Deadline by John Sandford Page A

clip the teachers’ salaries and maybe the state’s pupil payments. Both of those gotta be in the millions of dollars a year. Suppose they had five ghost employees . . .”
    “Bless me,” Virgil said. “If that’s the case, there’d have to be several people in on it.”
    “Yes, there would. You know ol’ Buster Gedney? His wife’s on the school board.”
    “Do tell. I talked to her, and she didn’t mention it,” Virgil said. He waved at his laptop. “According to my research, he has a fifty-thousand-dollar machine shop in his garage, which he apparently paid for by selling turkey fryers out the back door.”
    “That’s a lot of turkey fryers,” Johnson said. “But these spreadsheets . . . I wonder why there’s no identification on them? Theyjust start, on page 128, and they go on for a while, and then they end. But the end is not the end of the spreadsheet.”
    “I suspect it’s because he had several batches of photos, and I only found the last batch,” Virgil said. “Maybe he could only spend a certain amount of time shooting. If that’s what happened, he’d go back home and unload the photos into his laptop. Which nobody can find.”
    “I’d semi-buy that,” Johnson said. He added, “If this story was really that important to the guy, a kind of redemption, you’d think he’d make a backup of all his computer files. The story so far. You know, in case his hard drive croaked, or his laptop got stolen.”
    “If he backed it up on a flash drive or a Time Capsule, it probably went with the computer,” Virgil said.
    “Flash drives are so last year,” Johnson said. “I wonder what the chances are that he stuck them up in the Cloud?”
    “Hmm. Maybe Sandy could find out for me,” Virgil said. “I knew there was some reason I hung out with you.”
    “You mean, besides attracting women that you can make a run at?”
    “Yeah. Besides that.”
    —
    A TRUCK ROLLED into the yard, and they both looked out the window. “It’s Clarice,” Johnson said. “I called her and told her to meet me here.”
    Clarice came in a moment later and said, “Goddamnit, Johnson, you been reading again, without your Chapstick.” She looked at Virgil, who was looking down her cleavage again. Clarice was onher way to Friday’s, and looked, Virgil thought . . . nice. “His lips get chapped when he reads too much.”
    “Yeah, I got that,” Virgil said. “You look . . . nice.”
    “Especially with her tits out to here,” Johnson said.
    Clarice’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t have tits, if you’ll just excuse the shit out of me, Johnson. I have breasts.”
    Johnson agreed that she did, indeed, and Virgil nodded in agreement, and she and Johnson went out the door. “Don’t let those pictures get out of sight,” Johnson said. “They are something.”
    —
    W HEN THEY WERE GONE, Virgil called Sandy back and asked her to start working on the Cloud concept. “Gonna need subpoenas and all that,” she said.
    “I’ll leave that to all you large brains back at HQ,” Virgil said. “Let me know what happens.”
    —
    V IRGIL WENT BACK to his computer and read the e-mails that Sandy had sent earlier, the details on Conley and Laughton. When he was done, he got a Leinenkugel’s from the refrigerator, kicked back on the glider, and thought about it. Was it really possible that Conley had discovered a case of public corruption, and had been killed to cover it up? If so, how big would the conspiracy have to be? How many people would have had to know about the planned killing? Had it been one guy, panicked, who decided to solve the problem? Or had it been several people?
    As soon as Johnson mentioned the possibility of a big publicorganization, Virgil had thought of Bill Don Fuller, who’d seen Conley getting into his car in the predawn darkness, right there by the high school. . . .
    He was still thinking about it when Frankie called and spent a half hour keeping him up on the happenings around the