Dark of the Moon

16

Saturday night, nowhere to go.

He thought about calling Davenport, but he'd been leaning on Davenport too hard, and decided to let it go. Instead, he checked into the St. Paul Hotel, put on a fresh pair of jeans, a Flaming Lips T-shirt, buffed up his boots, and headed over to the Minnesota Music Cafe for a couple of beers.

Bumped into Shrake, who was there with a big-haired secretary from the Department of Agriculture; she said she dated him because he had a big gun. Then Shrake wanted to know what happened with the Johnstones, and a couple of St. Paul cops came over, and Virgil danced with a woman who had a butterfly tattoo around her navel. He'd gone back for a third beer when a woman's hand slipped into his back jeans pocket and a familiar voice said, "I'd know that little butt anywhere."

He turned and said, "Goddamn, Jeanie. How've you been?"

She said, "Okay," and to a girlfriend, she said, "This is my first ex-husband, Virgil Flowers. I'm either his second or third ex-wife, I forget which."

"Be nice," Virgil said. He looked her over and she did look okay: prosperous, even. "Still in real estate?"

She rolled her eyes: "Yes. Shouldn't admit it, the way it's fallen out of bed, but…nothing like selling a house. Makes me feel good."

So they chatted awhile, and he started remembering some of the better times they'd had, and then she patted him on the chest and said, "Guess what? I might get married again."

"Hey…great, man," Virgil said. "Anybody I know?"

"No, no. He's at Wells Fargo, a vice president in the mortgage department. Known him for years."

"And he's available because…"

She shrugged. "His marriage broke up. Same old stuff. Everybody works, nobody talks."

"He got kids?" Virgil asked.

"Two; but he'd like a couple more."

"Does he dance?"

She laughed: "Not like you, Virgil. He does, but like a banker."

"Ouch."

Pretty good time, all in all, and he danced with the girlfriend a couple of times, and at one o'clock in the morning, a little drunk, rolled into bed at the hotel, all alone.

Thought about God for a while.

Sunday NOT EXACTLY HUNGOVER, but a little lonely. He got cleaned up, got breakfast, checked out of the hotel, and drove over to the Historical Society. The library was closed. He called around, and the duty officer, which was not her title, but what she did, led him to the microfilm machines, and got him the missing roll of microfilm.

He spooled through it, found the paper that came out on July 24, the first one after the man-on-the-moon party, and there it was.

A "miracle baby" was delivered to a twenty-nine-year-old Minneapolis woman moments before she died at the Bluestem Memorial Hospital emergency room Sunday night after an automobile accident on Buffalo Ridge.

Margaret (Maggie) Lane of 604 Washington Avenue, Minneapolis, apparently lost control of her car as she was leaving a "man on the moon" party at the home of William Judd Sr. Witnesses say the car plunged over the Buffalo Jump bluff after leaving the driveway fifty yards below the Judd house.

An autopsy revealed.07 percent blood alcohol, below the legal limit, and Judd said that "Maggie had only a glass of wine or two during the party."

"This is an awful tragedy," Judd said. "She was a warm, interesting woman and nobody ever had a thing bad to say about her."

Stark County sheriff Roman Schmidt said that deputies interviewed all the partygoers, and were satisfied that Lane's death was accidental. "She'd only been to the Judd house a couple of times. She wasn't legally drunk, but she may have had enough that she became confused as she was leaving, and turned the wrong way as she came over the shoulder of the hill," Schmidt said.

A witness called the volunteer fire department, and a rescue squad reached the car within ten minutes. Lane was taken to the emergency room, where Dr. Russell Gleason delivered a healthy 7-pound, 4-ounce full-term baby even as the boy's mother was dying of extensive and what Gleason called "surely fatal" brain injuries.

The baby will be remanded to the care of Minnesota child-protective services…

There was one bad photograph of the wrecked car sitting at the base of the bluff. The picture had been taken with a flash of some kind-were flashbulbs still used by news photographers in 1969? There were a few white faces in the background, unrecognizable, and three cops close to the car. One of them was a young Big Curly.

THE NEXT PAPER came out on July 31, and oddly, Virgil thought, there was no mention of the Miracle Baby. Not a single word. In his hometown, he thought, there would have been recurring stories for a month.

