Dark of the Moon (27 page)

“Hell of a thing,” Big Curly said, as they came up.

“What happened to him?”

“The crows were here…but it looks like something cracked his skull open. His brains…take a look.”

Judd was on his back, wearing a suit and dress shoes. He didn’t have sightless eyes staring at the sun, because he no longer had any eyes. Crows. The top of his head was misshapen. Not as though he were shot, but more as though his skull had been crushed. Flattened.

“Piece of rebar over here,” one of the deputies said. “We’re waiting for Margo to come up, but it’s got blood on it, and some hair.”

Virgil and Stryker went over and looked: a piece of rusty steel that might have been picked out of the burned house. “That would have done it.”

No gunshot wounds. “We know one thing,” Little Curly said. “It wasn’t suicide.”

G
OMEZ ASKED,
“What do you think? Feur?”

“We need a time of death, but I don’t think so. It’s my other guy,” Virgil said.

Gomez grimaced, did a slow three-sixty, looking at the prairie lands stretched out around him forever, said, “Interesting little culture you got going here.”

“Gotta be Feur,” Stryker said. “Gleasons, Schmidts, the Judds—it’s a Feur cleanup operation. They were gonna get out, they weren’t gonna leave anything behind.”

“I don’t know,” Virgil said.

Another deputy’s car pulled in below them, and Margo Carr got out, took a gear bag out of the trunk, and trudged up the hill. “Another one,” she said, heavily.

“Last one, but maybe one,” Virgil said.

“What does that mean?” Stryker asked.

Virgil shrugged.

Down the hill, another truck pulled in, and Todd Williamson got out. The deputy at the truck put out a hand to him, but Williamson jogged straight past him, beat the deputy to the edge of the heavy grass, and pulled away, the deputy still yelling at him.

Big Curly blocked him: “You can’t be here.”

“Screw that,” Williamson said. He poked a finger at Virgil. “If the genius here is right, I’m next of kin. So what happened to my brother?”

V
IRGIL HEADED BACK
to the motel, with one stop at the accountant’s office. Olafson had just gotten up. She raised the shade on her office door, cocked an eyebrow at Virgil, and opened the door.

Virgil stepped inside and asked, “If something happened to Bill Judd Jr., would that change what happens with his father’s estate?”

“Is he dead?” she asked.

“Pretty much,” Virgil said. He told her about it, and she shook her head and said, “May the Good Lord keep him.”

“Estate?”

Olafson made a noise, then said, “I’d have to look up the law, and you might even have to get a special ruling. But you know what? I think it’s possible that Jesse Laymon and Todd Williamson, if they can prove a blood connection to Senior, could stand to get a bigger piece of the estate.”

The argument would be complicated, she said, and hung on what the IRS would do about Junior’s debt, how it would be counted against the estate. “And with this nut cake running around killing everybody, I’m not sure I’d hang around to make the argument.”

Virgil thanked her, and continued on to the hotel. Shut down his cell phone, took off his boots, put the chain on the door, stretched out on the bed. There’d been a thread running through this thing, he thought, right up to the firefight at Feur’s place. If he could only find one end of it, and pull it…

V
IRGIL ROLLED OFF THE BED,
looked at the clock—he’d been down an hour—brushed his teeth, and stood in the shower. At the end of a case, when the facts were piling up, a nap often worked to clarify his thoughts: instead of being scattered around like crumbs, they tended to clump together.

A
ND THAT HAD HAPPENED.

A
BOUT
F
EUR:
Jim Stryker was at least partly correct. When Virgil thought about it, it seemed unlikely that a town the size of Bluestem would be home to two, separate but simultaneous, very large crimes. Yet Feur had denied the connection, even when it wouldn’t make any difference to him. Could he have been protecting someone? Seemed unlikely—seemed unlikely that in Bluestem he could have an unknown relationship so close that he would die protecting it; that he would swear on a Bible.

