“Why is she calling? She’s probably still sitting in your driveway.”
“Maybe I should answer the phone and find out.” He answered and Cornell said, “We have something for you.”
“Yeah?”
“The owner of one of the smaller sites, she wasn’t at the meeting, Phyllis Binley, got a wild call a few minutes ago. She says one of her readers down in Farmington told her that her father recognizes the guy with the Porsche. Phyllis wanted to put in a bid for a piece of the reward.”
“Whoa. That’s serious,” Lucas said. “Who’s the woman who called?”
“I wrote it all down on one of the yellow pads I took back. With one of the pens.”
“Michelle…”
“Her name is Rochelle Green. She lives on Walnut Street in Farmington…Do you have a yellow pad of your own that you can write this down on?”
Lucas took the address down and asked, “Is Rochelle gonna be around?”
“She says so. She says she’s a caregiver for her father,” Cornell said.
“Uh-oh.”
“Yes, I don’t know exactly what that means, but I thought you’d want to check,” Cornell said.
“We do,” Lucas said. “We’ll head down there.”
Off the phone, he asked Virgil, “You know everything south of the Cities. How far is Farmington from here?”
Virgil: “If I’m driving, half hour, maybe a little more.”
“You’re driving.”
—
Lotta corn, andthough this was Minnesota, and not Oklahoma, the corn was higher than an elephant’s eye, and the soybeans were looking good, too. Highway 3 down to Farmington rolled through farm country, lined with trees and widely spaced farmhouses usually half-surrounded by unpainted steel silos. A light drizzle was still falling out of the overcast sky; the creeks they crossed were overloaded and some of the fields were decidedly soggy.
“This is wet, but down home at the farm, I mean, I’ve never seen the Minnesota River as high as it is, this time of year,” Virgil said.
“Uh-huh. Tell me some more rural shit, I’m deeply interested.”
“Making conversation,” Virgil said.
More buildings began popping up at the side of the road and Virgilsaid, “We haven’t had lunch. There’s a Dairy Queen just before we get into town. I could use a chocolate-dipped.”
“You’re driving.”
“Clever. You want a cone, but you don’t want the responsibility for stopping.”
—
They both gothot dogs at the DQ, which they ate immediately, and then vanilla cones, Virgil’s chocolate-dipped, Lucas’s not. They followed Virgil’s navigation app to Spruce Street, and then, because he was licking his cone and not paying attention, past Walnut Street to Locust Street, and then around the block and back to Walnut, where they spotted Green’s house.
While much of the town had older, prewar houses, Walnut was newer, probably fifties or sixties—ranch-styles and split-levels with two-car garages, old enough that many had been re-sided with aluminum or vinyl siding, mostly in tan, gray, beige, brown, or blue. There were sidewalks on both sides of the street, with trees that appeared to be younger than the houses growing from the verge between the sidewalk and the street.
They sat outside the house for another minute, finishing the cones, threw the cone wrappers and napkins on the floor of the back seat. then hurried through the drizzle up to Green’s house and knocked.
Green came to the door and opened it without peeking out. Virgil held up his BCA identification and said, “Miz Green. I’m agent Flowers with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and my partner here is U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport.”
She pushed open the door with a smile and said, “You two are justthe berries. My goodness, I didn’t expect to hear back for hours, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was days. Come in, come in, Dad is in the porch, where he likes to sit. Can I get you a Dr Pepper or a cup of coffee?”