He went to the dailies at Worthington and Sioux Falls, and found stories similar to that from the Bluestem Record. But the dailies were farther away, and the death happened the same day of the first manned landing on the moon, and so was tucked away in the back of the papers.

He thought about it for a while, then called Stryker, and told him about the story. "You know, I've never heard that," Stryker said. "You would have thought I'd have heard it. I mean, it'd be something that people talked about."

"Got drowned out by the noise from the moon landing," Virgil said. "So go over to the hospital, and find out what happened to the kid. I mean, kick somebody's ass off the golf course, and find out where he went."

"I'll do that."

VIRGIL HUNG OUT at the Historical Society for a while, looking at an exhibit on early photography, all those Civil War guys with white eyes and stolid faces. Stryker called back: "Nothing there. I mean, there's something there, but it's nothing. The child was turned over to protective services on August second. That's it. You'll have to work it from that end."

"And it's Sunday."

Stryker: "Wonder what's happening with the DEA?"

"That's what I'm wondering. If I stay up here, and it goes down tomorrow, I could miss it."

"Well…get the research chick to work it," Stryker suggested. "Get back here. I've been thinking about it, and it's all Feur. No mystery, no weirdness. Just Feur."

"Give me the logic," Virgil said.

"We've got a series of huge crimes, murders," Stryker said. "Then we find out there's a professional criminal, right in our backyard, selling dope all over the country, and he's been doing it for years. Back at the beginning, he needed seed money to get started, and he needed a way to hide the operation. That's about the time all these little farmer-sponsored ethanol plants were popping up. This crime we know about, with Feur, involves some of the same people involved in the others: the Judds. I don't know how you tie the Gleasons in, but I could see a reason for Roman Schmidt: Schmidt was monitoring the cops through the Curlys. The Curlys might not even have known about the rest of it. You say Schmidt was willing to cover up a murder, take money for it. When you've done it once, you'll do it again. In fact, the Judds might even have pulled him into it."

"I don't know," Virgil said. "If somebody had to kill the Gleasons, they could have done it in a quiet way. Kill them, but don't pose them. Try to make it look like a murder-suicide. Something…But the way it was done, was nuts."

"Got your head up your ass, Virgil. It's Feur."

Virgil scratched his nose, made the call: "I'm coming back."

HE WAS BACK by five o'clock, having stopped in Mankato to check his mail, pay bills, and run a load of laundry through the washer and dryer. Before he left home, he went into his closet and took out his third-most-favorite deer rifle, a Browning Lightweight Stalker semiauto in.30-06, an extra magazine, and a box of cartridges. The rifle wasn't as accurate as his best bolt action, but it was as accurate as he was, and could put some heavy metal on a target in a big hurry.

Heading west, into the sun, he could feel some kind of climax just over the horizon: too many things going on, not to have something shake loose.

THAT NIGHT, they went out to Barnet's Supper Club in Sioux Falls, five of them-Stryker and Jesse Laymon, Virgil and Joan, and Laura Stryker. There was one tough moment on the way over, when Laura told Jesse that she should get Stryker to take her up swimming at the dell some hot night.

Jesse giggled and admitted that they'd already been. Then Joan and Virgil had to spontaneously join in teasing Stryker, and they pulled it off. And then the three women began working on Virgil and Stryker. Something was up with the case, they knew, but Virgil and Stryker weren't talking.

Later that evening, Virgil was looking at the jukebox when Laura Stryker came by, on the way back to their table from the women's room, and she stopped and asked, "Are you and Joanie going to get serious? You look like it."

"Not that serious," Virgil said. "She gave me a little talk. I'm not husband material. I'm her transition guy."

"Damn it. I need a grandchild," Laura said. "I want to be around long enough that my grandchild can remember his grandmother."

"You've got a few years," Virgil said.

"I've got enough years to be a great-grandmother," Laura said. "But one side of the family stops when Joan's clock runs out. I think Jim and Jesse…I think I've got something going there."

They both turned and looked at Joan, who was leaning across their table, making a point to Stryker and Jesse. "She'll be okay," Virgil said. "I'm her transition guy, but I wouldn't be surprised if she has somebody picked out, on the other side of the transition zone."

"I hope so," Laura said, "or I'd suggest that you go ahead and knock her up."

