Storm Front

later, she was gone. Yael watched from the window as she hurriedly climbed into the passenger side of a large white SUV, and was gone.
    —
    V IRGIL RARELY TOOK A BATH , preferring the speed and overall cleanliness of a shower, but this night he’d submerged in his oversized bathtub, a relic left behind by the previous renter, a disabled man who’d had it installed to help with muscle cramping. He died, but Virgil didn’t think it had to do with the tub. The man had also left behind an oversized hot-water heater, which meant that Virgil could submerge to his ears, and cook out his frustrations.
    The water had just begun to cool, and his toes were showing wrinkles, when his cell phone rang. Because of the ongoing clusterfuck, he’d left it on a windowsill above the tub, where he could pick it up. He did, and saw that Yael was calling.
    “Did you buy a membership at Sam’s Club?” he asked.
    “Yes, I did, and this membership, which I use only one time, cuts directly into my profit,” she said. “But, I don’t call to talk about Sam. I just had a visitor. She swore me to secrecy as one good Israeli to another.”
    Virgil said, “You gotta be kidding me. I thought she’d be on the other side of the ocean by now.”
    “I think she is in very large trouble, and she tries to save herself. But, that is her problem. My problem, my only problem, is to get this stele. I think tomorrow night that she will try to take it, by force if necessary. I am supposed to alert her, when you leave me to attack the stone carrier.”
    “Hmmm,” Virgil said. “All right. She had a male assistant when she kidnapped Ellen Case. Is he still with her?”
    “Somebody is with her. When she left, she got in the passenger side of a very large white car. But, she said to me that her assistant had abandoned her. I believe that, because . . . she seemed to tell the truth. She was very angry about it. Now, her new assistant will tell her where the exchange takes place, this auction. She says it will be at nine o’clock, but that the minister will not have the stele.”
    “This car . . . was it like a safari vehicle?”
    “Exactly. You know it?”
    “I do. Okay, I will work through this. I will call you tomorrow and tell you what we’re going to do.”
    He punched off, put the phone back on the windowsill, said, aloud, “That fuckin’ Bauer,” and resubmerged to think about it some more.

21
    V irgil got up the next morning with quite a few thoughts. The first was, if Tal Zahavi was with Bauer, he could bust her and take her up to the Ramsey County Jail in St. Paul and let Davenport worry about it.
    After a fast cleanup, he was out in his truck, where he dug out the tracker, found the signal from Bauer’s Range Rover, which was parked in a residential neighborhood on the west side of town. Virgil drove over . . . and couldn’t find the Range Rover.
    Eventually, with a little fast triangulation, he determined that the Range Rover was parked in exactly the same residential driveway occupied by an orange Mini Cooper convertible. He stared at it for a moment, wishing it away, then parked, walked up to the house where the Mini was parked, and rang the doorbell. A moment later, a tall bony fortyish woman wearing a pince-nez on her tall bony nose came to the door, carrying an open
New York Times
and a coffee cup, peered at him and asked, “What?” as though he were peddling cable-TV connections.
    “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” He held up his ID so she could inspect it through the screen door. “Is this your Mini?”
    “Yes, is there a problem?”
    “I was tracking a man using an electronic tracker, and this morning it led me to your car . . . I think. I need to look at your car to see if he found the tracker on his, and moved it to yours.”
    “When would he have done that?” she asked, interested now.
    “I don’t know. Sometime last night, probably.”
    “Around nine o’clock at the Apache Mall?”
    “Did you notice something there?” Virgil asked.
    “When I came out from shopping, there was a big white SUV of some sort parked next to me,” she said. “The man said he was looking at his tire, he said it felt soft, but I had the impression he’d done something to my car. But he didn’t try to stop me from driving away, or anything. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it.”
    “Driver’s side, or passenger side?”
    “Passenger side—right by the