A
BOUT THE OTHER SUSPECTS:
Stryker, now, or some other cop—the Curlys, or the Merrill guy, or even Jensen or Carr—or one of the Laymons, or Williamson. Did he, Virgil, have a perceptual problem? Did he come to town and view certain people as suspects because those were the only people he saw, or spoke to, or heard about? He’d gotten all over Williamson. Had he been conditioned to do that, because Joan had mentioned Williamson’s name the first time he met her? He thought about it and decided: No. That might have been the case, except for the Revelation…

The book of Revelation at the Gleasons’, the cigarette butt at the Schmidts’, the anonymous note, and the corporate evidence on Judd’s secretary’s computer, all had pointed him at Feur, or Judd and Feur together. He was being pushed by somebody.

A
PASSING THOUGHT:
Bill Judd’s secretary. Who was she? The evidence for the Judd-Feur connection came right out of her computer. He’d heard her name, but didn’t remember it…

M
ORE IDEAS:
Could he
clear
anyone? If he could clear Stryker or Williamson, or the Curlys, the Laymons, or the Judds, then he’d know something. Other suspects would come into sharper focus. Was Joan a suspect? She’d gotten close to him by noon on his first day in town. How about Jesse Laymon, or her mother, Margaret? How long had they really been waiting for Judd to die?

A
LSO:
In one way or another, the killer of the Gleasons and the Schmidts, and probably the Judds, had been in Jesse Laymon’s closet. Stryker had been there, he thought. Who else? Technically, her mother, but her mother wouldn’t be framing Jesse…at least, not for any reason that Virgil knew of. There was the additional problem that the Laymons’ house could be entered by any teenager with a stick…

H
UH.

V
IRGIL GOT
his gun, clipped it under his jacket, put on his straw hat, and called Stryker.

“When we were in Judd’s office, looking at the secretary’s computer…What was her name again?”

“Amy Sweet. You think we ought to talk to her?”

“No need to bother you. I might stop by and have a chat,” Virgil said. “Sort of at loose ends, is what I am. Can’t get over Junior getting hit like that.”

“Yeah. Still think it was Feur…You still think it wasn’t?”

“I’ve moved a few inches in your direction,” Virgil said. “But keep your ass down anyway.”

A
MY
S
WEET WAS
another middle-aged woman, who might have been a rocker at one time, too heavy now, round-shouldered, wrapped in a housecoat with pink curlers in her hair. “I’d be happy to talk to you,” she said at the door of her small home, “but I’ve got to be in Sioux Falls for a job interview at one o’clock.”

“Take a couple of minutes,” Virgil said.

“What was all the excitement a while ago?” She pushed her face toward him, squinting, nearsighted.

“Uh, there’s been another murder.”

“Oh, noooo…” She stepped across the room, fumbled around on a TV tray, found steel-rimmed glasses, and put them on. “Who?”

“Bill Judd Jr.”

“Oh, noooo.” Round, Swedish oooo’s.

“Miz Sweet, when we were going through Judd Sr.’s office, we found some invoices on your computer, for chemicals that were apparently used in an ethanol plant out in South Dakota…”

“I heard about it on TV. That was the same one? The one where they were making drugs?”

“Yes, it was,” Virgil said.

“Oh, nooo.”

The sound was driving him crazy; she sounded like a bad comedian. “Who in town knew about the ethanol plant?”

She turned her face to one side and put a hand to her lips. “Well, the Judds, of course.”

“Both of them?” Virgil asked.

“Well…Junior set it up, but Senior knew about it.”

He pressed. “Are you sure about that?”

“Well, yes. He signed the checks.”

“Did you see him signing the checks?” Virgil asked.

“No, but I saw the checks. It was his signature…”

“Do you remember the bank?”

She shook her head. “No, no, I don’t.” She frowned. “I’m not even sure that the bank name was on the checks.”

“Did you ever talk to Junior about that?”

