“Sure, go ahead,” Skinner said.

The nun, looking at her Fritos, said, “You’re lucky.”

Virgil got the chicken potpie from the freezer, paid for it, went in the back room, popped it in the microwave, and was waiting for it to heat up, when Holland came in. “Plastic forks and spoons in the drawer under the sink. You figure anything out?”

“Not much, except that your mom’s cafe sells sugar water as syrup.”

“She puts sugar in it now?”

“Okay, I couldn’t go to court and swear to it.” Virgil told him that Ford might drop by and ask for an escort down to the church, and Holland said he’d do it or get Skinner on the case.

“What’s next?” Holland asked.

“Nazis,” Virgil said.

9

   The deputy was sitting in his patrol car, reading a John Connolly novel, Every Dead Thing, when Virgil pulled in beside him. Darren Bakker got out of the car, carrying the book, and said, “Good thing we’re going to talk to heavily armed Nazis ’cause now I can quit reading this book. It’s scaring the hell out of me.”

“That’s a good one. I gotta say, reading it in a patrol car is the right way to do it,” Virgil said, as they shook hands. “You don’t want to read them at night in bed.”

Bakker was a tall, thick man, with rosy cheeks, a blond brush mustache, close-cropped blond hair, and small blue eyes. He had a U-shaped scar on one cheekbone about the size and shape of a pull tab on a beer can. He was wearing a radio with a shoulder mic.

Virgil had gotten the impression that there were only two Nazis, plus spouses or girlfriends, but Bakker said that there might be three. “Which is a problem,” he said. “The third one is a guy named Woody Garrett, and there are a couple of warrants out for him for assault and ag assault. Beating up his wife and daughter. He used a two-by-two on his daughter, told his friends he spanked her because she’d snuck out at night, but he managed to bust her pelvis. He’s got a substantial track record, too.”

“Charming guy,” Virgil said. “Why’s he hanging out with the Nazis?”

“He’s a cousin to one of them. We don’t know that he’s there for sure, but a farmer called in this morning and said he saw him in Jim Button’s yard last night, in the rhubarb patch. Button’s the cousin. And a Nazi. The other Nazi is Raleigh Good.”

“Raleigh? It’s not pronounced ‘Really’?”

“Nothing really good about Raleigh Good,” Bakker said. “He is an asshole of major dimension, believe me.”

“Hate assholes,” Virgil said. “You can’t even put them in jail for that.”

“That’s pretty hateful. I sometimes think we’d be better off if we put the assholes in jail and let the criminals go,” Bakker said. “Now, Jim and Raleigh are mean guys. Mean! They like to start fights in bars with guys they know they can beat up. They made a mistake with one old boy a couple of years ago; he just about beat Raleigh to death, and was starting in on Jim Button, when some people pulled him off. Jim and Raleigh—they usually know their limits, though. Black eyes and bloody noses. I don’t think they’d kill anybody, not on purpose anyway. The whole idea of prison scares them. The ‘Don’t drop the soap in the shower’ thing.”

“Glad to hear it. Too many guys look on it as free health care,” Virgil said. “You want to lead the way?”

* * *

—

Virgil followed Bakker down eight miles of blacktop highway, three miles of blacktop side road, and a half mile down a dead-end gravel road. Jim Button lived in a decrepit clapboard farmhouse that a Midwestern cartoonist might have drawn: it appeared to be taller than it was wide or deep, like an inhabited silo, and it had all gone crooked, as if the two floors had rotated in different directions. Virgil could see eight windows, none of them matching. The last flakes of paint were peeling off the boards, and the front steps had collapsed into the weeds beneath the porch. The only new-looking thing anywhere was a silver propane tank next to a stand-alone machine shed.

A too-heavy blond woman was in the backyard, hanging clothes, and a red-and-black Nazi flag, on a clothesline. She stopped to look at them, and instead of running for the house, she took a cell phone out of her pocket and made a call.

Virgil parked beside Bakker, who had gotten out of his car and was talking into his shoulder microphone. When Virgil came up, he said, “I let the boys in the office know that we got here alive.”

As he said it, a man in a black wifebeater shirt came out a side door, looked them over, called something back inside, and started toward them. Behind him, another man and two women came out of the house and trotted after him to catch up.

Bakker nodded at the leader—a thin, muscular man, with a fuzzy black beard and mustache—who displayed a variety of Nordic symbols tattooed on his arms, but nothing that would have impressed the average NBA player. Bakker said, “How you doin’, Jim? . . . Virgil, this is Jim Button.”

“What’s up, Darren?”

As the others came up, Bakker said Virgil was a BCA agent, and Virgil said, “You heard about those people in town getting shot, right? Apparently with a .223, and we’ve been told that you folks have a bunch of .223s, and a grudge against the town. I’m checking to see if you can tell me where you were on Saturday around four-fifteen, and about the same time the Saturday before that.”

“Wouldn’t you fuckin’ know it?” Jim Button asked the air. “Somebody gets shot, so who’re you gonna blame? The National Socialists.” He turned to his friends. “Can you believe this?”

Both the women who’d come out of the house had dark hair, but only one had swastikas on her earlobes. The other was prettier and had a dime-sized black rose tattooed on one side of her neck. She said, “I can tell you where I was the day before yesterday. I was at work, from three ’til nine, over in Austin. Raleigh dropped me off at three, and then he hung around for a while, bullshitting with my boss.”

“Trying to get a cleaning job over there, after closing,” Raleigh Good said. “You can call up Bob and ask him.”

“So what time did you leave there?” Virgil asked.

“About four.”

“You were bullshitting with the boss for an hour?” Bakker asked. “That’s a lot of bullshit.”

“Wasn’t all bullshit,” Good said. “We were talking about how I wouldn’t be an employee, I’d be my own business, and I’d have to provide my own equipment and supplies; we also talked about what needed to be cleaned every day and what needed it once or twice a week. There was a lot of bullshit, but it wasn’t bullshitting, if you see what I mean.”