Dark of the Moon

12

VIRGIL OPENED his eyes: daylight.

He felt good, but a little stiff from sleeping on the floor.

Worried about the gunman, he'd taken the cushions off the couch, and had thrown them on the floor behind the bed, and put the pistol under the bed next to his hand. He didn't like the idea of sleeping through the night next to a sliding glass door. Joan was at her mother's. No point in taking a chance.

But he did feel good. Things were happening, and he was still alive.

Part of it was the absence of sex after the long naked interval in the pool. He'd tried to talk Joan into sneaking through the glass door into the Holiday Inn, but she turned him down: "Everybody in town would know before you got the curtain pulled. It's all right to sneak around and have sex, but it has to be creditably sneaky."

"Ah."

"My place," she said. "You could walk over in half an hour."

"I don't want you going to your place tonight. I was thinking…your mother's. You'd be close, but not where you'd have a target on you; he could be waiting for us to get back to your place…"

"Well, we're not doing anything at Mom's…"

So, they called it off.

Hands all over each other, parked three blocks from Mom's, like a couple of teenagers; and he dropped her.

And woke up feeling good. Maybe he could take a break from the hook-and-bullet magazines, and write a piece for Vanity Fair: "Violence: The New Aphrodisiac." But that wouldn't be right-it'd always been an aphrodisiac, as far as he could tell. Something primitive there…

Maybe, he thought, they should have stayed in the barn for a while, up in the hayloft.

When he was a teenager, there were locker-room fantasy stories-maybe one or two were true-of guys getting the farmer's daughter up in the hayloft. His best friend, Otis Ericson, had claimed to have nailed one of his girl cousins, Shirley, who was in their high school class, and even in eighth grade, had tits out to here.

In what Virgil assumed was nothing more than an effort at verisimilitude, the alleged fuckee warned Virgil against hay cuts, or hay rash: "And you sure as shit don't want to get any hay in her crack. She'll be bitching and moaning for a week. Take a blanket."

The thought that Otis Ericson might have actually gotten Shirley Ericson naked, in a hayloft, had, at the time, seriously turned him on; still did, a little, though the last time he saw Shirley, she'd sort of spread out.

LYING ON THE FLOOR, he looked at his watch: eight o'clock. Threw the cushions back on the couch, yawned, stretched, did his sit-ups and push-ups, cleaned up, and called Davenport.

"Still too early," Davenport said.

"I was shot at last night," Virgil said.

"Virgil! You okay?"

"Nothing but scared," Virgil said. "The shooter wasn't that good. Scoped rifle, I was up on a friend's farm, missed me by a couple of feet and I wasn't moving that fast."

"Tell me you had your gun," Davenport said.

"I had the gun. Saw him running, fired seven shots at maybe four hundred yards, chances of hitting him were zero…but…thought I should let you know. I'm pushing something here. I'm going to write some notes and e-mail them to you. Just in case."

"Goddamnit, Virgil, you take care," Davenport said. "You want help?"

"Just get me that paper that Sandy put together."

ON THE WAY to breakfast, the desk clerk said, "You've got mail," fished an envelope out of a desk drawer, and handed it to him. The address was typed; no return address. Mailed yesterday from Bluestem. He went on to the dining room, holding the envelope by its edges, slit it open with a butter knife, and slid the letter out.

You're barking up the wrong tree. Look at Bill Judd Jr.'s debt and think "estate tax." Look at Florence Mills, Inc.

That was it-no signature, of course, and the note was typed, not printed. Who'd still have a typewriter? Somebody old, like Gerald Johnstone, the funeral director. The stamp was self-sticking, so there'd be no DNA.

Estate tax? Florence Mills? Sounded like something more for Sandy to do, when she got back.

He finished breakfast, went back to his room for his briefcase, went out to the truck; went back to the room to get his gun, back to the truck; and headed out to the Stryker farm, past the farm, around behind the hill.

The far side of the hill, opposite the dell, had once been pastureland, before the countryside had emptied out, with the red quartzite right on the surface. There were clumps of wild plum and scrubby shrubs, thistle and open spaces with knee-high grass.

