Dark of the Moon (2 page)

The fire stank: of burning fabrics and old wood and insulation and water and linoleum and oil and everything else that gets stuck in a house, and maybe a little flesh. They watched for another moment, feeling the heat on the fire side, the cool rain spattering off the hoods on their rain suits, down their backs and necks. Virgil asked, “Think he was smoking in bed?”

Stryker’s features were harsh in the firelight, and the corners of his mouth turned down at Virgil’s question. “Bill Parker, he’s a guy lives up in Lismore, was coming into town on Highway Eight. He saw the fire, mmm, must’ve been a few minutes after it started. He was driving toward it when a truck went by, moving fast. He figures it was going eighty, ninety miles an hour. And it was raining to beat the band. It took the turn on Highway Three, headed down to Ninety.”

“He see what kind of truck?”

“Nope. Not even sure it was a pickup. Might’ve been an SUV,” Stryker said. “All he could see was, the lights was set up high.”

They looked at the fire some more and then Virgil said, “Lot of people hated him.”

“Yup.” A few locals sidled past, grinning, hiding beer cans, having snuck past the cops below. Small town, you took care of yourself: Stryker told them, “You folks stay back out of the way.”

They watched for another minute, then Virgil yawned. “Well, good luck to you, Jimmy. I’m heading down to the Holiday Inn.”

“Why’d you come up?”

“Just rubbernecking,” Virgil said. “Saw the fire when I was coming down Ninety. Knew what it must be.”

“Goddamnedest thing,” Stryker said, peering into the flames. “I hope that old sonofabitch was dead before the fire got to him. Nobody needs to be burned to death.”

“If he did.”

“If he did.” Stryker frowned suddenly, again turned his green eyes to Virgil. “You don’t think he might’ve faked it? Skipped out to wherever he put that money?”

“I think the money might be a legend, is what I think,” Virgil said. He slapped Stryker on the shoulder. “You take it easy, Jimmy. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Not too early. I’ll be out here awhile.” As Virgil walked away, Stryker called, “That money wasn’t no legend, Virgil. He’s burnin’ because of that money.”

Behind him, up closer to the fire, Bill Judd Jr. was still screaming at the firemen, looking like he was one step from a heart attack.

T
HE
H
OLIDAY
I
NN
was smoke free, and Strictly No Pets, but Virgil’s room smelled of smoke and pets anyway—snuck cigarettes and cats in the night—as well as whatever kind of chemical they sprayed in the air to kill the smell of smoke and cat pee. You got two beds whether you wanted them or not. Virgil tossed his bag on one of them, pulled off the rain suit, and hung it over the showerhead to drip-dry.

He was a medium-tall man with blond hair and gray eyes, a half inch over six feet, lean, broad shouldered, long armed with big hands; his hair was way too long for a cop’s, but fell short of his shoulders. He’d played the big-three sports in high school, had lettered in all of them, a wide receiver in football, a guard in basketball, a third baseman in baseball. He wasn’t big enough or fast enough for college football, he was too short for basketball, and had the arm for college baseball, but couldn’t hit the pitching.

He drifted through a degree in ecological science, with a minor in creative writing, because it was easy and interesting and he liked the outdoors, the botany, and the girls in the writing classes. He joined the Army after graduation, got semicoerced into the military police, saw some trouble, but never fired his weapon in anger.

He came back home, found that there was no huge demand for bachelor-degree ecologists, and went off to the Police Academy. Got married, got divorced, got married, got divorced, got married, got divorced, and at the end of a five-year round of silliness, decided he didn’t want to be a four-time loser, so he stopped getting married.

He was working for the City of St. Paul as an investigator—eight years on the force, getting bored—when he was borrowed by a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) unit looking into a home-invasion ring. One thing led to another, and he moved to the BCA. There, he fell into the orbit of a political appointee named Lucas Davenport who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: “We’ll only give you the hard stuff.”

H
E
’
D BEEN DOING
the hard stuff for three years, with a personal side-venture as an outdoor writer. He had credits at most of the magazines that still took freelance stuff, but he wasn’t going to make a living at it; not unless he got a staff job, and magazines weren’t looking real healthy.

