Storm Front

called Simple, even to his face, was kneeling in the hallway with his eye about a quarter inch above the smear on the floor.
    Virgil said, “Hey, Simon. Is it blood?”
    Hamm looked up and said, “Hand me one of those paper towels from the kitchen.”
    Virgil walked across the living room to the kitchen, got a paper towel, and brought it back. Hamm said, “We got the main smear, but we’ve also got a couple little drops that are otherwise useless.” He spit on the paper towel and scrubbed one of the spots, then looked at the towel.
    “Yep, it’s blood,” he said. He held up the towel so Virgil could see the crimson smear.
    “That makes my day,” Virgil said. “Though it’s not much blood.”
    “Not much, but it’s more than you’d get from nicking your finger with a bread knife,” Hamm said. “The other thing is, it’s all in one spot. It’s not like he was dripping a little blood—it’s like he was bleeding and not moving.”
    “This doesn’t seem good,” Yael said.
    “See, recognizing that—that’s why you’re a highly paid investigator,” Virgil said.
    “So what do we do next?”
    Virgil looked at his watch. “First, we’ll go through the house, in detail, to see if he hid the stone here. Then, we’ll run up to the Twin Cities and see if we can surprise his daughter. Maybe Jones is hiding out with her.”
    —
    H AMM ESCORTED THEM through the house. He didn’t want them in it at all, because of the possibility that a violent crime had been committed, but Virgil insisted on looking for places that the stele might be hidden.
    “The problem with that is, the guy who was here when you came in—he might have left prints, but we don’t know where,” Hamm said. “If you go digging around, you’ll ruin them.”
    “So
you
open the doors,” Virgil said. “We’ll just look.”
    And that’s what they did. They went through two bedrooms, a third bedroom that had been converted to a study, two bathrooms, a small home office niche, the living room, and the basement, and then out to the garage. They found no sign of a stele, no body, and no further evidence of violence. The Nissan Xterra was still in the garage, still covered with garage dust. Although Jones had apparently been home, he hadn’t moved the truck. Virgil looked inside, to see if he might have stashed the stone there, but the truck was empty.
    In the house, one living room wall was devoted to photographs, mostly small, and mostly taken at a variety of digs in Israel, featuring Jones and a cheerful, slightly overweight woman Virgil thought was probably Jones’s wife. Yael pointed out various well-known Israelis, posing with Jones. “This is Jones with Yigael Yadin, probably the most famous archaeologist in Israel, after the War of Independence,” Yael said. “They look very friendly together. I confess, I am impressed.”
    “This can’t be right,” Vigil said of another. “He’s playing golf by the Pyramids.”
    “I don’t know, I’ve never been to Egypt,” Yael said. “But I tell you, in my job, I travel to sites all over Israel, and there are sites here that I haven’t seen. I believe this one is Samaria, on the West Bank, it must have been years ago. He was digging near Jericho . . . here.” She tapped a photo. “Not the best place for a Jew.”
    “Maybe not so bad for a Lutheran,” Virgil said. “Especially one with a bushy black beard.”
    “Perhaps,” she said.
    There were three or four photos, wide-angle shots, taken in Minnesota at what looked like ministerial conferences. Virgil examined them closely, then said to Yael, pointing at a sandy-haired man at the edge of one of the shots, “This is my father. Must’ve been twenty years ago. He would have been maybe ten years older than I am now.”
    She nodded. “I see the resemblance. Was he disappointed that you didn’t follow in his footsteps?”
    “No, he knew I’d never had a call to the ministry. He was just hoping I wouldn’t become a moonshiner or a stock-car driver. Being a cop was just fine with him: he imagines that I’m on the side of the angels.”
    “You’re not?”
    Virgil shook his head: “There’re not many angels around anymore. Not in my work.”
    —
    H AMM THREW THEM OUT when they didn’t find the stone, or anything that might have the stone in it, and told them not to come back too soon. “This will take a while. What do I do if Jones shows up?”
    “Bust him,” Virgil said. “We have a warrant for him and