Virgil cruised the backside of the hill until he saw the truck tracks leading off-road. He turned off, bounced across a shallow ditch, and then ran parallel to the tracks, up the hill, to a copse of trees and bushes just below the crest of the hill. The tracks swerved around the copse, and ended. This was where the shooter had parked, out of sight from the road. He sat in the car for a minute, watching the road, and saw not another single vehicle; he was alone except for a red-tailed hawk, which circled the slope, looking for voles.

The hawk dropped, hit the ground, out of sight: breakfast. Virgil stepped out of the truck and looked at the tracks made by the shooter's vehicle. There were enough weeds and grass that any tread marks were hidden. He followed one of the tracks back down the hill, and never saw a clear print. Followed the other one back up, found nothing.

From the car park, looking up the hill, with the sun still at his back, he could see disturbed grass where the shooter had been. He got the shotgun out of the back of the truck, loaded it alternately with buckshot and solid slugs, jacked a shell into the chamber, and followed the trail to the top of the hill. A hundred yards over the crest, he could see the front lip of the pool, and the farther down the hill he went, the more of the pool he could see. The trail wasn't straight at this point. It moved between clumps of shrubs, which meant that he and Joan must've already been at the pool.

Another hundred yards, and he found the shooter's stand: a circle of crushed grass next to the broken-off and rotted stump of a small tree. If he'd rested the rifle on the stump, he'd have been able to see two-thirds of the pool. To see more, he would have had to go right up to the lip of the dell, without cover.

He checked around the nest: no brass. The guy had cleaned up after himself.

FROM VIRGIL'S VIEWPOINT, the dell, down below, didn't look like much: a crack in the landscape, with a wider spot, and a pool, near the bottom. He walked down, and when he got right on top of it, the character changed. Down here, the ground seemed to have been hit with a mammoth cleaver, carving a sharp trench right through the quartzite down to the pool.

If the shooter had been cooler, or braver, he could have waited until they were fooling around under the spring, out of sight, and then walked or crawled up to the back wall. From there he would have had them at sixty or seventy yards, and there would have been no place for Virgil and Joan to hide.

On the other hand, if they'd seen him sneaking down, and had gotten back to Virgil's gun and down the canyon, he'd have been screwed. In the folded, broken rocks of the canyon, a guy with a pistol could hold off a small army.

On that thought, Virgil took out his cell phone: he had a signal. You might not down in the dell, but you wouldn't know unless you were down there. Maybe the shooter had taken that into account. He could not allow somebody to see him, and walk away…

LOT TO THINK ABOUT. The day would be hot again. Another good day for the pool, but he wouldn't be swimming again until the killer was caught, or dead.

Virgil went back to the truck, shucked the shells out of the shotgun and put it away, and headed back to Roman Schmidt's place. Larry Jensen, Stryker's investigator, was there, with the crime-scene people. Virgil took Jensen aside.

"Where's Jim?"

"At the office. He said you'd probably show up and want to get in. We're just about done. Let me go talk to Margo."

"Okay. I got a note in the mail today, I was wondering if you could check it for fingerprints."

He explained, and gave Jensen the note and envelope, folded into a piece of hotel writing paper. Jensen read it, frowned. "Shoot. That's not a direction we've gone."

"Hardly had time," Virgil said. "Anyway, I'm on it. I've got a researcher up in St. Paul who can pull the corporate information, and I've got some income-tax forms coming in. If you could check this letter…"

"Wonder who uses a typewriter?"

"Somebody Roman's age," Virgil said.

MARGO CARR, the crime-scene specialist, showed him Schmidt's home office, a table made out of a wooden door, set across two filing cabinets. A computer, no typewriter. "Everything in here has been worked," she said.

"You think the killer was in here?"

"No. I think the killer shot Roman, shot Gloria, then came and shot Roman twice more, then dragged him outside and propped him up with a stick he'd already cut. I don't think he went anywhere in the house, off the line of the bedroom."

"Do you think he knew the inside of the house?" Virgil asked.

"Maybe. Or maybe Roman turned on a light in the bedroom and gave it all away."

"Find anything at all?"

"One thing," she said. She went back to a plastic trunk, opened it, and brought back a Ziploc bag with a cigarette filter in it. "Found this right by the back steps. Cigarette butt. I can figure out what kind, I'm sure, but I know it's a menthol-I can smell it. Wasn't rained on, so it's recent. The Schmidts didn't smoke."

He looked at the butt, and then at Carr: "You think?"

