Dark of the Moon

9

VIRGIL LOVED the early-morning hours in the high summer, when there was a cold cut to the morning air, but you could feel the heat coming over the horizon. The perfect time to fish. The perfect time to do anything out-of-doors.

He was up a couple of minutes after five-thirty, peeked out through the curtains across the parking lot, saw the orange upper limb of the sun coming over the horizon. Blue sky. Not a cloud in sight. Excellent.

He sat down, knocked off fifty sit-ups, did fifty push-ups, pulled on a T-shirt and shorts, gym shoes, and headed for the door. Sometimes, in Mankato, he'd plug in an iPod and run to old classic rock, like Aerosmith. The trouble to running with music was, he couldn't think while he was listening to it. Sometimes, that was okay. This morning, he needed to think.

Had things to do, places to go, plans to execute.

Get back to Sioux Falls and see Betsy Carlson at the nursing home. Take along Laura Stryker, Joan's mother, if she'd go…do a sneaky interrogation of the elder Stryker, see what she knew about Judd and his love life. See if she'd talk about her husband's suicide, and the effect it might have had on Jim and Joan.

And that made him feel a little bad, but he was a cop, so not too bad.

HE RAN UP through town, and back and forth along residential streets, until his watch told him it was 6:15, and that he'd run five miles, more or less. He turned back toward the motel, picked up the pace for the last two blocks, and got to the lobby sweating hard.

He had a further list: historical research at the paper; look up the fat woman that Michelle Garber, the drinking schoolteacher, said had been in bed with Judd. Plot some kind of excuse, as rotten and underhanded as it might be, to get Joan back to the family farm, and up in that hayloft. To that end, steal the extra blanket in the Holiday Inn closet, and hope it got all stuck up with hay.

Garber had mentioned the postmaster who'd shared a bed with Judd and the girls, and had made a point: nobody could really come in from the outside and do this. A persistent stranger would be noticed; even a car seen too often. And a man coming back after years away-or a woman coming back, for that matter-would be noticed instantly, and remembered, and commented upon. He might be missing something, but he believed that he was standing within a half mile of the killer…

The shower was perfect. Even the breakfast was good. Might have been the start of a perfect day, if his cell phone hadn't rung at 6:45, with two syrup-drenched link sausages still on the plate.

STRYKER, BREATHING HARD: "Ah, Jesus Christ, Virgil, we got another one. Two."

"Who?"

"Roman Schmidt and his wife," Stryker groaned. "You gotta get over here."

"Wait, wait, slow down. Roman Schmidt. I know the name…"

"He was the sheriff, three before me. Thirty years. Jesus, people are going to be rioting in the streets."

"What's the body look like?" Virgil asked.

"Just like the other one. Propped up on a tree branch, this time. It's just…fuckin'…nasty."

Virgil got directions to the Schmidt house, threw fifteen dollars on his plate. As he went by the pale-faced night clerk, the clerk blurted, "Have you heard?"

"Ah, man…"

OUT THE DOOR, into his truck. He opened his cell phone, scanned down through the directory, punched the call button. A minute later, Lucas Davenport, his boss, said into the phone, "This better be good. You better not be in a fuckin' fishing boat."

"Listen, we got two more down here," Virgil said.

"Oh, boy…" Davenport was in bed, in St. Paul. "Same guy?"

"Yes. There's display on the body. Worse than that. It's Roman Schmidt, a former sheriff and his wife. Stryker says that townspeople are gonna be in the street. And since this makes five, we'll start getting heavy-duty media heat."

There was a moment of silence, and then Davenport said, "And?"

"And? And what?"

"What does this have to do with me, when it's not even seven o'clock in the morning?" Davenport asked.

"I thought you'd like to know," Virgil said.

"I would have, I guess, at nine-thirty," Davenport said. "But at seven o'clock-before seven o'clock-it's your problem."

"Thanks," Virgil said. "Listen, does that Sandy chick still work for you?"

"Part-time."

"Can I call her?" Virgil asked. "Get her to carry some water for me?"

"Yeah. Call me after nine, and I'll get you her cell number," Davenport said. "She goes to school in the morning."

"What about the media? What do I do about them?"

Davenport said, "Wear a fresh shirt, tell them that you're following up a number of leads but you're not able to talk about them for security reasons, that all state and local authorities are cooperating, and, uh, you expect a quick resolution to the case."

"Thanks, boss."

"Virgil, I didn't send you out there to be stupid. Handle it, handle the press, get back to me when you've got it figured out," Davenport said. "I'll monitor your activities on Channel Three."

