Dark of the Moon (4 page)

“Does it need saving?” Virgil asked.

“Maybe,” she said. And, “My name’s Joan Carson. Jimmy said you had some nice things to say about my ass.”

“Jimmy’s job just got in deeper trouble,” Virgil said, but she was still smiling and that wasn’t bad. “Tell me about that, though. His job.”

She shrugged, dug into her salad. “This is his second term. Most sheriffs have to get over the third-election hump. That’s just the way it is, I guess. You’ve pissed off enough people to get fired, if they’re not so impressed that they feel obligated to vote for you.”

“They’re not impressed?”

“They were, until the murders,” she said. “Jimmy runs a good office, he’s fair with his deputies. Now, he’s got these murders and he’s not catching who did it.”

“Did he tell you that?” Virgil asked.

“Common knowledge,” she said. She picked a raw onion ring out of her salad and crunched half of it, and pointed the crescent-moon remainder at Virgil. “Everybody knows everybody, and the deputies talk. Nobody’s got any idea who did the shooting.”

“Who do
you
think did it?”

“It’s just a goddamn mystery, that’s what it is,” she said. “I know every single person in this town, and most of the relationships between them, and I can’t think of anybody who’d do something like that. Just can’t think of
anybody
. Maybe…” She trailed off.

“Maybe…”

She fluffed her hair, like women do sometimes when they think they’re about to say something silly. “This is really unfair. The newspaper editor, Todd Williamson, has only been here for three or four years, so I know him less than I know other people. So maybe, before he came here, there was some knot in his brain that we can’t see because we didn’t grow up with him.”

“That’s it?” Virgil asked.

“That’s it,” she said.

“That’s nothing,” Virgil said.

“That’s why I said it’s unfair. But I lie in bed at night, going through everybody in town over the age of ten, figuring out who could have done this. Maybe…”

“What?”

“Could we have some little crazy thrill-killer in the high school? Maybe somebody who had some kind of fantasy of killing somebody, and for some reason picked out the Gleasons? You read about that kind of thing…”

“I hope so,” Virgil said. “If it’s like that, I’ll get him. He’ll have told his friends about it, and they’ll rat him out.”

Virgil’s cell phone rang, and he slipped it out of his pocket and she said, “I hate it when that happens during lunch,” and Virgil said, “Yeah.” The call was coming in from a local number, and he opened the phone and said, “Hello?”

“Virgil, Jim Stryker. You know that Bill Judd had a heart bypass fifteen years ago, and also had some work done on his lumbar spine?”

“Yeah?”

“My crime-scene girl found a coil of stainless-steel wire in the basement of Judd’s house, and she swears it’s what they used to close up his breastbone after the bypass. And eight inches away, she found a couple of titanium screws and a steel rod that she says came out of Judd’s spine. She says there should be X-rays up at the medical center, and she can check, but she thinks that’s what she’s got. She also thinks she found the back part of a skull, looks like a little saucer, pieces of two kneecaps and maybe some wrist and ankle bones.”

“So he’s dead,” Virgil said.

“I believe so—DNA will tell, if they can get some out of the bone marrow. The arson investigator says that there was an accelerant, probably ten or twenty gallons of gasoline, because he says the fire did a broad lateral flash through the house, instead of burning up,” Stryker said. “He means it spread laterally much faster than up, and with all this wood, it should have gone
up
faster.”

“How can he tell?”

“Beats me. That’s what he said—so, we’ve got another murder.”

“Huh,” Virgil said.

“What’s that mean?” Stryker asked.

“You up there? At the Judds’?” Virgil asked.

“I am. I’ll be here for a while.”

“See you in a bit,” Virgil said.

J
OAN POINTED
her fork at him. “Bill Judd?”

“Yeah.” Virgil dabbed his lips with a napkin. “They think they might have found some remains. I gotta go.”

“If I was a forensic anthropologist, I’d come up and help,” she said. “Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about forensics or anthropology and I don’t much care for bodies.”

“What do you do?” Virgil asked.

“Run the family farm,” she said. “Twelve hundred and eighty acres of corn and soybeans north of town.”

“That’s a mighty big farm for such a pretty little woman,” Virgil said.

“Bite me,” she said.