"I'm grasping for straws, here. That's what I got."

A MOMENT LATER, he was sitting at Roman's desk, his eyes closed, trying to remember: the pack of cigarettes next to George Feur's elbow, when Virgil interviewed him at his house. Salems? Virgil thought so. His visual image was of a green package, an aqua green…

His cell phone rang: Joan.

"How are you doing?" she asked.

"Not bad. I'm confused, but I'm looking pretty good," he said. "I might go out tonight, see if I can pick up some chicks."

"Good luck."

"Yeah. Anyway, I'm at Schmidt's. I've got something for you to think about: how many people, once they figured we were going out to the farm, would have known how to come down that slope to a place where they'd have a free shot at us?"

She thought for a moment, and then said, "Well, probably not everybody."

"Not everybody?"

"It's a fairly famous swimming hole, Virgil. Kids would park up on that hillside, up in the trees, then sneak in past the stock tank and go up the canyon and skinny-dip. I mean, if you didn't do that at least once in high school, and get laid up on that rock, you were nobody."

"How often did you do it?" he asked.

"We agreed not to talk about our histories," she said.

"No, we didn't."

"We have now," she said.

He offered to take her to the Dairy Queen, having exhausted the fine-dining possibilities at McDonald's.

"I'll order a pizza from Johnnie's," she said. "My place at four o'clock, we'll go back out to the farm. It's a great day. Be careful. And bring a better gun."

"You be careful."

VIRGIL DUG THROUGH the Schmidts' filing cabinet, which turned out to be a waste of time. He did learn that they were fairly affluent: Gloria had been an elementary-school teacher in Worthington-a friend of the alcoholic schoolteacher? Probably not, though: Gloria was most of a generation earlier, and would have taught in a different school. Wonder where the money came from? They had half a million dollars in a Vanguard account; but then, they'd had a long time to build it up.

The most interesting material was in Schmidt's computer. He had a dial-up account, and he had e-mail from Big Curly, and they were talking politics. Curly was looking for support for his son to run against Stryker in the next election.

Schmidt was talking, but wasn't eager to side with someone who might be a loser. "We better wait until we are close to the time, have a better idea of what the opportunities are," he wrote back in one of the notes. But he didn't say no.

Sitting there, looking at the Schmidt material, Virgil started thinking about the letter he'd given to Larry Jensen. How many people knew what tree he was barking up? The banker, of course, and anyone he might have gossiped with.

And the Johnstones.

"That damn picture," he said aloud. Had the photograph somehow generated the note?

STYMIED at the Schmidts'-there was nothing right on the surface, and a full analysis of all the Schmidts' financial transactions would take a lot of time. He heard people knocking around in the back of the house, and gave up. Back another day, if nothing else popped up.

He went out through the kitchen, saw Big Curly, Little Curly, and a deputy he didn't know, standing in the yard with Jensen. He waved and said, "I'm outa here."

"Anything?" Jensen asked.

"We need an accountant," Virgil said.

"Yeah…"

He'd be back to Schmidts', Virgil thought, to see if somebody erased that e-mail about the election…if somebody would mess with evidence at a murder scene. Be an interesting thing to know.

ON THE WAY into town, he saw another hawk circling, like the one he'd seen out at the farm, and that made him think of the shooting, and the slope, and the farm, and skinny-dipping, and the whole question of why the shooter hadn't come closer and taken the sure shot.

And how he'd missed by two feet at three hundred yards. Of course, it wasn't that hard to miss by two feet. But if you had the rifle sitting on a stump, the shot should have been closer than that.

He thought about that for a minute and then slowed, pulled to the side of the road, and called up the Laymon place. Jesse picked up the phone: "Hello?"

She did have a nice whiskey voice, Virgil decided. "This is Virgil," he said. "I'm calling on behalf of Jim's sister, who's reluctant to gossip with you. But did we see you guys up in Marshall last night? About seven? We had to dodge a restaurant because she was sure it was you guys."

"Not us. We went over to Sioux Falls," Jesse said.

"Ah, shoot. So I ate pizza while you guys were doing surf 'n' turf. You pay? Being a rich woman?"

She laughed, and said, "No, I didn't. And really, why are you calling? You're sneaking up on something."

"I am not," Virgil said cheerfully. "Honest to God, this is nothing but the purest gossip. I personally took his beautiful sister up to the Stryker Dell late last night. You guys coulda come along."