Didn’t know if he wanted to, anyway.

Davenport had told him that smart crooks were the most interesting game, and Virgil sometimes agreed.

V
IRGIL WORE
native dress out on the prairie: faded jeans and scuffed cowboy boots and musical T-shirts, and because he was a cop, a sport coat. In the sun, in the summer, he wore a straw hat and sunglasses. He usually didn’t wear a gun, unless he was in St. Paul, where Davenport might see him. The law required him to go armed, but in Virgil’s opinion, handguns were just too goddamned heavy and uncomfortable, so he kept his under the seat of the car, or in his briefcase.

After hanging his rain suit in the shower, he got a laptop out of his briefcase, went online. In his personal e-mail, he found the note from
Black Horizon
, a Canadian outdoor magazine, that he’d been expecting for a couple of days. They were working late in Thunder Bay: “Virg, I had to take a couple graphs out of the section on the portage—nothing I could do about it, it’s all about the space. I tried not to hack it up too bad. Anyway, it works for us if it works for you. Get back to us, and I’ll stick a check in the mail.”

He was pleased. This was his third piece in
BH
. He was becoming a regular. He opened the attached Word document, looked through the edited section.

Good enough
. He closed the document and sent a note to the editor: “Thanks, Henry. It’s fine. I’ll look for the check. Virgil.”

Whistling now, he went to the National Weather Service, typed in the zip code for Bluestem, got the week’s forecast: thunderstorms tonight—no shit—with fair skies and warm weather the next three or four days, thunderstorms possible in the afternoons. He checked Google News to make sure London hadn’t been nuked since he left Mankato; it hadn’t.

He shut down the computer, got undressed, shook the little remaining water off his rain suit, got in the shower, cranked the heat until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then turned it up one more notch. He got out, scalded half to death, crawled into bed, and thought about Bill Judd roasting like a bratwurst in the embers of his own home, and a truck speeding away in the night.
That
would be an interesting murder.

T
HEN HE THOUGHT
about God for a while, as he did most nights.

The son of a Presbyterian minister and a professor of engineering, who saw in God the Great Engineer and believed as devoutly as her husband, Virgil had gotten down on his knees every night of his life, to pray before bed, until the first night he’d spent in the dorm at the University of Minnesota. That night, embarrassed, he hadn’t gotten down on his knees, and he’d shivered and shaken in fear that the world would end because he hadn’t said his prayers.

By Christmas, like most freshmen, he was done with religion, and he mooched around campus with a copy of
The Stranger
under his arm, hoping to impress women with long dark hair and mysteries that needed to be solved.

He’d never gotten back to religion, but he had gotten back some faith. It came all at once, in a bull session in an Army bachelor-officers’ quarters, when one of the guys professed to being an atheist. Another one, and one who wasn’t too bright, in Virgil’s estimation, had said, urgently, “Oh, but you’re wrong: look at all the wonders of the world. There are too many wonders.”

Virgil, having grown up in the countryside, where there
were
wonders, and having studied ecology, where he found even more, had been stricken by the correctness of that statement from the not-too-bright believer: there
were
too many wonders. Atheists, he came to believe, generally worked in man-made cubes, with blackboards and computers and fast food. They didn’t believe in wonders because they never saw any.

So faith came back, but a strange one, with a God his father wouldn’t have recognized. Virgil thought about Him almost every night, about his sense of humor, and the apparent fact that He’d made rules that even He couldn’t bend…

Then at one o’clock in the morning, having thought of God, Virgil drifted off to sleep, and dreamt of men sitting in motel rooms, in the dark, secretly smoking Marlboros, watching their cats ghosting illegally around their rooms.

Tuesday Morning

T
HE OLD TOWN
of Bluestem, named for a prairie grass, lay almost a mile north of I-90. Over the years, the space between the old town had filled up with the standard franchise places—McDonald’s, Subway, Country Kitchen, Pizza Hut, Taco John’s; a Holiday Inn, a Comfort Inn, a Motel 6; four or five gas stations with convenience stores, the Ford dealership and two used-car lots. There were also a half-dozen farm and truck service shops, with worn tires stacked outside and muddy-yellow driveway puddles from the overnight rain.

