Storm Front

an Israeli extradition request.”
    “I haven’t arrested anyone in fifteen years,” Hamm said.
    “So, get one of the other guys to do it. Or, you know, just say, ‘You’re under arrest,’ and make him sit on the couch until somebody else gets here.”
    “So that’s how it’s done now,” Hamm said, scratching his neck. “I don’t remember it being that easy.”
    Two minutes later, Virgil and Yael were on their way to the Twin Cities. Virgil had gotten Jones’s daughter’s name from the old woman next door, and had found her phone number on a list tacked inside a kitchen cabinet, next to a telephone.
    He called Davenport with that information, and asked for a callback, detailing where Ellen Case worked. Davenport said he would give it to his researcher, Sandy, and Sandy called back ten minutes later with a home address and the information that Case was a highway engineer with the state Department of Transportation.
    “Call her and tell her to stay where she’s at, so we don’t have to chase all over town,” Virgil told her. “We’ll be there in an hour and a half, or so.”
    “I’ll call her,” Sandy said.
    When he was off the phone, Yael said, “If she’s involved in this plan, she may warn her father.”
    Virgil nodded. “Maybe.”
    “That doesn’t bother you?”
    “No, because I plan to scare the shit out of her,” Virgil said. “I’ll draw her a picture of how her career ends in disgrace, how she might spend fifteen years in an Israeli prison. Or maybe a Minnesota prison. I’ll tell her about the blood on the floor, and that if she lies to us, she may be involved in a murder conspiracy, which is thirty years’ hard time in Minnesota. She’s a bureaucrat: she’ll know all about cutting her losses.”
    Sandy called back a few minutes later and said, “She’s not working. She’s on vacation. A guy at her office said she’s getting over a divorce, and decided to take a long wandering trip to Alaska. By car.”
    “Well . . . that’s a poke in the eye,” Virgil said.
    “That’s what I thought,” Sandy said.
    Virgil got off the phone, told Yael, who said, “I suspect this is a ploy. It’s too convenient that she is on a vacation so far away, while her father dies.”
    “You really do speak good English,” Virgil said. He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and waited for a line of traffic to pass so he could make a U-turn. “I’ve never heard anybody use the word ‘ploy.’”
    “Perhaps because you live in a rural state?”
    “What?”
    —
    H E MADE THE U- TURN and they headed back south, and had gone about three hundred yards when he took another call, this one from a Mankato cop named Georgina. She said that Mankato had collected tag numbers on forty-two Toyota Camrys that might have been considered champagne, depending on who was considering it.
    “I would say it would probably run from gold to silver,” she said. “Anyway, you said something about this guy might be a Middle Easterner, so when I ran the numbers, I was looking for something that might be relevant. The good news is, an Arab-sounding guy popped up, a student here at the U, so I thought I’d give you a ring. His name is Faraj Awad. You want the address now?”
    “I do,” Virgil said. He wrote it on a notepad. “Thank you. Now, what’s the bad news?”
    “My husband gets back tonight, unless he gets stuck in Chicago,” she said. “I probably won’t make it down to the Coop.”
    “Aw, man—Wendy’s playing.”
    “You know I’d give anything to be there,” she said. “But Ralph’s gonna want his pound of flesh.”
    “Well, shoot—make it if you can. Don’t bring Ralph.”
    “He wouldn’t be caught dead doing a two-step,” Georgina said.
    —
    “T HIS COULD BE INTERESTING ,” Yael said, when Virgil told her about Awad. “If we can get passport details, maybe I can talk to somebody in Israel and get more information.”
    Virgil called and told Davenport about the change of circumstance. Davenport put him on hold, and came back in one minute: “He’s got a Minnesota driver’s license. Been here for at least two years.”
    —
    O N THE WAY BACK TO M ANKATO , Virgil and Yael spent most of the drive time talking about the Solomon stone, archaeology, and about the differences between Minnesota and Israel. There were many; in fact, there were almost no similarities, geographically, climatically, ethnically, or culturally. Minnesota was about nine times larger than Israel