"I don't think so," she said. "Skinny-dipping with your sister? Jim's waaaaayyy too straight for that."

"Didn't think of that," Virgil said. "I'd be, too, if I had a sister…So'd you have a good time?"

"Yes, I did. He's just like a puppy," Jesse said. "But he pays attention to me."

"Told you, that you might like it," Virgil said. "I was afraid he wasn't going to make it at all, with the Schmidt case. I couldn't see how he'd be out of there before eight o'clock, and everything around here closes up at nine."

"No problem," she said. "He just dumped what he was doing and came over; that's what he said, anyway. We were in Sioux Falls by eight-thirty."

"Ah, well…so now I come to the real reason I called," Virgil said.

"I knew it…"

"I haven't been able to catch him this morning," Virgil said. "He isn't there, is he?"

"Virgil!"

"Sorry, honey, I need to find him."

"I don't sleep with guys on the first date," she said. "Not at home. Most of the time, anyway."

"Suppose that leaves something for him to look forward to," Virgil said. "Don't tell him I called and asked you this, or he'd probably beat the snot out of me."

THEY CHATTED for another minute, then he closed the phone. All right: if they'd been in Sioux Falls at eight-thirty, Stryker picked her up at eight, and would have been available to do the shooting. Why? That was another question, but knowing who was available was a step in the right direction.

Though he really, really didn't think Stryker had anything to do with it.

Really.

HE STOPPED AT the courthouse, found Stryker leaning in the window at the assessor's, chatting with a clerk. He straightened when he saw Virgil, and Virgil asked, "You got a minute?"

"Yup." As they walked away from the assessor's desk, Stryker said, "Larry called me, said you got a letter this morning…"

They went into Stryker's office and closed the door, and Virgil sat in a visitor's chair and grinned and said, "I don't know how to exactly approach this particular report…"

"Spit it out."

"A friend of mine from here in town…"

"Joanie…"

"…and I decided to go for a swim last night, and she knew this famous local swimming hole…"

Stryker's eyebrows went up. "You went skinny-dipping up at the dell? With my baby sister?"

"Yeah."

"Do any good?"

"Somebody with a rifle ambushed us," Virgil said.

He was watching Stryker's face, and Stryker's smile died so naturally that it seemed impossible that he already knew. "What!"

"Two shots, from up on that hillside. Trying to hit me, not Joanie," Virgil said.

"Virgil…"

"I hit a nerve someplace," Virgil said.

"Holy shit, man." Stryker bucked up in his chair, the wheels skittering over the plastic floor-protecter. "You gotta stay away from Joanie until this is over. Jesus, he coulda killed both of you. Like shooting sitting ducks, down in there…"

"Yeah. I've been trying to figure out why he missed. Maybe just a bad shot," Virgil said.

They talked about it for a couple of minutes, then Virgil said, "They're not after Joanie, whoever it is. I think…I gotta run down the letter from this morning. Are you looking at prints?"

"Yeah, they're doing the glue thing right now…"

"All right." Virgil pushed out of his chair. "I got one more thing-I tell you because you're a friend. I was going through Roman Schmidt's e-mail this morning. Big Curly was trying to get Schmidt to support Little Curly in a run against you this fall. They were talking back and forth, going over the possibilities."

Stryker rubbed his chin with his forefinger: "Doesn't surprise me," he said. "What'd Roman have to say?"

"He suggested that they don't do anything until they get closer to the election, see which way the wind is blowing. Didn't say no."

VIRGIL WAS WALKING back to his car when a tall, older man in a white straw hat yelled at him. "Hey! Mr. Flowers…"

Virgil waited by his truck as the man cut across the street and came up to him. He was gray haired, weathered, wiry, in jeans and a golf shirt. "I'm Andy Clay, I live up by the Johnstones? And, you know, where the Gleasons used to live?"

"Yeah, how are you?"

"Fine. Well, maybe not," Clay said. "I want to tell you something, just between you and me, and maybe ask a question."

"No problem."