“Thank you, ma’am. You want to go into Worthington tonight?” Virgil asked. “Tijuana Jack’s ain’t too bad.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Give me your cell number. I have to drive over to Sioux Falls for some parts. If I get back in time…Mexican’d be okay.”

V
IRGIL,
pleased with himself, went back through town, up to Buffalo Ridge, through the park gates, and around the corner of the hill to the Judd house. He was astonished when he saw what was left. In most fires, a corner of a house will burn, and at least a wall or two will survive. Of the Judd mansion, nothing was left but the foundation, cracked and charred, and a pit full of twisted metal, stone, and ash.

Stryker and one of his deputies, an older fat man with blond curly hair, were talking to a third man, who had a reporter’s notebook. A man in a suit was peering into the pit, and three people scuffled around the bottom like diggers on an archaeological site.

Virgil walked up, looked in the hole: picked out ductwork and air conditioners, two furnaces, the crumbled remains of what must have been a first-floor fireplace, three hot-water tanks, a couple of sinks, three toilets, a twisted mass of pipes. The diggers in the bottom were working next to the wreck of a wheelchair; the guy in the suit, Virgil realized, was Bill Judd Jr.

V
IRGIL WALKED OVER
to Stryker: “How’n the hell they find
anything
in there?”

Stryker said, “This is Todd Williamson, he’s editor of the
Bluestem Record
; and Big Curly Anderson.” A warning to watch his mouth.

“I met a Little Curly the other night…” Virgil said, shaking hands with the two men. Big Curly’s hands were small and soft, like a woman’s. Williamson’s, on the other hand, were hard and calloused, as though he ran his own printing press.

“That’s my boy,” Big Curly said.

Stryker: “To answer your question, it was pretty much luck. They saw the wheelchair down there and started digging around, looking for a body, and they found that coil of surgical wire. Now they’re trying to figure out how the wheelchair got on top of all that trash and the ash, and the body was
under
it. They’re starting to think that Judd was in the basement, and the wheelchair was upstairs, on the second or third floor, and dropped down when the fire burned through the floor.”

“Coincidence?”

“Seems like. I don’t know what else it could be,” Stryker said.

“You gonna take this case?” Williamson asked.

“I’m working the Gleason investigation,” Virgil said. “Our contact with the press either runs through the local sheriff or the BCA spokesman in St. Paul. I can’t talk to you about it.”

“That’s not the way we do things out here,” Williamson said.

“They must’ve changed then, because I’m from out here,” Virgil said. “I played high school baseball against Jimmy here, and kicked his ass three years running.”

“You were seven and two, and three of those wins were pure luck,” Stryker said. “People still talk about it. Haven’t ever seen a run of luck like it, not after all these years.”

“Bite me,” Virgil said.

“You’ve been talking to Joan,” Stryker said.

V
IRGIL TIPPED
his head toward the burn pit, and asked, “That’s Judd, right?”

Stryker said, “Yup. I gave him a call, he came right up.”

Big Curly said, “Probably been down at the bank, reading the old man’s will.”

Williamson said quietly, “He’s about to inherit my newspaper. That won’t be good. I’m job hunting, if any of you guys own a printing press.”

T
HEY ALL LOOKED
at Judd for a few seconds, then Virgil asked Big Curly, “What’s this about a will?”

Big Curly shrugged: “I don’t know. I was jokin’.”

Virgil to Stryker: “The will’s an idea, though. Have you looked for a will?”

Stryker shook his head: “I imagine it’s in the bank. Or Bob Turner’s got it. Turner was the old man’s attorney.”

“We ought to take a look at it,” Virgil said. “Get a writ to open his safe-deposit box, get his attorney and his kid to go with us. Could be something in it.”

Williamson said, “What if he left all of his money to George Feur?”

Stryker cracked a smile. “That’d give old Junior a major case of the red ass, you betcha.”

Virgil: “Who’s George Feur?”

“Nutcase preacher, found Jesus in prison,” Stryker said. “He’s got a so-called religious compound over by the Dakota line. He was trying his best to save Bill Judd’s soul, according to the local gossip.”

“He’s nuts?”