IF VIRGIL was having a bad morning, it was nothing in comparison to Roman Schmidt's. The killer had pushed a forked stick into the dirt of the driveway and had pushed the fork rudely beneath Schmidt's ears, one tine of the fork on either side of his neck. It was enough to hold the sightless body upright, but the down pressure of the body, pulling on the stick, had forced his tongue out. Flies were crawling around his face, into the eye sockets and his mouth.

His legs were splayed, and his penis peeked out of the fly of his boxer shorts.

"That is brutal," Virgil said, standing with his hands in his jeans pockets. "The family here yet?"

"Not much family, not that we know of-maybe some cousins. They never had children."

Virgil and Stryker were fifteen feet from the body and Virgil could see heel grooves in the dew-soft soil of the parking area, where the body had been dragged from the house. "Where was he killed?" Virgil asked.

"Right at the back door," Stryker said. "The first shot took him low in the heart, out a little higher in back. It looks like somebody knocked on the door, was standing on the step, Roman opened the door and bam! He's dead. We know he opened the door because the slug didn't go through it. Gloria was in the bedroom. Looks like they'd been asleep awhile. Then, whoever did it, came and put the last two shots through his eyes. There are holes in the kitchen floor, inside the door."

The body was found by the newspaper deliveryman. Virgil was the fifth cop there: the two guys on the night patrol had come in first, Big Curly right behind him, because he lived only a mile away, and heard the call on his scanner, and then Stryker and Virgil. Now more cops were showing up, blocking off the yard, waving traffic through on the county highway. Crime scene running a bit late, but expected in the next several minutes.

"Any sign of resistance?"

"No, but that's not a sure thing. We cleared the house and then I got everybody outside, so's not to mess the place up," Stryker said.

Big Curly came over. "I barfed," he said.

"You okay?" Virgil asked.

"I knew them my whole life," Big Curly said. "They lived three doors down when I was growing up. I said hello to Roman or Gloria every day for fifty years."

"Maybe take a seat, get some coffee," Virgil said. "Not much to do until crime scene gets here."

"Okay," Big Curly said. He took a step, then turned, and said, "You know, Jim, Rome liked his guns. That drawer was open on his bedside table. I bet there was a weapon in there. If somebody came in late, while he was asleep, I bet he took his gun to the door with him. The killer might have picked it up."

Stryker nodded and Virgil said, "Good eye."

Curly went away and Virgil said, "You've been assuming that the killer is a guy-male."

"You think it's a woman?" Stryker's eyebrows went up.

"I had an open mind on the issue. These guys are old, and don't weigh much, but they were dragged. I'm thinking, now, Curly's right-it's a guy."

"Uh…"

"A strong woman could have dragged them, as long as she didn't worry about hurting them, which she wouldn't, because they were dead. But: take a guy from Schmidt's generation. He's up, he's got his gun, he goes to the door, sees who it is-recognizes him-and opens the door. Gets shot."

Stryker was puzzled. "A woman couldn't do that?"

"A woman could-but Roman wouldn't have opened the door with his dick sticking out of his shorts. He would have said, 'Hang on, let me get some pants on,' and he would have put something on, and then he would have opened the door."

Stryker looked at him for a minute, and then said, "Sometimes I suspect you're smarter than I am."

"Better ballplayer, too," Virgil said. "But where that leaves us, is right back at what you were assuming anyway. Not a major advance."

"SPEAKING OF major advances," Virgil said, "have you heard from Jesse?"

For a moment, the issue of Roman Schmidt flicked out of Stryker's eyes: "You sonofabitch, you've been messing with my love life."

"And…" Like Davenport.

"I appreciate it." Stryker started to laugh, remembered where he was, and choked it off. "She called me up last night and she said, 'Jimmy, you want a chance with me?' I said, 'Yes,' or something like that. I actually mumbled a lot, but the basic bottom line is, I was gonna take her to Tijuana Jack's tonight."

"It's off?"

"Of course it's off," Stryker said, looking sideways at Schmidt. "If I took her out tonight, and somebody from town saw me, I'd be dead meat, politically. That'd be the end of my job. They'll want me out there twenty-four/seven, driving the back roads, looking for Roman's killer."

Virgil looked around, making sure nobody would overhear them: "That's horseshit, Jim. Not that they wouldn't think it, but you're not gonna find the killer driving the back roads. You want some advice?"

Stryker shrugged. "Depends on what it is."

"Take her to Brookings. Or Marshall. That's what, an hour? Give you time to talk. Tell her straight out what's going on, why you've got to go so far. She seems pretty bright; she'll understand it. She'll understand that you're taking a risk for her."