"I saw you at the Johnstones' yesterday. Everybody in town knows who you are, now," Clay said. "Anyway, later on, I was down at the gas station, getting gas for my mower, and Carol pulls up in their Lexus truck. She doesn't even say 'hi,' she just starts filling it up and washing the windshield and she looks like she's in a hurry. So I went on back up the hill, and I'm gassing up the mower and here comes Carol in the Lexus. She parks in the driveway instead of the garage, and then here comes Gerald out the front door with a big bag, and he throws it in the truck. Then they both go back inside and then they come out with a couple more bags-I'm mowing the lawn by this time-and then she locks the door, and they take off."

"Take off?" Virgil asked. "You mean, like getting out of town?"

"Unless they were donating a bunch of suitcases to the Goodwill," Clay said. "The thing is, they've got these timer lights, that turn the lights on and off when they're gone? Well, everybody up there knows about them, and they were going last night. One comes on here, another goes off there. Then the first one goes off, and the second one comes on. You know. It's almost like a signal: The Johnstones are gone."

"Huh," Virgil said. He thought about it for a moment, then said, "So what's the question?"

"We were talking about it last night, up on the hill," Clay said. "Should we all get out?"

THE FUCKIN' JOHNSTONES, Virgil thought as he went back to the motel.

Too late to get the highway patrol to drag them back. Gerald Johnstone knew something about the picture of the dead woman, and Virgil needed to know what it was.

Time for threats, now-if he could find them. Didn't they say something about visiting a daughter in Minneapolis?

He called Davenport. "I got a couple of people who may be running. Not the killers, but they know something. If Jenkins and Shrake are sitting on their asses…"

He explained and told Davenport that he didn't know the daughter's name. "We can probably find it in the vital records," Davenport said. "I'll get the guys on it. They've been restless."

"Well, Jesus, don't let them beat these people up," Virgil said. "These are old people."

"You mean, we should only beat up young people?" Davenport asked. "There are as many old assholes as there are young ones. Especially since the boomers got old."

"Yeah, well…I'd just as soon my witnesses didn't die of a heart attack. Tell them to take it easy. No kicking."

"I thought you wanted them scared," Davenport said.

"A little scared," Virgil said. "Not too scared."

AT THE MOTEL, the desk clerk had three cardboard boxes, sealed with tape, stashed behind the counter: "A guy brought them in a half hour ago. He said they were from St. Paul."

They felt like boxes of bricks. Virgil hauled them to his room and unloaded the stacks of paper. Too much stuff, but it had to be looked at. Some of it, anyway.

Before he started on it, he called Davenport again, got a name, called a guy at the secretary of state's office, and found that he could look at all current corporate records, online, including the confidential files, if he had a password. "I'll set you up with a temporary password: chuzzlewit," said the guy, whose name was Martin. He spelled the password. "That'll be good through next Wednesday. If you need another one, call me up again."

"What's a chuzzlewit?"

"It's a word unlikely to be figured out by some little hacker-geek between now and Wednesday," Martin said.

SO VIRGIL, reluctant to start on the pile of paper, pulled out his laptop, stared at it for a moment. A problem had been pecking at the back of his mind for a day or so, and he put in the disk that Stryker had given him on the first day, the one with the paperwork on the Gleason killing. Included with everything else were a couple of hundred jpg photographs of the crime scene. He combed over them for a half hour, then, satisfied, said, "Huh."

No Revelation, as far as he could see.

THEN HE WENT online with the secretary of state's office and searched for Florence Mills, Inc.

Florence Mills, according to the information in the original filing, had been created three years earlier to "build, buy, or lease facilities for the production of corn-based and switchgrass-based ethanol as a renewable fuel," a joint venture between Arno Partners, a limited liability company registered in Delaware, and St. John Ventures, of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Not much there. He had a feeling that the Delaware company would be hard to check. Delaware was an easy place to set up a corporation, requiring minimal information, and a stickler for legal procedures when you wanted to mine their corporate records.

Idaho, he thought, might be easier, and it was: called the Idaho secretary of state's office, was told how to look at online public records, and with a certain sense of what he'd find, looked up St. John Ventures: George Feur, chief executive officer and chairman.

He called Stryker: "What happened with Judd Sr.'s office? Did you seal it up, or what?"

"Yup. Couldn't say for sure that Junior didn't get in there, though. They're right next to each other. If there was a big pot of cash or something…"

"I need to get in," Virgil said. "Right now."

"I'll walk down. Meet you there in ten."