Before they left, Virgil went out in the parking lot and called Sandy, Davenport's researcher, who'd just gotten back from a weekend trip. "Goddamnit, honey, you picked a bad time to go away. I need you to get some stuff for me tomorrow morning, and I need you to rain fire and brimstone on anybody who stands in your way. A woman named Margaret Lane, also known as Maggie, was killed in an auto accident on July 20, 1969…"

He gave her the rest of the details and said, "Find that kid."

Monday VIRGIL WOKE UP in Joan's bed. She was lying flat on her back, her head cocked off to one side, and a less charitable man might have said that she was snoring, if only softly. She was wearing a T-shirt as a nightgown and had pushed down the sheet. He pulled it up to her chin, then slipped out of his side of the bed, yawned, stretched, did some sit-ups and push-ups, as quietly as he could, then got his clothes and walked naked down the hall to the bathroom. He used her toothpaste, which was a cinnamon-flavored gel, and scrubbed his teeth with his index finger. When he came back down the hall, pulling yesterday's shirt over his head, she cracked her eyes and said, "I'm not getting up yet."

"That's okay." He looked at his watch. "Seven forty-five. I'm heading back to the motel. Call you later?"

"Call me later," she said, and closed her eyes and snuggled into the bed. He pulled on his boots, lifted the sheet, looked at her ass, said, "Masterpiece," and went on out the door. A neighbor was fooling with his sprinkler system, and when Virgil came off her porch, he raised a hand and called, "How're ya doin' Virgil?"

"Doin' good," Virgil said.

"I bet you are," the neighbor said, with cheerful, barefaced envy.

AT THE MOTEL he cleaned up, chose a Decemberists T-shirt, which he saved for days that he felt might be decisive, and called Sandy.

"Jeez, Virgil, I hardly got started. The baby was processed through the Good Hope adoption service, which seems like it might not exist anymore. I'm trying to find out what happened to their records. I'm also working it the other way, through child-protective services."

"Call me the minute you get anything: I want to know every step of the way."

She called back in ten minutes, as Virgil was sitting in the restaurant, eating pancakes and link sausage. "I've got something, but it's not specific yet."

"What is it?"

"It's the list of child-protective-service adoption actions through the district court. I can't get the files themselves, without jumping through my butt-which I'm willing to do, but there are dozens of them, and I've only got one butt."

Virgil was shocked: "Sandy, you don't talk that way."

"I'm a little cranky this morning," she said. "Anyway, what I can get, without permission, is the file headers, which I can pull up on my computer. These are the names of the adoptive parents. They're organized by year, and there are…let me see…about a hundred and seventy files for 1969. If the adoptions are randomly distributed through the year, and I don't see why they wouldn't be, the adoption of Baby Boy Lane would have taken place in the last half of the year, and probably the last four or five months. I can read the names of the eighty-five adoptive couples and see if anything rings a bell."

"Can you get the file afterward?" Virgil asked.

"We might need to do some legal stuff, but I can get Lucas to do that," she said.

"Read the names…"

She started, "Gregory, Nelson, Snyder…" He stopped her when she said, "Williamson…"

"Williamson?"

"Williamson, David and Louise."

"You gotta be kidding me," Virgil said.

"Yank the file?"

"Yank the file. Call me as soon as you get it."

VIRGIL BLEW PAST Stryker's sullen secretary into his office, shut the door, and leaned across Stryker's desk, Stryker's mouth open, and asked, "What do you know about Todd Williamson?"

Stryker said, "Todd? Came here three years ago, pisses me off, sometimes…What're we talking about?"

"He's the Miracle Baby. And after thinking about it, thinking about what Judd's sister-in-law said, about looking at him in the middle of his face…I think he might be Judd's natural son. From his eyebrows to his lips, he looks like a Judd."

"Oh…" Stryker held his hands up in the air, what next? "Jeez."

"Something else occurred to me. He's the dog that didn't bark," Virgil said.

"What?"

"He's at every crime scene-he knows everything. But I didn't see him at the Judd fire. Where the hell was he? The fire trucks went out there with their sirens screaming, where was Williamson?"

Stryker said, "I don't know. Maybe…running away from it?"

Virgil nodded: "He's the guy. Bet you a dollar."

