Storm Front

the stele up at midnight. He could have easily taken a
sherut
to Haifa, and back, in that time.”
    “A
sherut
?”
    “Like a minibus,” she said. “Or he could have taken a taxi.”
    “So Haifa’s not far?”
    “Maybe an hour and a half,” Yael said.
    “You checked to see that he was gone for at least, say, five hours in that period? Time enough to catch a bus, get there, make arrangements, and get back?”
    “There seems to be some controversy about that, but I don’t care,” she said.
    “And you don’t care, because he stole the stele, and that’s what you care about.”
    “Correct,” she said.
    —
    A T J ONES ’ S HOUSE , Virgil’s note was gone from the door. He rang the doorbell again, and a second time, then reached out to the doorknob . . . and it turned in his hand. Hell, this was Minnesota. He pushed the door open and called, “Hello? Anybody home?”
    He heard the creak of a floorboard from the back of the house. “Hello? This is the police. Anybody there?”
    He heard two quick steps and then the back door banged open and Virgil was running through the house. It occurred to him, as he cleared a china cabinet full of blue-and-white Spode dishes and cups, that usually, in this situation, the cop had a gun. His was in the truck, and not for the first time, he thought,
Jeez
.
    He went through the kitchen and took a wrong turn, into a dead end that led to stairs down into a basement. He reversed field, and through a back window saw a tall, dark-complected young man with long hair, in a T-shirt and jeans, hop a back fence and dash between the two houses that backed up to Jones’s house.
    Virgil ran back through the kitchen and through the mudroom, out the back door and across the backyard. There was a four-foot fence separating Jones’s yard from the house it backed up to. He clambered over the fence and ran to the front of the house; but none of that was as fast as the runner had done it, because Virgil was wearing cowboy boots and the runner was wearing running shoes.
    He was in time to see a champagne-colored Camry pull away from the curb a hundred yards farther on, and accelerate down the block and then around the corner. The car was too far away to get the tag, but it was from Minnesota, and he noted a basketball-sized dent in the left rear bumper.
    “Shoot.” He felt for his phone, and remembered it was on the charger in the car.
    He jogged back around the block, got the cell phone, and called 911 and identified himself and asked the Mankato dispatcher to have her patrolmen take the tag numbers on any champagne-colored Camrys they saw in the area. “The driver is tall, with long dark hair. He looked sort of like an Apache. Or, because of what I’m doing, he could have been Middle Eastern.”
    The dispatcher said she would do that, but, “There are probably two hundred champagne-colored Camrys in town. That’s probably the most common car in the world.”
    “Yeah, but . . . do it anyway,” Virgil said. “The car had a dent in the left rear bumper. And you might send a car around to a probable burglary.”
    —
    H E ’ D BEEN TALKING to the 911 operator from Jones’s front lawn. When he got off the phone, he went back inside the house, where he found Yael innocently standing in Jones’s living room, examining a wall of photographs.
    “Did you look around?” he asked.
    “Of course not,” she said. “That would be illegal. I don’t have a search warrant.”
    “Good. If I were to get a search warrant and look around, do you think
I’d
find a body? Or a stele?”
    “No, I don’t think you would,” she said.
    “Then there’s no reason to hurry,” Virgil said.
    “Well, when I came to look at these photos, I noticed a smear of some kind on the floor in the hallway, there.” She pointed at a hallway that probably went back to a bathroom and some bedrooms. “Perhaps you should check it.”
    Virgil went that way. The smear was three feet from the point where the hallway entered the front room and was about the size of Virgil’s index finger.
    “Looks like dried blood,” Virgil said.
    “I couldn’t really tell from this far away,” Yael said.
    “Right,” Virgil said.
    “The police are here,” she said.
    Virgil walked back through the living room and saw two city cops coming up the walk. He stepped out on the porch and said, “Hey, Jimmy. Paula.”
    “Hey, Virg,” Jimmy said. “You got a burglary?”
    “Well, I got a runner, anyway,” Virgil