JUDD'S OFFICE included a small outer waiting room with a secretary's desk, a side room with a Xerox machine, a printer and a half-dozen file cabinets, and a large inner office with leather chairs, dark-wood paneling, and a new wide-screen television sitting on top of a bar. The newspaper office was on one side, and Judd Jr.'s office on the other; they hadn't seen either the newspaper editor or Junior when they unlocked Judd Sr.'s office.

Stryker locked the door behind them and Virgil said, "Not too much light. Just the inner office and the file room. I'd just as soon that not everybody in town knows that we're here."

"Probably know anyway," Stryker said, gloomily. He was discouraged by the results of the Schmidt investigation: "Nothing's coming up, man. What about you? Anything working?"

"The letter this morning implied that Bill Judd Jr. has money problems, and mentioned Florence Mills," Virgil said. "It supposedly was set up to make ethanol out of corn and switchgrass-and it's half owned by George Feur."

"Feur?"

"Yeah. I can't find out who owns the other half, because that half is owned by a Delaware corporation. We could probably find out next week, but it's too late today. We're gonna need some papers, and it's already two o'clock on the East Coast. I'm thinking that if the Judds are involved with Feur, and…I don't know. There's something going on there."

"Ethanol? Shoot, it could be another goddamn Jerusalem artichoke scam. There's the same kind of gold-rush thing going on…the people who got killed weren't only old, they were mostly pretty well-off. Could have been investors in another scam."

"Yeah. Even the Schmidts. They had half a million in Vanguard." Virgil thought for a second, and then asked, "Is Larry Jensen still out there?"

"Yeah."

"Get him to check the Vanguard statements. There should be monthly statements, like with a checking account. See if there've been any big withdrawals in the past three years. Not like for a car…bigger than that."

"I'll call now."

While he went to call, Virgil began going through Judd's files, looking for anything involving Arno Partners or Florence Mills. Stryker came back: "Larry'll check. What are we looking for?"

"Arno Partners, A-R-N-O, or Florence Mills. If you could crack open his computer, run a search on either name…"

"Why don't I do the files, you do the computer. You gotta be better at computers than I am…"

JUDD'S COMPUTER wasn't password-protected and had almost nothing on it other than Microsoft Word, with automatic formatting of letters and envelopes with Judd's return address and a letterhead. Nothing at all in the documents file. The e-mail file hadn't even been set up. A fancy typewriter, Virgil thought.

He was closing it down when he caught sight of the secretary's machine in the outer office: non-networked, both freestanding.

"Judd still have a secretary?" he asked Stryker, who was sitting on the floor of the file room.

"Yup. Amy Sweet. We told her to go on home and to send the probate lawyer a bill for her last week of work."

"Gotta talk to her," Virgil said. He dropped behind the secretary's desk, booted up the computer. More files, this time. He ran a search on Arno and one on Florence Mills, and the Florence Mills search kicked out a half-dozen documents.

"Got Florence Mills," he called to Stryker. He opened the documents, one at a time: payments to High Plains Ag amp; Fleet Supply, in Madison, South Dakota. Stryker came to look over his shoulder: "Sonofabitch," he said, reaching past Virgil to tap the screen, a payment for one thousand gallons of Bernhard Brand AA. "Look at this."

"I don't know what that is," Virgil said.

"Anhydrous ammonia. They've got an ethanol plant somewhere, and they're buying AA. I mean, it could be legitimate if they're growing, as well as cooking, but I'll tell you what I think: I think they're manufacturing methamphetamine, bigger than life."

"Ah, man," Virgil said.

Stryker: "I checked Feur with the NCIC. He's had some run-ins with the law, since he got out, but they were all bullshit. You know, disorderly conduct for protests, that sort of thing. Nothing hard, like dope."

"Sit tight," Virgil said. He got on his phone, called Davenport. "You told me once if I ever needed anything really bad from the federal government, you've got a guy high enough up to get anything."

"Maybe," Davenport said. "I'd hate to burn up a favor on an errand, though."

"Call him. Tell him to go to the DEA and see if there's anything on a George Feur-any possible connection to methamphetamine distribution through one of those fascist white supremacist convict groups. I need it just as fast as you can get it."

"You break it?"

"Maybe; not what I thought, though," Virgil said.

"I'll have him dump it to your e-mail, if there's anything," Davenport said.