THEY WERE TALKING to the judge about a search warrant when Sandy called again: "Lucas screamed at a man at CPS and they won't cough the file without a court order, but the guy confirmed off the record that the kid was Baby Boy Lane."

"I will kiss you on the lips next time I'm up there," Virgil said.

"I'll look forward to it," she said, primly.

THE JUDGE SUGGESTED that there was little evidence to support a search warrant.

Stryker said, "Randy, goddamnit, don't dog us around with some pissant evidence bullshit. It's about fifty percent that Todd is the killer and he's gonna do it again. I want to get all over him before he has a chance."

"What if you don't find anything? He's gonna sue your pants off," the judge said.

"Not my pants, the county's pants," Stryker said. "If I don't solve this case pretty damn quick, I'm gonna lose my job anyway, so why should I care? Sign the warrant."

"Okay, okay, keep your shirt on."

Outside the judge's office, warrant in hand, Virgil said, "Your judicial efficiency is a marvel."

"Out here, you take care of yourself," Stryker said.

They brought in Larry Jensen, the investigator, and four other deputies. Stryker and two of the deputies took the newspaper office. Virgil, Jensen, and two more deputies headed for Williamson's home. "Call me every five minutes, tell me what you got," Stryker said. "Find a.357."

"Find a typewriter," Virgil said.

WILLIAMSON LIVED in a square, flat, single-story white house with a flat-roofed garage set farther back, and a long screen porch on the front, in an old neighborhood on the east side of town. From Williamson's house, Virgil thought, getting to the Gleasons' would have been a snap: Williamson was two blocks from the riverbank.

In the heavy rain the night of the murders, he could have walked over to the bridge across the river, off the far end of the bridge, along the riverbank, and up the slope to Gleason's. After the killings, he could be back home in fifteen minutes. No muss, no fuss, no cars in the night. And that, he thought, was why the killings may have taken place during a thunderstorm. The neighbors wouldn't be out, everybody would have been snuggled up in front of the TV.

Virgil drove over, alone in his truck, because he'd learned that if he went to a crime scene in somebody else's vehicle, he'd need to leave before they did, or after they did. Jensen and the other two cops followed in two sheriff's patrol cars. Virgil stopped in front of the house, and the deputies pulled into the driveway, one car going all the way to the garage, to cover the back door.

They got out, watching the doors, Virgil with a hand on his weapon, Jensen with a hand on his own. The screen door was open and he and Jensen went through, hammered on the front door. No answer. Tried the door: locked.

Jensen said, "Wait one." He went out to his car, brought back a long-shaft Maglite, and used the butt end to knock out a pane of glass in the door. Reaching through, he flipped the lock. "We're in."

THEY CLEARED the place, making sure that Williamson wasn't inside, then started pulling it apart. The furniture was comfortable, but old, as if it had come from a high-end used-furniture place. There were six rooms, all on the first floor: kitchen, small dining room, living room, good-sized bath, a bedroom used as a home office, and the actual bedroom. Exterior doors leading out through the kitchen to the garage; and out the front.

Virgil took the bedroom, Jensen took the office, one of the other deputies did the kitchen. Virgil opened and emptied all the drawers, worked through the closet, checking all the pockets in all the clothes, checked the walls and baseboards for hidey-holes, plugged a lamp into the outlets to make sure they were real, turned and patted the mattress, lifted and turned the box springs, lifted the braided rug.

The only thing he found of even the remotest interest was a half-dozen vintage Penthouse magazines, featuring well-thumbed hard-core porn, stashed under the corner of the bed, within easy reach.

Jensen was hung up in the office. "Lot of paper," he said, looking up from the office chair, his lap full of files. "So far, nothing about being adopted. Got job stuff; he was in the Army in Iraq in ninety, in supply…No guns at all."

The cop in the kitchen had come up empty, and had then gone out to the garage, gotten a stepladder, and now had his head poked through a hatch that led into a space under the roof. "Lots of insulation," he said. "Lots of dust. Doesn't look like it's been opened in years…"

Virgil was working through the living room-found another stash of porn, this on video, behind the DVD player-when he heard the deputy outside calling, "Hey, hey, Todd. Hold it, Todd."

Virgil drew his pistol, felt Jensen moving in the office, and then Williamson came through the screen door and the front door on the run. Virgil, from the corner of his eye, could see through the porch screen that Williamson's car had been dumped in the street, the door still open.