"Gotta think about it," Stryker said.

"Just don't be too nice," Virgil said. "She likes edge. Mix up nice, with a little law-enforcement edge."

"That what you're doing with Joanie?"

"Joanie and I are operating on a higher level," Virgil said. "You're not. So do what I tell you." He looked back at Schmidt, sitting in the dirt, with the fork under his ears. "Isn't this the most fucked-up thing you've ever seen?"

"When I get this cocksucker, I'm gonna kill him," Stryker said.

"Atta boy," Virgil said. "Feel the burn."

A WHILE LATER, Virgil said, "I'm going back to town. As soon as your crime-scene people will let me inside, I want to know. Something in there might tell us what's going on. It'll be on paper, if there's anything. I don't think this guy is leaving any DNA behind."

"What's in town?"

"Historical research," Virgil said.

He drove back to town, parked, got his briefcase out of the car with his laptop, went to the newspaper office, and found a scrawled note Scotch-taped to the window: "Out on story, back later." The note looked like it had been written in a rush. He'd probably passed Williamson as the newspaperman headed to Schmidts', and he was coming in.

Frustrated, he rattled the doorknob, and to his surprise, it turned under his hand. He had a quick snapshot vision of Williamson lying on the floor, with two black holes where his eyes should be. He pushed in: the place was empty. He really needed to look at the files…

He reached back, pulled the taped note off the window, and let it fall to the floor. Hey, he never saw it, and the door was open. On the counter inside was a fresh stack of papers, with a coin box. The lead story was headlined NEW CLAIM FOR JUDD FORTUNE.

That would sell a couple papers, he thought.

Back in the morgue, he pulled clip files on every name he had in town: the Judds, the Gleasons, the Schmidts, the Stryker family, the Laymons, George Feur.

Judd's wife had been named Linda-and when she died, in 1966, the story must've been the biggest one in the paper that week, with a seventy-two-point headline. She'd been rushed to the hospital, the story said, but had been declared dead on arrival by a doctor named Long. An autopsy had been done, and found the cause of death to be an aortic aneurysm. The clip on the autopsy said that the coroner, Thomas McNally, declared that "once the aneurysm tore open, there was no possibility of survival. She bled to death within a minute or two."

Judd was characterized as "distraught."

That was not quite the story he'd gotten from Margaret Laymon, who remembered it as a heart attack, but it was close enough.

HE READ FORWARD in the Judd files, but after Linda Judd's death, it appeared to be mostly business news, and then the Jerusalem artichoke scandal.

He went back, looking through the huge collection of clips on Roman Schmidt, who had even more than Judd Sr., and found a few intersections with Russell Gleason. Gleason was occasionally cited as the coroner, apparently alternating with Thomas McNally. That hadn't been uncommon in country towns, Virgil knew, where local doctors took turns doing an unpaid extra duty.

Roman Schmidt and Gleason were cited together in fifteen or twenty highway accidents, an accidental gunshot death during deer season, a man who was killed by a deer, old people found dead at home, several drownings and infant deaths, one "miracle baby," a kid who'd stuck his arm in a corn picker and had bled to death, and several more gruesome farm accidents, including a man who'd been cut in half by an in-gear tractor tire, after the tractor rolled on him.

But Virgil couldn't find Judd's name in any of them.

The Laymon files he'd already seen, but there was nothing to indicate that Margaret Laymon had had a romance with Judd. Garber, the alcoholic schoolteacher, had no file at all; to his surprise, neither did Betsy Carlson, Judd's sister-in-law. Shouldn't there be a story at the time of the sister-in-law's death, since she was the witness? Or maybe, like Williamson had said, they only filed the most important names, and she just wasn't important enough. Have to ask, but it seemed strange.

The Stryker files were large: Mark Stryker's suicide was covered extensively, but most of the story detailed the family history before Mark. Laura Stryker was mentioned as working as an office manager at State Farm. Virgil checked files under "State Farm Insurance," and found that the local agency was owned by Bill Judd Sr.

Huh. Nobody had mentioned that. No way to tell from the clips when she began working there, or when she left…

THE ROOM WAS close and warm, and after a while, Virgil leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Let Homer out: worked on a little fiction.

Laura Stryker rolled away from Bill Judd, both covered with a sheen of sweat, gasping from the sex, and dropped her feet to the floor. No doubt about it: she was missing life with Mark. Nice guy, but not what she needed. "I'm going to tell him," she said, pulling up her underpants.

"Aw, don't do that. You know that we're not long for this. We're just fooling around, honey."