VIRGIL TO STRYKER: "Do you know any accountants that you can trust, who don't work for Judd?"

"One…"

CHRIS OLAFSON ran a bookkeeping, financial planning, and accounting service out of a converted house on the west side of town. Stryker swore her to secrecy: "This is about the murder investigation," he said. "Virgil has a hypothetical question for you…"

"Go ahead." She was a bright-eyed, busy, overweight woman, of the kind that drip efficiency.

"If you had a rich father-a millionaire, I don't know how many millions-and you borrowed a lot of money from him, over the years, how would that complicate your inheritance?" Virgil asked.

She knitted her fingers together and said, "That depends. Did the father gift any money to Junior…to his son?"

They all smiled at each other, acknowledging the fact that she knew who they were talking about, and Virgil said, "I don't know. What do you mean, gift?"

She gave them a short course in the estate tax. When she was done, she asked, "So, hypothetically, how bad is Junior screwed?"

Virgil rubbed his head. "We'd have to get down some exact numbers to know that," he said. "I've got some tax records down at the motel…but they're all bureaucratic bullshit. So…I don't know if he's screwed at all."

"He's not a real good businessman," Olafson said brightly. "They should have had an estate plan. Does anybody even know where all of Judd's money is? Was it in trusts, or what? Did the killer burn down the house to get rid of planning documents?"

"We don't know any of that stuff," Stryker said.

"Maybe I ought to run for sheriff," she said.

"Get in early, avoid the rush," Stryker said.

THEY BOTH STOOD, and Olafson said, "Sit back down for a minute. Would you like Cokes? I want to give you my hypothetical."

"We're in a bit of a hurry," Virgil said.

"Take you five minutes," she said. "Cokes?"

They both took a Coke, and Olafson said, "Suppose Bill Judd had a big tank of money somewhere, that nobody knew about but his son. Like money and interest from the Jerusalem artichoke scam."

Stryker started to say something, but she held up a finger. "Suppose Judd Senior starts to fail, first mentally, and then physically, and it looks like he's about to die. Once he's dead, any money taken from the account could only be taken by fraud. And the fraud would be pretty visible: the bank says money was taken out on August first, but lo, Judd was dead three weeks before that. Even Junior's smarter than that.

"In the meantime, the son goes to his accountants, and they say, 'It's really bad. You've been gifted right up to the limit, so the whole estate is exposed to taxes. Plus, you're so far in debt to him that you're going to owe money to the state and federal government and they are going to foreclose you. You can't even go bankrupt, because bankruptcy doesn't wipe out back taxes.' So what do you do?"

Virgil shrugged: "It's your hypothetical."

"So the old man is failing mentally, and you're down there in his business office, and you know about this big tank of money. You know the codes, or you have the checkbooks, that you need to transfer money to the old man's bank account…and the old man is so far gone mentally, he won't see it. You couldn't give it to yourself, because that would either be fraud, or more debt, and it would all be on paper. But if you were willing to forge his signature, if you gave that money to a business that the old man supposedly owned-even if he was too far gone to know that he owned it-and if you had a way to take that money back out of his business, whatever it was, say, for services that were never performed…"

"You're saying he was embezzling from his old man."

"I'm not saying that. I'm saying that if I'm elected sheriff this fall, I'll look into it."

"Suppose he was pouring money into a corn-ethanol plant?" Virgil said.

She shook her head: "The government would take the plant, and any profits should show up in tax filings. You have to remember: you have all this paper-checks and banks, purchases and sales. The government won't believe you, if you say that you lost it."

"Suppose the profits coming out of the plant were hidden?"

"What I'm trying to tell you is, you can't hide it. Not very well. The feds would do the books," she said. "They're good at books."

"Suppose the plant was making two products. The above-ground books worked out to the penny. The underground stuff, there were no books at all. You know, like they make a hundred thousand gallons of ethanol, sell ninety thousand, claim they only made ninety thousand, and sold the other ten thousand gallons as over-the-bar vodka, two bucks a quart, underground."

"Then, if nobody gave you up, you'd make some money," she said. "But the distribution network, the low unit value of the product, would hardly make it worth the risk. Somebody would talk, and there you are on tax evasion."

VIRGIL TOOK STRYKER outside and asked, "You think she can be seriously trusted? No gossip?"

