Storm Front

serious, because she’d taken away something serious: the sense that there’s a safety and privacy in life, and that bad crazy things happen to other people.
    He was inclined to give her a lecture about her father, and about any help she might be giving him, but after glancing at her, decided to let it go.
    “You’re going to get a lot of attention now,” he said, as they started down in the elevator. “You will be doing everyone a great favor if you read your old man the riot act.”
    “I’m sure he’s still focused on Mother,” she said. “If he’s still alive.”
    “That’s a question we’ll have to deal with—that I want to deal with in the press conference,” Virgil said. “You have to make him call me. Or call you.”
    —
    T HE PRESS CONFERENCE was stacked with reporters. The kidnapping, and the stone, were the big story in the state, and for several states around, and it was beginning to get attention from the national cable channels like CNN and Fox. Both Sewickey and Bauer had been on early morning shows, Virgil had been told, and they had more on their schedule.
    The press conference was being held in a meeting room, but they and a couple of Rochester detectives, including Hall, hid out in a conference room until it was time to go out. When it was time, the three cops led Ellen through the meeting room and around to the front, where a podium had been set up. Virgil counted seven cameras, and saw Ruffe Ignace, a
Star-Tribune
reporter, and sometime friend, taking up two chairs in the front row; not because he needed two chairs, but because he was a two-chair kind of guy, and he didn’t like being touched, as he put it, by TV scum.
    Virgil opened the press conference by saying that Ellen Case had been released early that morning, and that the kidnappers had fled, and were being sought by both local police and the FBI. He told them that the kidnappers had attempted to exchange Ellen for the Solomon stone.
    He recounted her early-morning phone call, and his call to the Rochester police, and then turned the press conference over to Hall, who told about Rochester cops finding Ms. Case in the Kwik Trip store, about her trip to the hospital, her physical condition, and about the discovery of the motel where she’d been kept.
    Hall introduced Ellen to the cameras, and she related how the kidnappers had taken her, how they’d kept her in the motel room, and then how they’d abandoned her on the side of the road.
    “I think my father will either see this, or hear this, and Dad, I’m pleading with you, give it up. You’re hurting people now. I can promise you, I’ll never be the same. This whole thing is so crazy. Call Virgil, or call me—I still have my phone. Come in. Please, please, come in.”
    She began to tear up, to choke up, at the end of her statement. There were a lot of questions, which she answered, as best she could, and when the reporters began to repeat the questions, Virgil tried to end the conference.
    Failed for a few minutes: a TV guy asked, “Is there any indication that this stone itself may be influencing the way Reverend Jones is thinking? Tag Bauer, the well-known archaeologist, says that these artifacts can be extremely psychically powerful and that Reverend Jones may no longer be in control of his own actions. That he may somehow be possessed by it.”
    Ignace slapped a hand to his forehead with an audible w
hap
.
    Virgil said, “Ah . . . we think Reverend Jones is quite ill. We do think that he’s in control, however.”
    Another reporter asked, “When you briefly had custody of the stone . . . did you notice any unusual effects from it? Did it glow, was it warmer than it should have been? Did the writing seem unusual in any way? Professor Sewickey said that with artifacts of great power, the writing sometimes changes.”
    Ignace turned in his seat and said, “It’s a rock, you fuckin’ moron,” loud enough to be picked up by the microphones.
    Virgil said, “No, I didn’t notice anything like that. I’ve got to end this now, because we’ve got a lot of work to do. To reiterate, we need Reverend Jones to call us—either me, or his daughter.”
    He stepped back and one of the TV cameramen, a large man in a Sturgis T-shirt, said to Ignace, “You fuck up my tape one more time, and I’ll pull your little fuckin’ head off like a radish out of—”
    He didn’t get to finish it, because Ignace—not a tall man, but thick—dropped his notebook and