The old town was prettier. The residential areas were dominated by early-twentieth-century homes, each one different than the next, and big, with porches and yards with swings. The shopping district, on Main Street, was four blocks long, yellow-brick two-and three-story buildings, including a prewar movie theater that still showed movies, and all the businesses left over after you took out a Wal-Mart: law firms, insurance agencies, too many gift shops and antique stores, a couple of small clothing stores, four restaurants, a drugstore.

The courthouse was built two blocks back from Main, and was still used as a courthouse. In most small towns, the old courthouses had been retired, to be replaced by anonymous county government buildings and law-enforcement centers built outside town.

V
IRGIL PARKED
in the courthouse lot, walked past the war memorial—thirteen Stark County boys lost in World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq—and inside, down the long hall to the sheriff’s office.

Stryker’s secretary was a heavyset fiftyish woman with an elaborate pearly-blond hairdo, accented and bias-cut with a couple of tentative spikes sticking out the back like porcupine quills. She squinted at Virgil, took in the sunglasses and the Sheryl Crow T-shirt with the carp on the front, and asked, abruptly, “Who’re you?”

“Virgil Flowers. BCA.”

She looked him over again: “Really?”

“Yup.”

“Sheriff said for you to go on back.” She half turned and gestured toward the back wall, which had a frosted-glass window set in a door that said
SHERIFF JAMES J. STRYKER
. Virgil nodded, and started past, and she asked, “How many times did you shoot at that man in Fairmont?”

Virgil paused. “Fourteen,” he said.

She looked pleased: “That’s what I heard. You never hit him?”

“Wasn’t particularly trying to,” Virgil said, though he’d just about given up on this argument.

“They say he was shooting at you,” she said.

“Ah, he didn’t want to hurt me,” Virgil said. “He was letting off some hot air, because he was pissed about being caught. Wasn’t really a bad guy, except for the fact that he held up gas stations. Had eight kids and a wife to feed.”

“Sort of his job, huh?”

“That was about it,” Virgil said. “Now he’s gonna be making snowplow blades for six years.”

“Huh,” she said. “Well, I think most of the boys around here would have shot him.”

“Must be pretty goddamn hard-hearted boys,” Virgil said, not liking her; and he went on back to Stryker’s office.

S
TRYKER WAS
on the phone. Virgil knocked and Stryker called, “Come in,” and he waved Virgil to a chair and said into the phone, “I gotta go, but the first minute you find a toenail, I want to hear about it.” He rang off and shook his head and said, “Can’t find him. Judd.”

Virgil eased into the chair. “Nothing in the house?”

“I’ll tell you something. When most people build houses, there’s a whole bunch of stuff in it that just don’t burn too well,” Stryker said. He tapped his fingers on his desktop; anxiety. “Judd’s house was all wood—floors, paneling, bookcases—and a good amount of it was pine. Dry as a broom straw. There was nothing left up there this morning but the basement and a few pieces of metal and rock—refrigerator, stove, furnace, and even those are melted down into lumps. We think he was in there. But we haven’t found a thing.”

“Huh.”

“I’ll tell you, Virgil. If we don’t find something, this is gonna plague me,” Stryker said. “And everybody in the county, for that matter. We won’t know if he went up in smoke, or if he’s down on some French island someplace. We won’t know if that truck last night didn’t have Bill Judd in it, heading for the West Indies.”

“Jesus, Jimmy, the guy’s what? Eighty?” Virgil said. “They were saying down at the Holiday that he’d been pretty sick. In and out of the hospital. Why in the hell would he sit here for eighty years, and then with six months to live, take off for the West Indies?”

“Probably because he’d think it was funny, fuckin’ everybody up one last time,” Stryker said. He was unsettled, mumbled, “Sonofabitch,” then sighed, looked at two fat file folders on his desktop, and pushed them across at Virgil.

“This is it. Everything we got. There’s also a DVD in there, all the same stuff, if you’d rather use a computer. You need Adobe Reader.”

