Storm Front

said. “The people in Bizby were okay, but nobody around there had any money, except some of the farmers who lived out of town. We were on welfare, but we didn’t have any clothes. . . .”
    By the time they got to Jones’s hideout—actually, a pleasant middle-class home—he looked like he was out of it. But when she parked, and walked around to help him out of the car, he looked up at her from the passenger seat and said, “That was one of the best stories I have ever heard, in my entire life, and I was there at the beginning. It’s one of the things that made my life worthwhile, and I’m grateful to you for telling it to me. I will think about it every day until I die, and rejoice a little.”
    Later, driving away, she thought about his sincerity in saying that, and it made her cry.

12
    V irgil’s phone rang at 3:37. He knew that because his clock was the first thing he looked at when the phone began ringing; 3:37 phone calls were not usually lawn-furniture sales, and more often than not, left him fumbling for his pants in the dark.
    He took his cell phone off his nightstand, looked at the caller ID and saw “Unknown,” which usually meant a cop. He answered: “Virgil Flowers.”
    “Virgil, this is Shane Cobley over at Mankato. We just got a call from the hospital, and they said your guy Jones has taken a hike.”
    “What?”
    “They said—”
    “I heard that. He was chained to the bed.”
    “They say he cut the chain off. That’s about all I know. I called Don Scott, and he said he’d go over there, and he told me to call you.”
    “I’m going,” Virgil said.
    But he would not, he thought, fumble into his pants in the dark. He turned the lights on before he fumbled into his pants, and a clean T-shirt, and yesterday’s socks. He was out the door in five minutes, at the Mayo in ten.
    —
    S COTT WAS STANDING in the hallway talking to two nurses, one each male and female, and a young man in a white jacket, when Virgil arrived. The nurses’ names were Max and Jane, and the resident’s name was Mark.
    “Don’t know what happened,” Jane said. “I checked on him every half hour, and at three o’clock he was sound asleep. At three-thirty, he was gone.”
    Mark, the resident, said, “I was asleep in the physicians’ room, and Jane woke me up. We ran around looking, but there was no sign of him. His clothes are gone, so he’s probably outside somewhere.”
    “Can he walk?” Virgil asked.
    “He’s hurt, but he’s pretty bound up in bandages. We would have had him on his feet in the morning.”
    “We got three patrol cars covering the area,” Scott said.
    “What about the cuff on his leg?” Virgil asked.
    “Take a look,” Scott said.
    They went into Jones’s room. One of the two cuff bracelets was still attached to the bed, with a short length of chain hanging from it. Virgil squatted to look at it. “Bright metal. Cut with a real bolt cutter—this was no side-cutter. Snipped right through it.”
    “There was nobody up here that I saw,” Jane said, and she then glanced sideways at the male nurse, Max.
    Max said, “I just got out of an elevator and I saw a woman walk down the hall toward me, and then she went down the stairwell. I didn’t see where she was coming from, but she shouldn’t have been here. I thought maybe she was a nurse I didn’t know, but she was dressed in civilian clothes.”
    “A dirndl,” Jane said.
    Virgil: “She was wearing a dirndl?”
    Max said, “That’s what Jane says it was. You know, a low-cut dress, cut square across the top. She went through the stairway door, and I thought it was odd, something odd about her, so I pushed open the door and looked down after her, but she was already going outside at the bottom.”
    “Did you mention it to anyone?” Virgil asked.
    “Yeah. Jane. She’s the charge nurse tonight,” Max said. “That’s how I found out about the dirndl.”
    “She was never around the station, I never saw her,” Jane said. “The thing is, the stairway door is only two rooms down from Reverend Jones’s. So . . . I wouldn’t have seen her, if she was just quick in-and-out.”
    “What time was this?” Virgil asked.
    “A few minutes before three, I guess,” Jane said. “Because a little while after I talked to Max, about this woman, I went and did my room checks, at three. Reverend Jones was asleep. Then . . . well, you know. I did the three-thirty check, and no Jones.”
    “What did this woman look