Off the phone, Virgil thought about what Hiners had told him. Hemming was planning to turn down the Cheevers’ loan application, but Hiners hadn’t known that. The Cheevers hadn’t mentioned it, and Hemming’s successors at the bank were about to approve it. For the Cheevers, Hemming’s death had paid off—big-time.
When Virgil was working as a St. Paul homicide cop, he’d known of two separate killings done for single eight balls of cocaine. An eight ball, at the time, was worth maybe a hundred and fifty dollars. Kill somebody for a million? No problem. No fuckin’ problem at all.
—
Griffin stuck her head into the office and said impatiently, “It’s been an hour and a half. I’m waiting patiently.”
“I’ve got some things to think about,” Virgil said.
“Why don’t you think on your way to CarryTown?” Griffin suggested. “It’s a nice, relaxing drive out there.”
—
Virgil had once solved a case involving an Israeli spy, during which he’d been given the definition of “nudnik.” A nudnik, he was told, was like a woodpecker sitting on your ear, pecking at your skull. Like Margaret Griffin. When neither Bea Sawyer or Bill Jensen had any more to tell him, he went out, got in his truck, and drove out to CarryTown, with Griffin close behind him.
CarryTown wasn’t actually a town but rather a collection ofmobile homes that had been put up around a country convenience store called the Cash ’n Carry, six miles south of Trippton.
The mobile homes didn’t look too bad under a pristine layer of snow, but when they got out of the vehicles Virgil could smell the unmistakable scent of a badly backed-up septic system. Griffin didn’t seem to notice. She pointed at one of the mobile homes and said, “His name is Joseph Anderson. I was told that he may have gotten some supply packages for the altered dolls.”
“Who told you that?”
“A little birdie... to whom I paid one thousand of Mattel’s hard-earned dollars.”
Virgil heard what she said but was focused on a red truck parked at a mobile home three down from Anderson’s: it was almost certainly, he thought, the truck driven by the women who beat him up, right down to the husband-wife-kids-dogs-cat sticker in the rear window.
Griffin picked up the fact that he wasn’t paying close attention to her and asked, “What? What’s going on?”
“That truck,” Virgil said. “When I got beat up, I think the women were driving that truck. No, wait: I’msurethey were driving it.”
“Then we’ve got a second stop... You put your gun in your pocket?”
“No, I didn’t think it was necessary. Let’s go knock. And, Margaret, be nice.”
—
Virgil led the way to Anderson’s trailer, which had a couple of concrete blocks for a step. Virgil stepped up, knocked a couple of times, stepped back down as he heard feet hit the floor inside,a heavy person walking toward the door, oil-canning the home’s aluminum floor as he/she walked across it.
A hulking, square-shouldered man pushed the door open, looked past Virgil at Griffin, and growled, “What’d I tell you about coming back?”
Before Griffin could reply, Virgil said, “I’m a cop. I’m looking for information about the people doing unauthorized and illegal alterations of Barbie and Ken dolls.”
“Wouldn’t know nothin’ about that,” Anderson said. “Now, get out of my fuckin’ yard. You want to talk to me, get a search warrant.” His brow beetled, and he said, “You know, I know all the cops in Buchanan County, and you ain’t one.”
“I’m with the state,” Virgil said. “I will be back with a search warrant. We’ll cuff your ass, sit you in the county jail until we have time to talk to you—could be a couple of weeks, with everything else going on—and tear your home apart, see what we find. If we find anything, of course, we’ll be talking prison time.”
He paused, waited for an answer, but Anderson simply looked confused and, after a moment, asked, “Virgil?”
“Yeah, Virgil. Instead of doing all that other shit, you could talk to us for a couple of minutes.”
Anderson put an earnest look on his face and said, “Listen, I don’t know nothing about this, Virgil. The lady behind you came and knocked on my door and said I got some UPS packages with illegal stuff in them. Well, I don’t know nothing about illegal stuff. My neighbor wasn’t home, and I told her I’d take the packages for her.”
“Which neighbor?” Virgil asked.
Anderson ducked his head and pointed to the next trailer down. “Jesse McGovern. She was in the process of moving out and said it was too late to change the address on the UPSpackages, so I took them for her. She come out and picked them up a couple days after they got here.”
“She’s moved?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, yeah. She’s been gone a couple months now. Heard she moved to... New York.”
