Storm Front

house seemed like the best bet to find him. He called the BCA duty officer, got him to look up the phone number for the Jensens next door, and called them.
    “I’m going to lie down on the couch here. I may be here overnight. Just carry on like you usually would,” he said.
    They said they would.
    —
    V IRGIL SAT in the living room for a while, realized that he wouldn’t make it, sitting in the dark all night. He eventually went back to the basement, turned on a light long enough to browse Johnson’s stock of movies, selected
Kick-Ass
, loaded it, turned the sound down as low as he could and still hear it, and turned off the lights.
    He watched the movie, and nothing happened upstairs.
    Then he watched two-thirds of
Watchmen
, and something happened. The phone rang, and when he answered it, Mrs. Jensen identified herself. “We worried about you sitting over there in the dark. I wondered, if I snuck over to the back door, would you like a slice of cherry pie?”
    “Well, yeah. I would.”
    “Heated up?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Ice cream?”
    “That’d be great.”
    “I’ll be over in five minutes. Back door.”
    Virgil really did like most people, because most people were pretty likable.
    The pie was excellent. So was the movie, but he couldn’t deal with a third one. At eleven o’clock, he raided the refrigerator for a beer, then curled up on the couch, placing his cell phone next to his ear.
    He thought for a while about the whole ridiculous situation, and what he might do about it. Every cop in the south half of the state was looking for Ellen Case, but the only link to her was the phone in Elijah Jones’s car.
    Virgil often did his best thinking in a half-slumber. As he was about to go to sleep, he started thinking about the fact that Yael-1, or Tal or whatever her name was, had been able to track Jones’s car, but they hadn’t been able to spot the tracker from the air. Not only had Yael-1 been able to track it, but she’d been able to track it over several miles, and several turns . . . so had they placed a bug on the car? But how’d they known which car to bug?
    “Huh.” He woke up, picked up his cell phone, and called the duty officer again.
    “When you lose your iPhone, can’t you call up somebody and have them track it for you? Like, on a map?”
    “I believe so,” the duty officer said.
    “This is what I need,” Virgil said. “I need you to get in touch with Apple or whoever. They have this service where you can track your stolen iPhone on an iPad, I think, or maybe even another phone. Find out if somebody called them and asked them to track an iPhone through southern Minnesota today.”
    “I don’t know exactly how I’d do that,” the duty officer said.
    “Well, figure it out. You’re a smart guy. Look it up on the Net. When you do get hold of them, ask what number was calling, and ask where that phone is now located.”
    “I’ll give it a shot.”
    “Don’t call me back before seven in the morning,” Virgil said. “I need the sleep.”
    —
    W HEN THE PHONE rang at six o’clock, he groaned and rolled over. The couch hadn’t been quite long enough, and he had a kink in the middle of his back, and his feet had gone to sleep, from being jammed between a seat pillow and the arm of the couch.
    He picked up the phone and looked at the screen, which showed a 507 area code, an unfamiliar number, and “Rochester, MN.”
    “Hello?”
    “Viiirrrrgilll . . .”
    She was blubbering incoherently, but it was Ellen Case. “I’m walking down this road toward this gas station, I’m in the ditch.”
    Virgil sat up, his mind suddenly crystal clear: “Get to the gas station. Can you run? How far are you from the gas station? Is the station open?”
    “The sign is on.”
    “What kind of sign?” Virgil asked.
    “It’s a Kwik Trip.”
    “How far away are you?”
    “I don’t know, not very far. I’m out in the country,” she said.
    “Could you run?”
    “No, I’m all . . . I’m all . . . I’m so tired . . .”
    “Just stay with me, stay on the phone,” Virgil said. He was getting his boots on as he talked.
    Virgil got her to the Kwik Trip, talked to the counterman, got the location, and then got the Rochester cops started.
    When Ellen got back on the line, he said, “Just hang on, honey, every cop in the world is on the way.”
    —
    M ANKATO , M INNESOTA , is about eighty-five miles from Rochester, and driving it takes no less than an hour and