At Skinner & Holland, Virgil and Jenkins went straight to the back room, where Holland was waiting with a legal pad and Skinner’s laptop.

“They want you to leave the money on the edge of a bridge abutment on Highway 18 . . . right here . . . at ten o’clock. Exactly ten o’clock. No earlier, no later.”

Holland had a Google map up on the laptop and touched a pencil point to the screen. The satellite image showed an elongated lake coming down from the north, dwindling to a stream, which opened into another shallow lake, or marsh, a couple of hundred yards to the south. The bridge crossed the stream between the two lakes.

Jenkins: “Did they say if we didn’t leave it, the chick is gonna get it?”

Holland frowned. “No, they . . . What?”

“Jenkins humor,” Virgil said. “Ignore it.”

Virgil’s cell phone rang. He looked at it, answered. The phone guy in St. Paul said, “I got the number okay, but you won’t like it. It’s a pay phone at a bowling alley in Albert Lea.”

“They got a pay phone?”

“Yeah, they’re still out there. Sorry about that.”

Virgil rang off, told the others about the phone. “So it looks like we’ve got a stakeout tonight.”

“It’s gonna be way dark out there,” Holland said. “I suspect they’ll get out there early, on foot, to watch for somebody doing surveillance. If they don’t see anybody, they’ll snatch the envelope and sneak off, up or down the creek, to somewhere else, where somebody will pick them up. If it is the Nazis, they’ve lived here all their lives, they probably know the area pretty well.”

Virgil looked at the map for a minute, and Jenkins asked, “Well?” and Virgil said, “I’m gonna run home and get some stuff. Be back in three hours.”

“What are you going to get?” Jenkins asked. “What am I doing?”

“I need my wildlife gear,” Virgil said. “There’s a sporting goods store at the mall in Albert Lea. You need to buy some camo or dark sweatpants and a dark sweatshirt and some cheap gym shoes. It’ll be muddy out there, you could ruin a pair of good shoes.”

“I’d like to help, if I can,” Holland said.

“You can,” Virgil said. “You’ll make the drop. You’re gonna be Virgil Flowers for an hour.”

—

On the way home, Virgil called Sheriff Zimmer and told him about the letter. “What we’d like is, at ten o’clock, we’d like some patrol cars well out away from the site, maybe five miles and moving, so if these people see them it’ll look like a routine patrol. I don’t want them parked someplace unless they can hide. When they try to make the pickup, and if we don’t get them, we might need your guys to run them down.”