Williamson's hands were empty but he was screaming and came straight at Virgil, and Virgil pushed the weapon back into the holster and when Williamson kept coming, hands up, he took one wrist and turned him, pushed him, and Jensen was there to push him again, and the other cop came in from the kitchen, and the outside deputy ran in the front door, his pistol drawn, and Virgil turned to Williamson and Virgil was shouting, "Hands over head, hands on the wall, on the wall."

Williamson shouted, "What the fuck are you doing, what the fuck is going on…" but he put his hands on the wall, and Virgil patted him down.

"What the fuck…"

Virgil said, "You can slow down, or we'll have to put some handcuffs on you. Calm down; you can step away from the wall."

Williamson's face was dead red, and he was breathing like a man having a heart attack. "What the hell is going on?"

"We're searching your house. We have a warrant."

Williamson's mouth worked, but nothing came out for a minute, and then Virgil saw him relax, make the small move that meant that he'd gotten it together. Virgil stepped back. "You okay?"

Williamson, still angry, but not uncontrolled: "What…are…you doing?"

"We're looking for anything that might tie you to the murders of the Gleasons, the Schmidts, and Bill Judd."

"What…what?"

"We know about your adoption," Virgil said.

"My adoption? My adoption?" His mouth hung open for a moment, then, "What about my adoption?"

"You were born here in Bluestem when your mother was killed in an automobile accident after a party at Bill Judd's. You're Bill Judd's son."

Williamson actually staggered back away from Virgil. "That's not possible. How is that possible? That's horseshit."

"You didn't know?" Virgil was skeptical.

"No!" Williamson shouted. "I didn't. I don't believe it. My mother…" He reeled away. "My mother got pregnant and gave me up for adoption. Didn't want me. That's what my mom told me. My real mom."

"Your real mom…?"

"My real parents…" Williamson's face had gone from red to white, and now was going red again. "David and Louise Williamson. Where did you get this bullshit?" He looked around. "What have you done to my house? What have you done? You motherfuckers are gonna pay for this…"

THEY COOLED HIM OFF and Virgil told him, bluntly: "We're going through here inch by inch. Frankly, it's not possible that you wound up here by accident."

"Not by accident. Not by accident," Williamson said. "I was working up in Edina, at the suburban papers, and Bill-it was Bill, not me. My editor met Bill at an editor-and-publisher meeting. My guy came back and said Judd had seen some of my stuff, and wondered if I'd be open to working in a small town."

"So you left Edina and moved to Bluestem?" Virgil's eyebrow went up. "Not a common thing to do."

Williamson looked around and said, "Okay if I sit down?" Virgil nodded, and he dropped onto a couch, and wiped his sweaty forehead on the sleeve of his shirt. "Look. I was working in the Cities, I was making thirty-eight thousand a year, and it wasn't going to get any better. I learned journalism in the Army; I don't have a college degree. The big papers were losing staff, everything was going in the toilet. So Judd says, come on down to Bluestem, I'll pay you forty thousand a year and vouch for you, so you can get a mortgage."

Williamson looked around the house. "You know how much this place cost?"

Virgil shook his head, but Jensen said, "I think it was up for forty-five thousand?"

"They took forty. I'm paying two hundred a month for a pretty decent house. In the Cities, I lived in a slum apartment that cost me eight hundred a month. The job wasn't going to get any better, either, even if the papers survived. Out here…" He shrugged. "I've got my own house, I'm sort of a big shot…I like the work."

The anger flooded back: "So go ahead and search, you fuckers. There's nothing here because I had nothing to do with any murders." To Jensen: "You know where I was when the Gleasons were killed? I was at the Firehouse Funder, down at Mitchell's. There were three hundred people there, and I was reporting it, and I gave a talk." He started shouting again. "You think about asking me for an alibi?"

"Take it easy…"

Still shouting: "And that stuff about Bill being my father…I want to see some proof. I want to see some DNA. Hey: you got a warrant? Are you searching the office…"

WILLIAMSON WAS out in the kitchen, getting a cup of coffee, watched by a deputy, when Jensen said to Virgil, "If that was an act, it was a pretty good act."

"If he did the murders, he's a psycho," Virgil said. "Psychos spend their lives fooling people…You want the dining room? I'll take the garage."