"She's been an accountant here for twenty years, since she got out of school-you couldn't get one word out of her about how anybody spent a nickel," Stryker said. "And nobody'll get a word out of her about what we were talking about. She's like a Swiss bank."

Virgil said, "I got a lot of paper in from St. Paul. Tax records, corporate stuff, stuff I took out of the bank. It really needs an accountant-somebody who can work it overnight."

"Ask her," Stryker said. "You'll have to pay her-but there's no question about trusting her."

"We can pay her. We need the analysis."

THEY WENT BACK to Olafson, and she agreed to do it: "Too many people dead. Of course I'll do it. I'll even give you my state rate-overtime, of course, rush job."

"And that would be…"

"Hundred and ten dollars an hour," she said.

Sounded like a lot, but then, it was only for eight or ten hours: "It's a deal. I'll go get the paper, you type up an agreement and I'll sign it."

BACK OUT ON the sidewalk, Stryker said, "If you're supposedly developing an ethanol plant, but what you're really doing is using the plant to buy bulk chemicals to manufacture methamphetamine-I mean, we're not talking about a coffeepot on a stove somewhere; we're talking about tons of it. The profits wouldn't be two dollars a quart. The profits would be astronomical. You'd need quite a bit of up-front money…"

"From the Judd money bin. And you'd need a distribution network."

"From Feur, if he's really involved in it."

They looked at each other, and Virgil said, "Let's check back at the hotel. Maybe Davenport's guy got me something."

DAVENPORT'S GUY WAS Louis Mallard, who was something large in the FBI. He sent along a single paragraph: "A Rev. George Feur of the first Archangelus Church of the Revelation was one of a number of people under surveillance in Salt Lake City and in Coeur d'Alene for his association with extremist antigovernment groups like the Corps. The Corps was known to distribute drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamine, to finance its activities and for the purchase of weapons. Surveillance was terminated after three months with no evidence of Feur's involvement in illegal activities, although he had extensive connections with people who were involved in illegal activities."

"That's it," Stryker said. "He's involved. He's got the connections."

"What about Roman Schmidt and the Gleasons?" Virgil asked.

"I don't know about the Gleasons-except that they had some contact with Feur. There was that Book of Revelation. Maybe they were investors. Roman…"

"What?"

"Roman was pals with Big and Little Curly," Stryker said. "Guess who patrols west county?"

"Big and Little Curly?"

"That's their country out there," Stryker said. "They know it like nobody else. If you were moving a lot of meth around, it'd be useful to have a lookout with the sheriff's department."

"Hate to think it," Virgil said.

"So would I," Stryker said. "I'd rather lose the election than find that out."

THEY SAT STARING at the laptop screen for a couple of minutes, then Virgil asked, "What're you doing tonight?"

"Thought I'd go see Jesse," Stryker said. "I've got something going, there. I don't know…but the case comes first. What do you have in mind?"

"I don't want to talk to the Curlys. I'm thinking we might want to do some trespassing. Feur and Judd have the ethanol plant over in SoDak, so what's his farm all about? What I'm thinking is, it's the distribution center. He's way out in the countryside, he has those religious services, there are strangers coming and going from all over the place, not unexpected with that kind of church…might be when they move the stuff. Lots of guys in trucks."

"If we're gonna do it, best to do it late," Stryker said, looking at his watch. "It's almost four, now."

"I wouldn't ask, but I'd be a little worried going out there without some backup," Virgil said.

"Wait until the town goes to sleep…and move," Stryker said. "Meet me at my place at one in the morning?"

"See you then. You might bring some serious hardware," Virgil said.

Stryker nodded. "I'll do that. Feur's boys have some heavy weapons out there."

"One good thing," Virgil said, after another minute.

"What's that."

"You'll still get to see Jesse."

"She's got me if she wants me," Stryker said. He seemed puzzled by it all. "I looked in her eyes last night, in that candlelight, and I thought my heart was gonna explode."

"Where're you going tonight?" Virgil asked.

Stryker shrugged: "I don't know. Jesus, thinking of someplace interesting just about kills you. I can't take her out to the club. I'm afraid to go to Tijuana Jack's or anyplace in Worthington-it's just too close, and I really don't want to be seen out on the town. Not yet."

"Life sucks, then you die."

"Easy on the die stuff," Stryker said. "I'm a little nervous about sneaking up on Feur."