Storm Front

got a whole life to get cut short,” Virgil said. “I’m really tired of him.”
    “Virgil—”
    “Do you know where the stone is?”
    She looked straight at him: “No. I don’t.”
    He looked over at Jones, then thought,
Screw it
, and walked out. Jones called, “Hey! Hey!” but Virgil kept walking. As he headed down the hall, it occurred to him that Jones was on the edge of death, and so
somebody
else had to know where the stone was . . . or how to find it. Jones could no longer rely on his own ability to recover the thing.
    He believed Ellen when she said she didn’t know—he didn’t think she could lie without flinching. He wondered about the son in San Diego. Was it possible that he was out there somewhere? He suspected, though, that the answer was closer by: that Jones hadn’t told Ellen where the stone was, but he
would.
She didn’t know now, but she
would
. When he got to the truck, he checked the tracker tablet and found that Awad’s car was in the apartment parking lot, five minutes away. He drove over, pried the unit free, drove it back to the hospital, and attached the tracker to Ellen’s car. He felt a little bad doing it, because she seemed like a nice woman, but, in the end, he didn’t feel all that bad.
    —
    H E WAS THINKING about going home when he got a call from the woman who ran the BCA crime-scene team. “We found a clue,” she said.
    “No shit,” Virgil said. “That’s gotta be a first.”
    “Hey.”
    “Just kiddin’, Bea. What is it?”
    “It’s a note. Written with a ballpoint pen. What happened was, Jones was shot and thought he was dying, so he started writing a note to his daughter. You probably ought to come take a look at it.”
    “Can’t you just read it?”
    “Yeah, but you oughta see it,” she said.
    “All right. Give me twenty minutes.”
    When Virgil got back to the hunting shack, the place had been lit up with work lights run off a gas-powered generator. The generator was also driving a Dell computer with a couple Logitech speakers, currently playing the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian,” which Virgil recalled from his childhood; a song about right for Bea Sawyer’s teenybopper days, and, when he thought about it, appropriate for the current investigation.
    Sawyer was crumpling up a pair of disposable Tyvek pants in which she’d been crawling around the cabin. When she saw Virgil, she said, “The note,” and pointed to the table where the computer sat.
    The note was in a transparent plastic evidence bag. Virgil sat down and peered at it, and Sawyer said, “You can see it better with a flashlight,” and passed him an LED flashlight.
    The note was on a piece of paper torn from a notebook, and was heavily creased. “It was a paper wad when I found it,” Sawyer said. “When you showed up and saved his ass, he wadded it up and threw it in the corner, hoping we wouldn’t find it.”
    “Wonder why he didn’t eat it?” Virgil asked, peering at the note. The handwriting was cramped, and nearly illegible.
    “Probably no spit,” Sawyer said.
    “What?”
    “When you get shot at, your mouth tends to go dry. Can’t eat paper with a dry mouth.”
    “Huh,” Virgil said. Sounded like bullshit. He flattened the note out and struggled through it. He got this:
    Ellen: I’m not going to make it this time. So far there are three bidders for the stone. You have to recover it; the buyers will come to you, but it might take them a while. Be careful. I put it where the sun comes through. You know I’ve always loved you and Danny, and the greatest pain is knowing I won’t see your faces anymore. I always hoped . . .
    The note ended and Virgil said, “The sun comes through?”
    “Comes through what?” Sawyer asked.
    “I don’t know. The drapes, the attic window, the branches on the old oak tree or down the well . . .”
    “The well?”
    “Probably not the well,” Virgil conceded. “How in the hell would I know? It’s some kind of reference that his daughter would understand.”
    “You gonna brace her?”
    “I need to think about it for a while.”
    Sawyer snorted. “Good luck with that.”
    —
    I N BED THAT NIGHT , reanalyzing his moves, Virgil decided that he had to confront Ellen about the note. If he could just get his hands on the goddamned stone, all the maneuverings would collapse.
    He spent some time wondering about the “three bidders.” The Israelis supposedly weren’t bidders, Sewickey said he didn’t have any