Free Deadline by John Sandford Page B

he owns other property.”
    “You think he might be trying to hide some income?”
    “He’s doing something, but I don’t know what it is,” Virgil said. “When you check his tax records . . . I’d like you to keep that between the two of us.”
    “You mean, instead of going to the Department of Revenue and asking nice, I should hack into them,” she said.
    “I don’t really want an explanation of how you do it,” Virgil said. “I just want them quick, and I don’t want to have to play ring-around-the-bureaucrat.”
    “You don’t want an explanation of how I’d do it, because that might be a criminal conspiracy.”
    “Sandy . . .”
    Every day in every way, he thought, it seemed harder and harder to get anything done.
    —
    V IRGIL CONTINUED DOWN Thunderbolt Road, which eventually crossed the levee and rolled down into the port. The port didn’t look like anybody’s picture of a port, because it wasn’t much—just a half-mile-long line of wharfs that ran parallel to the riverbank, with tie-up posts every hundred feet or so, and a dozen corrugated buildings in various stages of disrepair. A small marina had been built into an indentation in the shoreline; twenty small boats rose and fell with the waves coming in from passing towboats.
    Virgil crossed the levee and rolled along until he saw a Fuller’sBarge Service sign on two big steel Quonset huts, one enclosed and one open. Both were surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence, with three strands of barbed wire on top.
    He could see flickering welding torches in the open hut, but couldn’t see what was being done. The closed hut had a white sign on it that said: “Office.” Somebody had written “Wipe your feet” below the “Office” with a Sharpie, which was apparently a joke, Virgil thought, because most of the area outside the door was a mud hole.
    Avoiding as much of the mud as possible, he stepped inside and found himself in an open space, partly filled with welding equipment and a couple of Bobcats. A balding man was working in a cubicle off to the left; he’d turned to look when Virgil walked in.
    Virgil said, “I’m looking for a Mr. Fuller.”
    “That’s me,” the man said cheerfully. “What can I do you for?”
    Virgil identified himself and said that he was investigating the murder of Clancy Conley.
    “Oh, boy, that’s just a disaster,” Fuller said. “First murder we had down here in quite a while, and it had to be my tenant.”
    Fuller said that Conley had been living in the trailer for two years. “Never had a bit of trouble with him. I heard that he was a slacker, but he stayed employed, and never caused anyone any trouble. He was handy with a wrench, and that helped.”
    Fuller cleared up some of the mystery of how Conley survived on a minimal salary: “I didn’t charge him rent. Our deal was, he’d keep the place clean, make sure it didn’t get broken into, and maintain it, and pay the utility bills. During deer season, he’d move out,and my buddies and I would move in. I own that woodland around there, two hundred and forty acres, and there are three of us hunt over it. We stay in the trailer. Last year, while we were up there, Clancy came down here and bunked out in one of our sheds that the tow crews use from time to time. Got a toilet, sink, and a couple cots, but that was good enough for him.”
    “So the trailer’s actually a hunting shack.”
    “Yeah, exactly.”
    He repeated Wendy McComb’s statement that Conley had quit drinking, and hadn’t gone back. “He told me once that he didn’t really like booze all that much—and he didn’t like beer at all. He liked to get cranked up, not pulled down. He told me his dream was to get some fast hot car, like a Porsche, and see if he could drive across Nebraska from Omaha to the Wyoming line in four hours. He had it all planned out, he had the highway patrol radio frequencies, so he’d know where they were at, where he’d make his gas