“No. It wasn’t my business,” she said. “They wanted to keep it quiet, because, you know, when ethanol started, it sounded a little like the Jerusalem artichoke thing. The Judds were involved in that, of course.”

“So how quiet did they keep it?” Virgil asked. “Who else knew? Did you tell anybody?”

He saw it coming, the
noooo.
“Oh, noooo…Junior told me, don’t talk about this, because of my father. So, I didn’t.”

“Not to anybody?”

Her eyes drifted. She was thinking, which meant that she had. “It’s possible…my sister, I might have told. I think there might have been some word around town.”

“It’s really important that you remember…”

She put her hand to her temple, as though she were going to move a paper clip with telekinesis, and said, “I might have mentioned it at bridge. At our bridge club. That a plant was being built, and some local people were involved.”

“All right,” Virgil said. “So who was at the bridge club?”

“Well, let me see, there would have been nine or ten of us…”

She listed them; he only recognized one of the names.

W
HEN HE WAS DONE
with Sweet, he strolled up the hill to the newspaper office. He pushed in, and found Williamson behind the business counter, talking to a woman customer. Williamson looked past the woman and snapped, “What do you want?”

“I have a question, when you’re free.”

“Wait.” Williamson was wearing a T-shirt and had sweat stains under his arms, as though he’d been lifting rocks. “Take just a minute.”

The customer was trying to dump her Beanie Baby collection locally—ten years too late, in Virgil’s opinion—and wanted the cheapest possible advertisement. She got twenty words for six dollars, looking back and forth between Virgil and Williamson, and after writing a check for the amount, said to Virgil, “I’d love to hear your question.”

Virgil looked at her over his sunglasses and grinned: “I’d love to have you, but I’m afraid it’s gotta be private, for the moment.”

“Shoot.” She looked at Williamson, who shrugged, and she said, “Oh, well.”

W
HEN SHE
’
D GONE
out the door, Williamson said, “I’m working. You can ask me out back.”

“You still pissed about the search?”

“Goddamn right. Wouldn’t you be?”

Virgil followed him through the shop. Williamson’s van was parked in the dirt space behind it, the side doors open. Williamson had been piling bundles of unsold newspapers in the van, and there were still twenty or thirty wrapped bundles inside the shop. Williamson propped the door open, picked up two bundles by the plastic straps, carried them to the van, and asked over his shoulder, “What?”

Virgil grabbed a couple of bundles, carried them out and threw them in the van. “When did you last see Junior?”

“About an hour and a half ago.”

“Alive.” They were shuttling back and forth with the bundles.

Williamson stopped and cocked his head. “Day before yesterday…let’s see. Down at Johnnie’s, at lunch.”

“Did you hear him next door? Yesterday?” Virgil asked, heaving two more bundles into the van.

“No. He wasn’t there. I stopped, I wanted to ask him where I should send the money we’ve got coming in. His office was locked.”

“What time was that?”

“First time, about nine o’clock. Right after I got here. Then, when the shooting started out at Feur’s—I heard about it from a cop, and I took off, headed down there, to Feur’s, but the cops had all the roads blocked. Before I took off, I ran next door, I was going to tell Bill about it.”

“Why?”

Williamson shrugged. “I don’t know. Big news. Maybe something to do with his old man.”

“All right,” Virgil said. He threw two more bundles in the van, leaving three in the shop. “So he wasn’t here all day yesterday, and wasn’t here last night?”

“Nope. And I was here late.”

Virgil nodded. If Judd had disappeared some hours before the fight at Feur’s, that meant that both Stryker and Feur, or one of Feur’s men, could have killed him.

T
HEN
W
ILLIAMSON STACKED
the three remaining bundles, one on top of the other, and stooped to pick them up. As he did it, his T-shirt sleeve hiked up, exposing a tattoo of a crescent moon. The moon with a slash for an eye, and a pointed nose: a man in the moon. The tattoo was rough, with bleeding edges, dark ink from a ballpoint pen.

