What if Laura Stryker wasn’t the perpetrator, but was the next target?
HE SAT in the morgue for two hours, altogether, typing notes into his laptop, thinking. Every few minutes, the outer door would rattle, he’d hear change go into the coin box, and the door would close again. Once, there’d been no change, and he’d been tempted to peek and see who it was, stealing a newspaper; but he stayed with the clips.
When he was finished, he knew a lot more than when he’d started, but nothing that seemed to connect with the murders. Everybody in town may have known that Judd was sleeping with local women, and sometimes in a pile of them, but it never got into the newspaper.
He took ten minutes to get the clips back in their envelopes, close down his computer. He walked back through the newspaper office, picked up the note on the floor, taped it back on the window, and went to his truck.
Laura Stryker.
HE CALLED JOAN: “Did you hear about Roman Schmidt?”
“I did.” Her voice was hushed. “Virgil, this is god-awful. Completely aside from the fact that Jim is going to lose his job—it’s god-awful all on its own.”
“Well, if we catch the guy, Jim could still pull out of it,” Virgil said.
“Gotta be soon,” she said. “Do you have any ideas?”
“We were talking about going to Sioux Falls with your mom. Think I could take her right now?”
“I’ll call her. Do you want me to come?”
He hesitated, then: “If you want.”
“I’ll call her. I’ll get back to you in two minutes.”
LAURA WAS happy to go. Virgil drove to Joan’s house, rang the doorbell, and she waved him inside: “I just got here, I was out at the farm,” she said. “I have to change into something that doesn’t smell like dirt. Maybe take a really fast shower. I told Mom we’d be there in twenty minutes.”
“Happy to wash your back,” Virgil said.
“I need that,” she said. “There’s always that one spot right in the middle, it’s been dirty for eight years now.”
“What happened eight years ago?”
“That was the year before I got married,” she said.
SHE WENT OFF down the hall to the back bedroom, yelled, “There’s Coke in the refrigerator, there’s instant coffee, you could make it in the microwave.” He stirred around in the kitchen, looking it over, checking the refrigerator. She wasn’t a foodie, that was for sure. She had about three knives, and most of the stuff in the refrigerator looked like it had been there for weeks.
A door in back closed: the bathroom? He got a Coke, went into the living room. An open door led into what might have been a small dining room, or television room, now converted to an office, with a desk, computer, and file cabinets. He saw a wall of family photos, stepped into the room and looked at them: found the same thin man in plaid pants in two of them, thought it might be her father.
But she and Jim must take after Laura, because Mark Stryker really was a slight figure, except that he had the same white-blond hair of his son and daughter…
Slid open a drawer in a file cabinet, listening for her, for a footstep, looked at some tabs—business and taxes—and pushed it shut.
Just being snoopy now, he thought. No good could come of it. He eased back into the living room, heard a door open: “Hey. Are you going to wash my back, or what?”
ALMOST STOPPED HIS HEART.
He put the Coke down and headed back down the hall; saw her damp face and hair at the end of it, and then she pulled back inside the bathroom. And by the time he’d gotten to the bathroom, she was back inside the shower.
He opened the shower door, and there she was, her back to him, as well as the third-greatest—he gave her an instant promotion—ass in Minnesota, and maybe on the entire Great Plains. “Oh, my God,” he said.
“Just the back.”
“Just the back, my sweet…”
“Just the back,” she said. “You offered, I’m accepting.”
“If you…”
“Don’t you get in this shower, Virgil Flowers,” she said. “You’ll get all wet and we have to be at my mom’s in fifteen minutes and she’ll know that we’ve been up here fooling around.”
“Gimme the soap and back up,” he said.
He washed her water-slick back, and the third-greatest ass, and then, squatting, her legs, one at a time, working upward, and by the time he was getting done, she was hanging on to the faucet handles, and when he was done, he snatched her out of the shower and turned her around and kissed her and said, “Fuck your mama.”
“Not my mama,” she said. “Not my mama.”
THEY WERE twenty minutes late getting to Laura Stryker’s, driving over with all the truck windows down. Joan wanted to get the smell of sex off them, she said.
“Not as late as I might have hoped,” Joan said.
“You weren’t complaining twelve minutes ago,” Virgil said, “unless that was your way of screaming for help.”
“Don’t be too proud of yourself,” she said. “I’d been waiting for a long time. Bill Judd Junior could have gotten to me after all that time.”
