She was still boiling. “My pop money. From selling soda pop all summer. More than six hundred dollars and it’s all gone.” She was getting mad again, glaring at the men.
“Somebody took it out of her chest of drawers,” Jim Waller said.
Then Katy asked Virgil, “What kind of cop are you?”
“I’m an investigator for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”
“It’s like a state version of the FBI,” Johnson added.
Katy didn’t care. She just seized on the word cop and focused on Virgil. “Could you find out who took the money?”
Her father said, “Katy, goddarnit, he’s here to fish.”
“We’re not fishing with this rain,” Cain said.
Johnson nodded. “He’s right: Why don’t we take a look, Virgie? It’s something to do.”
Damn that Johnson.
They were all looking at him, and Virgil said to Katy, “You know, it’s enough money that you should call the local cops.”
“That’s not gonna help,” she said. “The deputy we got out here, he couldn’t catch a cow on a golf course. His main job is giving speeding tickets to tourists.”
“Let’s take a look,” Johnson said, as Lang and Cain made their way back to their own cabin.
Katy led Virgil and Johnson back to the house, trailed by her father, who kept saying to Virgil, “We really appreciate this, but you don’t have to do it.”
Virgil agreed, but shook his head and said, “It’s okay.”
He asked Katy when she’d last seen the money.
“Day before last. I got ten dollars off the golf course and stuck it in there.”
The Wallers had six children, four girls and two boys. Their house, made of two cabins joined together, had three small bedrooms for the six kids, and one shared bathroom for all six. Virgil guessed those rooms and half of a long living area had been one cabin, while the dining room, kitchen, master bedroom, and another bath had probably originally been in another cabin with a common wall.
On their way to Katy’s bedroom, Jim Waller explained to his wife that Virgil was a cop. To that she started saying, “Oh, geez,” and didn’t stop until Virgil was inside the girls’ room. The bedroom had two beds, a wooden chair, and a chest of drawers, with a window that looked out the back of the cabin toward a line of trees that hid the trout stream.
Virgil, Johnson, Katy, and her parents all crowded into the bedroom and Katy pointed at the bottom drawer of the chest. It contained a couple of flannel nightgowns, winter wear, some shirts, a couple of belts, and a dozen pairs of socks rolled into balls. Three pairs of white athletic socks had been unrolled. Two pair were lying on top of other clothing in the drawer and one pair was lying on the floor.
“I put the money in a pair of white socks. That’s where I always keep it,” Katy said. “It’s gone. It’s mostly in one- and five-dollar bills, so it makes a big lump. I couldn’t believe it when it was gone. I checked all the socks, even the black ones.”
Virgil dug around in the drawer for a moment, then turned and asked Ann Waller, who was watching from the doorway, “Could you get me a little wad of toilet paper?”
“You find something?” Katy asked.
“Dunno.”
He was kneeling by the chest, and a moment later, Ann Waller reached over and handed him the toilet paper. He touched his tongue to it, then dabbed at the side of the drawer.
He asked Katy, “When you were digging around in here, did you cut yourself? Cut your hands?”
She examined her hands, front and back. “No, I didn’t. Why?”
He held up the toilet paper. “There’re some spots of blood in the drawer, and it’s fairly fresh.” He then approached the window and saw that it was unlocked. “You lock this?”
“All the time, when it’s down. It’s always down, unless it’s a really hot night, but then, we’re always here when it’s up, me’n my sister, Liz. The screen’s always hooked, though, all the time. It should have been locked.”
He pushed the window fully open and checked the nylon screen, which had a hook lock at the bottom. The hook was undone and when he pressed his finger against the screen, he found a slit right along the bottom of it.