHITING CALLED: “Got all the guys I can get and a bunch of crappie cops will help out, stay in their trucks