Virgil leaned close to her: “The fact of the matter is, you’ve gotten hold of something far beyond your simple country experience.”
That made her laugh, and she pushed him away and said, “Next time, though, we’re going for the slow hand.”
WHEN THEY GOT out of the truck, Joan said, “Stay here, but leave the doors open. Mom might smell something if we don’t air it out a little more.”
“Jesus, Joanie, you’re an adult…”
“It’s my mom.”
So he left the doors open and the engine running, and stood out in the sunlight and worked up a little sweat while Joan collected Laura. In two or three minutes they were on the front porch, Laura carefully locking the door behind her.
Laura was a handsome woman for her age, slender as her daughter, with carefully cut and tinted hair. If you were checking out mothers to see what a daughter would look like in twenty-five years, you would have taken the daughter. She got into the backseat, said, “Pleased to meet you, Virgil,” and Joan hopped into the front passenger seat and said, “That’s the first time I ever saw you lock the front door.”
“Everybody’s locking doors now. If Janet came over after dark, and knocked, I might hide out and not answer, not until this killer’s caught,” she said.
Joan to Virgil: “Janet’s her best friend,” and to Laura: “I don’t think you have to worry about Janet.”
“The word is, the murdered people probably knew the killer. What do you think, Virgil?”
Virgil nodded. “I think that’s right.”
THEY RAN DOWN to I-90, and up the ramp, heading west, and talked over the murders. Virgil filled them in on the Roman Schmidt killing, the killer’s tendency toward display.
“So what are they looking at?” Laura asked. “They must be looking at something.”
“Gleason was looking at his backyard and up the hill, Schmidt was looking straight down his driveway at the road. Nothing in particular,” Virgil said.
A minute later, Laura asked, “What direction were they facing? If he was facing down his driveway, Roman was facing east, and if Russell was looking up the hill, he was facing east. Would that be right?”
Virgil thought for a moment, orienting himself, and then said, “Yeah, that’s right.”
“They were killed at night—so maybe toward the sunrise,” Laura said.
Joan asked, “But what would that tell you? That you’re dealing with a religious nut?”
“That Feur person,” Laura said. “Jesus was resurrected at sunrise. Maybe that has something to do with it. And in the Bible, east is the most important direction.”
Virgil said, “Huh. Well, Judd was burned to death. What does that mean? Hellfire?”
“We’re talking about a crazy person,” Joan said. “I don’t think you’re gonna figure out anything from that kind of stuff. He’s doing it because
he’s crazy.”
“Interesting to talk about, though,” Laura said.
They talked about the Laymons. The story was all over town five minutes after the first person picked up a newspaper. “Margaret Laymon. I didn’t know it was Bill that did it, but it doesn’t surprise me,” Laura said. “Margaret was a hell-raiser when she was young. Somebody was going to do it, sooner or later.”
“They didn’t have the pill yet?”
“Yes, but…I don’t know. Maybe she wanted to have a baby, and wanted Bill to be the daddy. Women get strange, sometimes.”
“You being one, I’ll take your word for it,” Virgil said. “I hadn’t noticed, myself.”
CROSSING THE BORDER into South Dakota, Virgil asked, “Was Betsy Carlson prominent in any way? I mean, before she came here?”
“Oh, lord, yes. Her parents were very well-off early settlers, owned a good chunk of land along the railroad, one of the banks, at least for a while. Betsy was the life of the party when she was young,” Laura said. “Everybody was a little surprised when Bill Judd married her sister, instead of her.”
“There were rumors that he didn’t actually have to marry her, to get what he wanted,” Virgil said. “The old ‘Why buy the cow if you’re getting the milk for free?’”
“Could be some truth to that,” Laura said. “Back then, people tended to look the other way…Have you been talking to other people…mmm…related to Bill Judd?”
“A couple,” Virgil said. “Margaret Laymon, of course. A woman who now lives somewhere else—I’ve got a list I’m working down.”
“Well, cough up the names,” Joan said.
“Ah, you don’t want to know,” Virgil said. “Besides, I couldn’t tell you if I wanted. I scrawled them all down in my notebook, and it’s back at the motel. He apparently got around town, though.”
His eyes caught Laura’s in the rearview mirror. She was watching him with just a hint of a smile on her face.
Virgil added, “The question I was working up to, was, why wouldn’t there be any press clippings about Betsy Carlson? I was looking in the newspaper files today, and there’s not a single one.”
