Storm Front

like?” Virgil asked Max.
    “I wasn’t that close to her . . . blond, maybe, very fair-skinned. I didn’t see her hair. She was short, she had . . . uh . . .” He’d unconsciously cupped his hands, then glanced at Jane, who crossed her arms, and he uncupped his hands and finished, “A pretty good figure.”
    “Couldn’t see her hair?”
    “No, she was wearing like a handkerchief over her hair.”
    —
    E XAM TIME .
    Virgil asked himself, who did he know who was short, blond, would cause a witness to cup his hands, and who very likely would have instant access to a bolt cutter, and who knew about the stone and the search for it, and the money involved?
    He said aloud, “Goddamnit, Ma.”
    Scott: “Who?”
    “Ah, that goddamned Ma Nobles. You know her?”
    “Yeah. What’s she got to do with this?”
    Virgil explained how she’d been around the edges of it. “She has a nose for money, and she probably gives every one of her kids a bolt cutter when they graduate from elementary school.”
    “She lives out in the country, right?”
    “Yeah. I’ll go on over there,” Virgil said. “But by this time, she’s ditched him someplace. Unless his daughter picked him up.”
    He explained that, then excused himself, went down to his truck, pulled out the tracking tablet, and found that he’d lost Ellen—according to the map, she’d driven off the north edge of the tracking radius at nine o’clock, apparently heading back toward the Twin Cities. Possibly, he thought, because she was creating an alibi.
    —
    V IRGIL PICKED UP his cell phone and peered at it, reluctant to make the call, but he really had no choice.
    Davenport said, “Goddamnit, Virgil.”
    “Listen, one phone call, and you can go back to sleep. I need Jenkins and Shrake. Like now.”
    Davenport wanted to know what had happened, and why Virgil was up at four o’clock in the morning.
    “Jones took a walk,” Virgil explained. He finished with, “ . . . so I need somebody to keep an eye on her. Shrake has that pickup, that’d be good, but Jenkins sure as shit can’t come down in the Crown Vic. He oughta get a company car, I guess. The more dusty and beat-up, the better.”
    Davenport said that he’d get them started. “What’re you going to do?”
    “I’m going to find a place where I can watch Ma’s driveway, see if anybody’s coming or going,” Virgil said. “Tell those guys to call me as soon as they get close. If Ma sees me, she’ll know I know.”
    —
    V IRGIL STOPPED back at his house, got an olive drab REI bivy bag, a couple of pillows, and two Dos Equis, threw them in the truck, and drove north out of Mankato. On the way out, Jenkins called, and Virgil had him pull up a map on his iPad, and spotted Ma’s house for him. Jenkins said they’d be there sooner or later, depending on traffic.
    —
    M A LIVED on what had been a run-down farm. She’d been rebuilding it since her second husband died in the epicurean tragedy at Wendy’s, and it had come a long way back—too small to be really successful as a farm, but with some of the better land leased out, and extensive subsistence gardens, some chickens and an annual calf, they did okay. Virgil looked at a satellite view before he went out: the place appeared to cover a half section, a near-perfect rectangle a mile long and a half-mile deep.
    Two of the back forty-acre chunks were wooded, with the beginning of Ayer’s Creek running through them. Five of the remaining forties were covered with corn and soybeans, and the last forty included space for the house, barn, garage, machine sheds, a chicken house and pen, maybe ten acres of pasture. The satellite shot showed what appeared to be a corral with a trodden dirt circle inside, as though Ma might be training horses.
    Virgil could see almost none of that on the ground, as he arrived in the faint predawn light. He checked the mailbox, and in his headlights saw “Nobles” painted on the side of it. A single mercury-vapor yard light hung from a pole at the end of the drive, and he could see the red pickup parked under the light. He went on by, to the first turnaround, then back past the house. He could see no lights, other than the yard light.
    He continued up the road for a half-mile, to the remnants of a woodlot, turned in, found a spot where the local children probably came to screw, and parked. He walked back out to the road and then a half-mile down it, crossed the ditch into a soybean field, spread out