Williamson said, “He believes in the purity of the white race and that Jesus was a Roman, and thinks blacks were stuck in Africa because of the curse of Cain, and they should all be shipped back there so they can properly suffer the righteous wrath of God, instead of polluting white women and gettin’ all the good jobs at Target. Once a month or so, he and a bunch of people get some signs and go march somewhere, and say all of that. Here, Worthington, Sioux Falls.”

Little Curly: “He says Indians are the Lost Tribes of Israel, and they’re Jews, and they should all go back to Israel so we can get the Second Coming. Had a few fights with Indians.”

Virgil: “And he was converting Judd?” He was thinking of the book of Revelation on the Gleasons’ end table.

“He needs rich recruits,” Williamson said. “How else is he gonna get the money to buy guns to overthrow the godless Democrats and ship the blacks back to Africa?”

“Ah.”

“And the Mexicans back to Mexico, and the Chinese back to China, and the Indians to Israel, and so on and so forth,” Williamson said. “I wrote a long feature on him, got picked up by the Associated Press.”

“H
ERE COMES TROUBLE,
” Big Curly muttered.

Virgil looked and Bill Judd Jr. was headed toward them. Judd was a heavy man, with a turkey-wattle neck under a fat face, thinning hair, and small black eyes. He must have been close to sixty, Virgil thought.

Judd nodded at Williamson, glanced at Virgil, and asked Stryker, “What’re you going to do about this, Jim? If that’s Dad down there, and if that boy from the state fire marshal was right, then it’s murder. What’re you going to do?”

“Investigate it,” Stryker said.

“Like you’re investigating the Gleasons?” Judd shook his head, his wattles swinging under his chin. “Give me a break, Jim. You bring in the BCA or…Goddamnit, you bring in the BCA.”

Stryker tipped his head toward Virgil. “Meet Virgil Flowers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

Judd’s face snapped toward Virgil. He examined him for a moment, checked the T-shirt, then said, “You don’t look like much.”

Virgil smiled. “I’m not easily insulted by suspects,” he said. “There been too many of them over the years.”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?” Judd asked.

“Well, you’re pretty much the only suspect we’ve got at the moment,” Virgil said. “In a situation like this, you always ask, ‘Who inherits?’ The answer, as I understand it, is
you.
”

Judd looked at Virgil for a long three seconds, then turned to Williamson. “You keep that out of the newspaper.”

Williamson shook his head. “I don’t work for you, Bill. I worked for your father, and now I work for your father’s estate. When the estate passes to you, I’ll be out of here like a hot desert breeze. Until then, I’m working for the estate.”

“You better find a job by the end of next week, then,” Judd said.

V
IRGIL SAID TO
J
UDD:
“We need to look at your father’s will. We assume it’s in a safe-deposit box. We’re gonna get a writ to open it, since it could be material for this investigation. Also because we’d like to see what else is in the safe.”

Judd nodded: “That’s fine with me. Let’s get Bob Turner and go talk to the judge and crack the box. Get things moving.”

“Can I come?” Williamson asked.

Stryker said, “No.”

Williamson grinned: “No harm in asking. Goddamn, it’s hot out here.”

O
N THE WAY
back to their vehicles, they stopped at the burn pit and Stryker called down, “Anything new?”

A chubby woman in a yellow protective suit and face mask stood up, used a paper towel to wipe sweat off her face, put the towel in a trash bag, and said, “I’m dying of heat prostitution.”

They all grinned down at her and she added, “Nothing else, really. But we’ve got the carpals and they’re intact; they were under a piece of sheet steel and that must’ve given them some protection, so I think we’re good for DNA. And with Bill Jr. to provide us a sample, we can be sure on the ID.”

“Get it done,” Stryker said.

On the way down the hill, Big Curly said, “I’d like to cut me off a piece of that,” meaning the woman in the yellow suit.

Stryker nodded. “I’ll mention it to Mrs. Curly.”

O
NE OF
the best things and one of the worst things about a small town was that everybody knew everything that was going on. The judge knew about as much of the Judd case as Virgil did, and pounded out a writ on his secretary’s computer, and printed it.

“Good to go,” he said, and handed the paper to Stryker.

Stryker called the Wells Fargo branch and talked to the manager, who said he’d be waiting. Judd’s attorney said he’d walk over.