Virgil blinked. Another man in the moon.

Sonofabitch.

H
E LEFT
W
ILLIAMSON
with the van, walked back to his truck, got on the phone to Joan: “What’re you doing?” he asked.

“Headed over to Worthington to do some federal bureaucratic bullshit about crop insurance. What about you?”

“I’m headed up to the Cities,” Virgil said. “Could be overnight…”

“I’d love to come,” she said, “but this appointment in Worthington is not optional, if I want to stay in business. I’ve got everything in quintuplicate, and they want it today.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow, then.”

She laughed at the tone: “I’ll brace myself.”

H
E CALLED
the Laymons, but nobody answered. Called Stryker, and asked if he had Jesse’s cell phone. He got the number and said to Stryker, “I’m running up to the Cities. Back tomorrow.”

“Anything good?”

“Just some federal bureaucratic bullshit. How’s the election looking?”

“Folks are smiling at me,” Stryker said. “I’m golden for at least a week; and as long as you’re wrong about Feur. If somebody else gets killed, now that Feur’s gone, I’m back in the toilet.”

V
IRGIL CALLED
J
ESSE.
She answered after a couple of rings: “Virgil…”

“Jesse: listen. I’m going to the Cities. It’s really important that you and your mom get someplace safe. Don’t get alone with any third person, no matter whether you know him or not. Maybe go over to Worthington or Sioux Falls, check into a motel. Just overnight—I should be back tomorrow.”

“You think somebody’s looking for us?” she asked.

“It’s possible. I don’t want to take any chances. Get yourself under cover until tomorrow.”

“Mom’s at work,” she said.

“Pick her up,” Virgil said. “Keep her away from the house.”

“I was planning to go out tonight…”

“Jesse, just for the heck of it…let’s say you should stay away from Jim Stryker, too.”

“Jim?”

“Just for the heck of it. Until I get back.”

H
E SWUNG BY
the motel, picked up a bag, headed out on the highway. As soon as he was clear of town, he turned on the flashers and dropped the hammer. Got settled online, and called Davenport. He wasn’t in the office, but he got him on the cell phone. “Can I borrow Sandy or Jenkins or Shrake for a few hours?”

“Jenkins and Shrake are picking a guy up,” Davenport said. “Sandy’s working on something, but if it’s important…”

“I’m cracking this thing,” Virgil said. “I need some names and some record checks.”

“She’ll call you back.”

V
IRGIL REMEMBERED
Joan’s mother, Laura, talking about grandmothers—about how she wanted to be one, about how she wanted to watch her grandchildren grow up, about how she had time to see great-grandchildren.

Laura Stryker wasn’t that old—a baby boomer, in fact. A rock ’n’ roller. The same age as Williamson’s mother. Williamson’s mother might have been dead, but it was possible that his natural grandparents were still alive. And grandparents do take an interest; normal ones, anyway.

So there might be, Virgil thought, somebody in the Cities who’d taken a lifelong interest in Todd Williamson…

H
AD TO BE
Williamson, Virgil thought.

Judd Sr.’s sister-in-law, Betsy Carlson, in wandering in and out of rationality, had mentioned the man in the moon. Virgil had connected that to the man-
on
-the-moon party at Judd’s, but Betsy had been right: she said she’d seen the man
in
the moon. She’d talked to Williamson at some point, had seen Judd within him, and had seen the tattoo, which brought everything back.

And Williamson would have no reason to talk to Betsy Carlson, unless he knew that Judd was his father.

N
EW FACT:
When he and Stryker checked Williamson’s police record, they’d found nothing at all. But the tattoo on Williamson’s arm hadn’t come from a tattoo parlor. It was a prison tattoo, done with a sewing needle and ballpoint-pen ink. Maybe he’d gotten it on the outside, from somebody who’d been inside, knew how to do it. Maybe he chose a crude tattoo for aesthetic reasons. But Virgil was willing to bet that Williamson had been inside, at least for a while.