“All right,” Virgil said. “But boil it down for me. What’d you get, and what are you looking at now?”

V
IRGIL WASN
’
T
in Bluestem for Bill Judd, though.

He was there for the Gleasons.

Russell Gleason had been a town doctor for fifty years, retired for ten. He and his wife, Anna, lived in an affluent enclave of businessmen and professionals on a hillock above the Stark River reservoir, a mile east of downtown and handy to the Bluestem Country Club. Anna had been a nurse for a while, when she was younger, and then had gotten elected to the county commission, where she served six terms and then retired for good. They had three children, but the children had gone, two to the Twin Cities, one to Sioux Falls.

Both were in their eighties and in good health. Russell still played nine holes a day at the club, in good weather, and Anna had her women’s groups. They had a housekeeper, a Mexican illegal named Mayahuel Diaz who was well liked by most everyone who knew her, and who came in on weekdays.

Three weeks and four days before Virgil came to town, Russell had played a round of golf on a Friday afternoon, the round cut short by rain. He had a few drinks with his golfing pals, then hooked up with his wife. They’d gone to the Holiday Inn for dinner. On the way back home, they stopped at a SuperAmerica—a credit card said it was twelve minutes after nine when they paid for the gas.

At eleven o’clock that rainy night, a neighbor had been sent to town by his wife to get a quart of milk. As he came past the Gleason place, he saw what looked like a strange sculpture, like a dummy or a scarecrow, sitting in the Gleasons’ backyard, bathed in yard lights.

He got a quart of milk and came back up the hill, drove past the Gleasons’ house, saw the scarecrow or whatever it was, got as far as his driveway, then said, the hell with it, that scarecrow was too strange. He’d just stop and ask if everything was okay.

It wasn’t.

The scarecrow was Russell Gleason, propped up with a stick, his eyes shot out.

T
HE SHOOTINGS
had happened inside the house. Anna had been shot to death as she sat on a couch in the living room; shot once in the heart. Russell had been shot three times, once in the lower back, and once in each eye. Then his body had been dragged outside and propped up, staring gap mouthed and blank eyed into the dark.

“It looked like he tried to run, but he couldn’t,” Stryker said. “That the sequence was, that he was standing up, and Anna was sitting down. The killer shot her in the heart and Russell turned to run, and the killer shot him in the spine, from the back, just as he got to the dining room.”

“How far was that? How far did he run?”

“About three steps. I’ll get you the key to the house, on the way out the door, we’ve got a couple in evidence,” Stryker said. “Anyway, the dining room is connected to the living room, and it looks like he was shot as he started into the dining room. He went down, and rolled on his back, and the killer stood over him and shot him twice, once in each eye. Goddamnedest thing.”

The slugs were .357 hollow points, and exited the back of Gleason’s head into the floor, and were recovered, though in fragments.

“The eye thing, propping him up in the yard, in the lights—a ritual of some kind,” Virgil said.

“Looks like something, but I don’t know what,” Stryker said, shaking his head. “The second shot was a waste of good ammunition, I can tell you that. And the shooter took a risk—the Gleasons’ house is three hundred fifty feet from the nearest neighbor, and it was raining, so the houses were closed up with air-conditioning. Still, a .357 makes a damn loud bang. If somebody had been walking by…the third shot was an extra risk.”

“Excitement? I’ve seen that,” Virgil said. “Guy starts pulling the trigger and can’t stop.”

“One in each eye? He had to take his time,” Stryker said. “I mean, he fired from two feet away, straight down, but you still have to take your time to put it right through an eye.”

“So he’s nuts. A ritual, a revenge thing…Maybe a warning?”

Stryker sighed. “What the whole situation hints at, when you boil it down, is that it’s somebody from here, that we all know. Somebody who went to that specific house, at that specific time, to do the killing. Somebody that they let into the house. No sign of struggle by the entrance. There was a glass of water by Anna’s hand, on an end table, like she’d been sitting there awhile.”

“Was it dark?”

