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“Oh... no.”
The next call was to Sandy at the BCA office. She went online with the Minnesota DMV, which produced a driver’s license. Sandy sent the image to Virgil’s iPad, and the license photo was good enough to confirm that they had the right Doreen Pollard and her address.
—
Two hours afterthey’d left Heath in the Home Streets office, they arrived at Pollard’s apartment complex in West St. Paul, a town that lay directly south of St. Paul. Following Virgil’s iPhone navigation app, they missed, by twenty minutes, the departure of a blood-and-bone spattered Noah Heath.
Heath was talking to himself as he hunched over the steering wheel of his aging Mercedes-Benz. He’d parked it a block from Pollard’s apartment, and had walked over, empty-handed, except for the ball-peen hammer he’d stuck down the back of his pants, the head of it hanging over his belt.
He was saying to himself, as he drove away from the apartments, “Had to do it, Dad, had to do it. Had to make the call, make the decision, make the move. Sometimes, people need to be fired for the sake of the entire company. You hate to do it, but it’s got to be done.”
The running commentary was done in a sing-songy voice, and before he got home, he thought, in a moment of clarity, that he sounded like a complete fruitcake. He had to stop talking, but he couldn’t. He kept going: “It’s hard, but somebody has to do it. You know it’ll be tough on the employee’s family, but not removing the person is hard on the entire business...”
He’d never know how close he came to meeting Lucas and Virgil in the parking lot. When he got home, he parked the Benz in the garage, stood back, and considered what the aging car represented: the end of the Heath lifestyle, going back to 1945, when his grandfather came back from World War II and built his first motel, or, as he called it, a motor hotel.
One way or another, Heath thought, the charity business wasdone. He’d sell out and vanish. His chin trembled with the thought. On the other hand, Antigua was a fine place to spend the end of your days. He’d have influence there.
—
Pollard’s apartment complexwas weathered, with fake-brick-looking fiberglass siding covering the bottom half of the buildings and green-painted clapboard above. Each building appeared to have about twenty apartments; the structures were arranged in a rectangle with an empty swimming pool in the middle. A battered child’s bicycle, possibly thirty years old, leaned against the nearest building, with weeds growing up through the spokes of one bent wheel; several television satellite dishes were perched on the roofs.
“She was not paid well,” Virgil said, as they got out of Lucas’s Cayenne. “Either that, or she spent her money on something else.”
“Boiled cabbage,” Lucas said, using a key fob to lock the car, then locking it a second time.
“Boiled cabbage?”
“That’s what it will smell like inside. Boiled cabbage and baby formula.”
Virgil nodded. “And dryer exhaust, from the in-house coin laundry.”
—
They were rightabout all of it.
Pollard’s apartment was in Building 2, which had double glass doors opening into a small lobby with brass mailboxes; the doors had prominent locks but didn’t lock.
Lucas and Virgil pushed through into the lobby, were hit with the odor of boiled cabbage, with an overtone of boiled carrots, climbed a narrow, carpeted stairs to the second floor. Pollard’s apartment, 251, was at the end of the hall. As they walked toward it, they heard music from one apartment, and two women arguing in another.
They knocked on Pollard’s door, got no answer, and knocked again, and harder. Nothing.
“Feels empty,” Virgil said.
A door opened at the next apartment back down the hall, and an elderly woman peeked out. “Who’re you?”
Lucas: “U.S. Marshal, looking for Doreen Pollard.”
“You got a badge?”
“I do,” Lucas said. He took his badge case from his pocket and showed it to her. “Have you seen Doreen?”
“I know she’s home. I got a plumbing problem and the manager opened up my wall and there’s nothing between me’n Doreen but wet Sheetrock,” the woman said. “I heard her talking on her phone, not more’n half an hour ago. And she hasn’t left, or I woulda heard her, the way she bangs that door. What’d she do, anyway?”
“Where’s the manager? Here in the building?”
“In Building 1, if the lazy shit isn’t having a rent nooner with May Ann Wells, that slut, which he probably is,” she said.
“It’s not noon,” Virgil said.
