But they knew the killer, Virgil thought: they must have. Anna was facing the TV, as though she might not even have been part of the conversation. If she’d been ordered to sit down, or forced to sit, she would have been facing into the room, where the killer was; she wouldn’t have been facing the TV.
He quickly checked the end table for any possible effort by Anna to leave something behind—a scribbled name, anything. Felt foolish doing it, but would have felt more foolish if he hadn’t, and something was found later. Nothing. The books were a novel by Martha Grimes and a slender volume titled Revelation, which turned out to be, indeed, the book of Revelation.
Virgil muttered, to nobody but the ghosts, “And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him…”
HE CHECKED the table by Russell’s reading light; nothing interesting. Drifted out of the shooting area, through the rest of the place. A den opened off the dining room, with file cabinets and an older computer. A hallway next to the den led to a big bathroom, but without a tub or shower—the public bath—and three large bedrooms, each with a full bath.
He walked through the master bedroom, looking, not touching, and into the kitchen. He was in the kitchen when he heard the sound of a vehicle outside. He went back to the front door, and found a sheriff’s patrol car stopped behind his, and a deputy looking at his license plate.
He stepped out on the porch, and the deputy’s hand drifted to his hip, and Virgil called, “Virgil Flowers, BCA.” Across the way, at the next house down the ridge, he could see a man standing in his backyard, watching them with binoculars.
The deputy said, “Larry Jensen. I’m the lead investigator for the sheriff.”
Jensen was another of the tall, thin types, burned and dry, sandy hair, slacks and cowboy boots, sunglasses. They shook hands and Jensen asked, “See anything in there?”
“Nope. I’d like to come back later and go through those file cabinets.”
“You’re welcome to…” Jensen turned and waved at the man in the next yard, who waved back. “That’s the guy who ratted you out.”
“Too bad he wasn’t watching the night the Gleasons were killed,” Virgil said.
“Got that right.”
Jensen was easy enough, took him in the house, told him how he thought the killings must have happened, and his reconstruction jibed with Virgil’s. They walked through the rest of the house, including the basement, and on the way back up, Jensen said, “I have the feeling…” He hesitated.
“Yeah?”
“I have the feeling that this was something that stewed for a long time. I went through every scrap of business dealings that the Gleasons had in the last ten years, I talked to about every single person that they knew, interviewed the kids and the kids’ spouses. I have the feeling that this goes back to something we don’t know about. I’m thinking, Russell was a doctor. What if he did something bad to somebody. You know, malpractice. What if back there somewhere, years ago, he killed somebody, or maybe didn’t save somebody, a wife or somebody’s daddy, and they just stewed and stewed and now they snapped? I mean, Russell dealt with a lot of death in his time—he was the county coroner for years—and what if it goes back to something that just…happened? Like happens to all doctors?”
Virgil nodded. “That’s a whole deep pit…”
Jensen nodded. “When I worked through it, I decided that it meant everybody in the county would be a suspect. So it’s meaningless.”
Virgil said, “I’ve got a question for you, but I don’t want you to take offense.”
“Go ahead.”
“Did your office ever issue .357s? To your deputies?”
“Yeah, you could of gone all day without asking me that,” Jensen said. “We did, but years ago. We went to high-capacity .40s when the FBI did.”
“What happened to the .357s?”
“That was before my time. As I understand it, guys were allowed to buy them at a discount. Some did, some didn’t. Tell you the truth, some went away, we don’t know where. Record keeping wasn’t what it should have been. This was two sheriffs ago, so it doesn’t have anything to do with Jim.”
“But you thought of that,” Virgil said.
“Sure.”
THEY TALKED for another fifteen minutes, and Jensen said that he was looking through medical records at the partnership that had taken over Gleason’s practice, and also at the regional hospital. “It’s buried back there somewhere. Maybe the same guy killed Bill Judd, if Judd is really dead. He and Gleason were almost exactly the same age, so there’s gotta be a tie. Maybe this killer-guy is waiting to go after somebody else, sitting out there thinking about it.”
“Could have gone all day without saying that,” Virgil said.
VIRGIL FOLLOWED JENSEN back into town, cut away when Jensen turned north toward the courthouse. The motel clerk had recommended two lunch spots, Ernhardt’s Café and Johnnie’s Pizza, both on Main Street. Virgil decided Italian might be too much, and checked out Ernhardt’s.
The café turned out to be a combination German deli and bakery, cold meat, fresh-baked potato bread, pickles, and sauerkraut. Virgil got a roast beef on rye with rough mustard, a pickle, and a half pound of bright yellow potato salad, and took it to one of the low-backed booths that lined the wall opposite the ordering counter.
A minute or so after he sat down, the sheriff’s sister stepped in, blinked in the dimmer light, said hello to the woman behind the counter, ordered a salad and coffee, spotted Virgil in the back booth and nodded to him. He nodded back, and a moment later, she carried her lunch tray over and slid into the seat on the other side of the booth.
“Are you going to save Jimmy’s job?” she asked.
She was not perfectly good looking—her eyebrows might have down sloped a little too much, her mouth might have been a quarter-inch too wide—but she was very good-looking, and certainly knew it. She was smiling when she asked her question, but her green eyes were serious.
“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 nigh
t, 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.
JOAN 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.”
VIRGIL, 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.
VIRGIL 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.
VIRGIL 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.”
THEY 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 Se
cond 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.”
“HERE 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.”
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