Storm Front

mostly eat for breakfast.”
    There were a few details: a minivan, the first floor of a motel, but not a very good motel—the rooms had a stale odor about them, as if they permitted smoking, and were poorly cleaned. The rooms were not particularly soundproof, because she’d heard cars going by on gravel, and once, somebody calling to somebody else, but she hadn’t heard anyone in an adjacent room.
    In the morning, when she was released, she tried to keep track of where she was being taken, and thought she’d been driven only fifteen minutes or so—the motel was not far away.
    “You think the motel parking lot was gravel, rather than paved?”
    She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. And when I think about it, I think we might have been in an end room.”
    Virgil continued pulling details out, and Donny, the detective, said, “I can think of two places she might have been. There might be more, but I’d bet it’s one of those two.”
    “Can you send some guys around?”
    “You bet.”
    He left, and Virgil patted Ellen on the leg and said, “I gotta ask you—can you talk to the media?”
    “I . . . Do I have to?”
    “We need to communicate with your father,” Virgil said. “There’s no better way. We’ve now had three people shot and a kidnapping. This is seriously ugly.”
    Virgil pushed her on the subject of who’d taken her father out of the hospital, and why. She was adamant: she had nothing to do with it, and didn’t know who might have done it.
    “I think, probably, it was Ma Nobles,” Virgil said. “To tell you the truth, Ellen, I suspected that you probably briefed her on the whole thing.”
    “We did talk about the stone,” Ellen admitted. “I might’ve . . . She seems . . .”
    “What?”
    “She seemed interested that the sale price on the stone might be, you know, a couple million dollars.”
    “So you talked about that?”
    “Yes, we did.”
    “You knew that Ma had a little bit of a questionable history?”
    Ellen said, “Well . . . she seemed nice enough. I mean,
you
introduced her to me.”
    Virgil winced: “I was trying to give her something legitimate to do.”
    “Well . . . that really didn’t work out very well,” Ellen said. “Do you think she’d know where Dad is?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Your old man is pretty good at hiding out, for a preacher.”
    —
    E LLEN DIDN ’ T want to stay at the hospital. When the doctor said she could go, Virgil drove her to the Rochester Law Enforcement Center to make a complete statement. While she was doing that, he drove over to the Downtown Hilton, talked to the manager and reserved a space for the press conference, called Davenport and told him what he was going to do, and then began calling TV stations.
    He was at the Hilton when Hall, the detective, called and said they’d found the motel. “It’s a mom-’n’-pop called Foudray’s out where 54 crosses I-90. Jack Golden’s out there.”
    “Are you done with Ellen?”
    “Not quite. You need her?”
    “Yeah, at the Hilton at eleven o’clock.”
    “We’ll be done by then,” Donny said. “I’ll bring her over.”
    Virgil drove to the motel, a single-story building with a fifty-yard strip of small rooms fronting on Highway 52. The parking lot was brown gravel, and Jack Golden was looking at the end room, and talking to a shaky, unshaven old man who wore a long-sleeved turquoise cowboy shirt and jeans. Golden and Virgil shook hands, and Golden introduced the old man as Bud Anderson.
    “Just saw one man, tall fellow, had a beard and long hair,” Anderson said. “He looked kinda foreign, but he spoke English pretty good. Didn’t sound foreign.”
    “There was a woman with him?” Virgil asked.
    “Yeah, I saw a woman getting out of that van, one time. Skinny-looking. They had two rooms rented, the tall guy come in and asked for the two end rooms, because they needed some quiet, so, no skin off my butt. I put them down here.”
    Golden said, “The guy wrote down a tag number when he checked in. No such number. Signed in as Richard Johnson. Paid cash. Never used the room phone.”
    “They’re long gone,” Virgil said. “I don’t even know if it’s worth calling in the crime scene.”
    “Might find some fibers from that sack or something,” Golden said. “But there’s a bottle of 409 in the bathroom that doesn’t belong to the motel. I suspect everything’s been wiped.”
    “Of course it’s wiped,”