"Doesn't necessarily have everything to do with you, Bill. Has to do with me: and I'm telling him…"

Try again.

Mark Stryker, trembling with anger, rigid there in the kitchen, shaking: "I won't put up with it. I put up with shit all of my life, and I won't put up with this. I'll tell the kids, I'll tell your folks, I'll talk to anybody who'll listen. You're not leaving me, you're leaving Bluestem. You won't be able to walk down the street…"

"I wanted to be civilized…"

"Civilized, kiss my ass," Mark Stryker said, his voice rising, shrill. "This is the last time you'll ever see the kids. I'm not letting some whore come around to the farm…"

He turned and went outside, shouted back at her, "I knew what you were doing, whore. I knew…"

Laura, the anger rising in her, with the fear, hadn't thought about the kids; Mark was outside, looking up at the screen over the sink, still there, shouting. The gun was there, in the kitchen drawer, behind the towels, the clip in the next drawer, took only a second to slam the clip into the butt, jack a round into the chamber…the gun right there in her hand, hot, Mark in the yard…

"I killed him…I'm freaking out here, I killed him in the yard."

"Jesus Christ, Laura…"

"You fix this." Not weeping, but out of control. "You tell them it's suicide. I'm not going to lose the kids…"

"Jesus Christ, Laura…"

"You call Russ Gleason…you tell him…I know about his little abortion mill. You tell him that Mark committed suicide…"

Virgil yawned and opened his eyes. Fiction. But a story was going there, beginning to feel like something-at least he was pulling the dead people together.

And then he thought, what if this wasn't about the men? What if it was about the wives? What if Gloria Schmidt and Anna Gleason had been in bed with Judd, and now somebody was killing them, and the shooting of their husbands, through the eyes, was symbolic of some kind of blindness, or a looking-away…

What if Laura Stryker wasn't the perpetrator, but was the next target?

HE SAT in the morgue for two hours, altogether, typing notes into his laptop, thinking. Every few minutes, the outer door would rattle, he'd hear change go into the coin box, and the door would close again. Once, there'd been no change, and he'd been tempted to peek and see who it was, stealing a newspaper; but he stayed with the clips.

When he was finished, he knew a lot more than when he'd started, but nothing that seemed to connect with the murders. Everybody in town may have known that Judd was sleeping with local women, and sometimes in a pile of them, but it never got into the newspaper.

He took ten minutes to get the clips back in their envelopes, close down his computer. He walked back through the newspaper office, picked up the note on the floor, taped it back on the window, and went to his truck.

Laura Stryker.

HE CALLED JOAN: "Did you hear about Roman Schmidt?"

"I did." Her voice was hushed. "Virgil, this is god-awful. Completely aside from the fact that Jim is going to lose his job-it's god-awful all on its own."

"Well, if we catch the guy, Jim could still pull out of it," Virgil said.

"Gotta be soon," she said. "Do you have any ideas?"

"We were talking about going to Sioux Falls with your mom. Think I could take her right now?"

"I'll call her. Do you want me to come?"

He hesitated, then: "If you want."

"I'll call her. I'll get back to you in two minutes."

LAURA WAS happy to go. Virgil drove to Joan's house, rang the doorbell, and she waved him inside: "I just got here, I was out at the farm," she said. "I have to change into something that doesn't smell like dirt. Maybe take a really fast shower. I told Mom we'd be there in twenty minutes."

"Happy to wash your back," Virgil said.

"I need that," she said. "There's always that one spot right in the middle, it's been dirty for eight years now."

"What happened eight years ago?"

"That was the year before I got married," she said.

SHE WENT OFF down the hall to the back bedroom, yelled, "There's Coke in the refrigerator, there's instant coffee, you could make it in the microwave." He stirred around in the kitchen, looking it over, checking the refrigerator. She wasn't a foodie, that was for sure. She had about three knives, and most of the stuff in the refrigerator looked like it had been there for weeks.

A door in back closed: the bathroom? He got a Coke, went into the living room. An open door led into what might have been a small dining room, or television room, now converted to an office, with a desk, computer, and file cabinets. He saw a wall of family photos, stepped into the room and looked at them: found the same thin man in plaid pants in two of them, thought it might be her father.

But she and Jim must take after Laura, because Mark Stryker really was a slight figure, except that he had the same white-blond hair of his son and daughter…

Slid open a drawer in a file cabinet, listening for her, for a footstep, looked at some tabs-business and taxes-and pushed it shut.

Just being snoopy now, he thought. No good could come of it. He eased back into the living room, heard a door open: "Hey. Are you going to wash my back, or what?"