“Probably. We can’t nail it down exactly, but they were wearing the clothes that they wore Friday. Russell was still in his golf slacks with a fresh grass stain on the cuff. So, sometime after they got gas at nine-twelve—take them five minutes to get out to the house after paying—and before they’d changed clothes to go to bed.”

“Nobody saw any cars?”

“No. I think the killer—I feel like it’s one guy—came up the Stark River on foot, and then around to the front of the house. If he stayed down in the river cut, in the rain, hell, nobody would see him. A guy who knows his way around could walk downtown, almost, without being seen, on a dark night.”

“So tell me what you think,” Virgil said. “Who did it? Who might’ve done it?”

Stryker was shaking his head. “I don’t know. This is too cold, for around here. There might be guys here who could do it, but it’d be hot. Lots of anger. Then they’d probably turn themselves in, or shoot themselves, or run for it. Or
something
. So, I don’t know. You’ll hear that all over town—that I don’t know. But nobody else does, either.”

“All right,” Virgil said. “Give me the rest of the day to look at the paper, and I’ll talk to you tonight. I’ll be down at the Holiday, you got my cell number if you need me.”

“Get you that key on the way out,” Stryker said. “When you’re done with the house, I’ll probably let the Gleason kids have it. They want to get it cleaned out and set up for a sale.”

“Nobody’s touched it?”

“We’ve been through it, but we haven’t taken anything out. Everything’s like it was, but maybe a little ruffled.”

T
HE EVIDENCE ROOM
was a closet with a fire door and steel sides. Stryker unlocked it, pulled out a basket, sorted through a dozen Ziploc bags, got the key, and handed it to Virgil. They walked along together to the courthouse door, past a guy painting woodwork.

When they were out of earshot, Stryker said, “Listen, you know how it is in a sheriff’s office. Half the guys working for me would like a shot at my job. If they smell a weakness…I’ll be in trouble. So. You do what it takes. You need anything from me—
anything
—you let me know. Any of my people drag their feet, anybody in the courthouse gives you trouble, I want to hear about it.”

“I’ll talk to you,” Virgil said.

T
HEY STEPPED OUTSIDE,
into the sunshine. A woman was going by on the sidewalk, fifty feet away, slender, pretty, small features, white-blond hair on her shoulders. Maybe early thirties? He was too far away to be sure, but Virgil thought her eyes might be green. She lifted a hand to Stryker and he lifted one back, and her eyes caught Virgil’s for a beat—an extra beat—and then she went along toward the corner.

“Another thing,” Stryker said. “We’ve got this newspaper here and the editor thinks he’s the
New York Times
. His name is Williamson. He’s investigating my investigation, and he says I’m screwing it up. Just a heads-up in case he calls you—and he will.”

Virgil nodded, then said, quietly, “Not to step on your train of thought, there, Jimmy, but look at the ass on that woman. My God, where do the genes come from? I mean, that’s an artwork. That’s the
Venus de Milo
, and you’re a bunch of goddamned Germans.”

“Yeah,” Stryker said, a noncommittal note in his voice.

Virgil looked at him: “What? She’s married to the mayor? You don’t even look at her ass?”

“No, I don’t, really,” Stryker said. “And she’s not married. She’s been divorced since February. Folks figure she’s about ripe for the pluckin’.”

“Have you asked her out?”

“Nope,” Stryker said.

They both looked after her as she crossed the street and went on down the sidewalk toward Main. Virgil said, “You’re divorced, Jimmy. I know you’re not hung up on your ex, because she’s in Chicago and you hate her. I mean,
I
hate her, and I only met her once. So here’s the woman with the fourth-best ass in the state of Minnesota, right in your hometown, and not a bad set of cupcakes, either, from what I could see…I mean, pardon me for asking, and not that it matters at all, but you’re not queer, or something?”

Stryker grinned. “Nope.”

The woman tossed her white-blond hair as she stepped up on the far curb, and might have glanced back at them—as all women would, she knew they were talking about her—and then Virgil turned to Stryker, about to continue his analysis of her better points, and noticed that Stryker had precisely the same white-blond hair as the woman; and Stryker had those jade-green eyes.

A thought crossed Virgil’s mind.

He said, “That’s your sister, isn’t it?”