After a moment of silence, Laura said, “Well, that’s ridiculous. She was in every club in town, she was president of most of them, at one time or another. There should have been a hundred stories about her.”
THE FLOOR NURSE at Grunewald rest home was not happy to see Virgil again, and got in his face. “Betsy was very agitated after you left. She still hasn’t recovered. She tries to walk, but she’s too weak. We’re here to protect our clients, and you could be hurting her.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Virgil said, with not much contrition. “But we’ve got a fairly desperate situation over in Bluestem. There were two more people killed this morning, and we believe they involve something that started in Betsy’s time. So: we’ve got to talk to her.”
The nurse let her disapproval show, but when she took them to see Carlson, the old woman showed no sign of recognizing Virgil. Instead she squinted at Laura Stryker and when Laura said, “Hello, Betsy,” she quavered, “Laura?”
“Yup, it’s me,” Laura said.
The three of them pulled up chairs, and with the nurse hovering in the background, Laura started talking to Carlson about the old days in Bluestem, about playing up on Buffalo Ridge. Carlson was older than Laura, so they hadn’t run with the same groups, but they’d all known each other.
Carlson’s memories wandered, sometimes were sharp, other times, vague. At one point, she blurted, “I remember when Mark died. That was an awful day.”
“Most awful day in my life,” Laura said. She glanced at Joan. “I was afraid for the kids. Jim was bad, but Joanie…I was afraid she might die. Or go crazy…” She bit off the sentence, realizing that it might not be the most diplomatic thing to say, given whom they were visiting.
Carlson’s head bobbed, and then her eyes drifted away, and then she looked at Virgil and said, “Did you find the man in the moon?”
Virgil smiled and said, “I looked, but I couldn’t find anything. I could find him if I had a better name.”
She shook her head and Virgil could feel her drifting again: “Doesn’t have a name. Not that I knew, anyway. They took him away, but he came back. I saw him.” She shook her head and went silent, and then she said, “You can’t look at all his face. Just look from his eyes to his chin, in this circle.” She moved a trembling hand to her face, and traced a circle from the middle of her forehead, past the end of an eyebrow, down across a cheekbone, around and under her mouth, and backup the other side to her forehead again. “You can only see him if you look in there. The man in the moon.”
“Do you know anybody who’d like to hurt Bill?” Joan asked.
The old woman looked at Joan for a moment and then almost giggled. “Who wouldn’t, that’s the question.”
They pushed, but she declined into babble. They waited, to see if she’d recover, and she went to sleep.
“GODDAMNIT,” VIRGIL SAID, as they were crossing the parking lot. “Doesn’t know the name, but she knows he’s here. The man in the moon.”
“What’re you going to do?” Joan asked.
“Go back to Bluestem. See what’s going on at Schmidt’s. Maybe…maybe go talk to the judge about getting a subpoena to look at Judd’s bank records. And Gleason’s, and Schmidt’s.”
“How about the Strykers’?” Laura asked.
“I’ve ruled out two of the Strykers,” Virgil said, as they settled in the truck.
“Which two?” Joan asked.
“That’s the tough question,” Virgil said.
ON THE WAY BACK, he pushed Laura about sexual and business relationships in town when Gleason and Schmidt overlapped as sheriff and coroner.
“You don’t think it’s about the Jerusalem artichoke scam?” Joan said. “Around here, that’s always a topic of conversation.”
“If it weren’t for Gleason and Schmidt, maybe. But with those two…from what everybody tells me, they were all movers and shakers in town, and friendly, but I don’t think anybody would blame Russell Gleason for the artichoke thing.” His eyes went up to the rearview. “Do you?” he asked Laura.
She shook her head: “It never occurred to me that he could be involved, and us Strykers knew as much about the artichoke business as anyone. No. I don’t think that’s it.”
“This comes down to craziness, and craziness…craziness isn’t usually about some long-ago hustle,” Virgil said. “There’s something else: sex, violence, illegality of some kind…some crazy bitterness that got covered up and suppressed, and now is sticking its head out. I was thinking, maybe…maybe there’d been a homosexual thing, that Judd pushed it on some kid back then, a kid who wasn’t gay but did what he was told to do, or forced to do, and that’s made him crazy. But my…names…say that there wasn’t any male-on-male gay stuff.”
Laura looked at him through the rearview, but said nothing. At her house, she got out, closed the door, walked around to the front of the truck and made a rolling motion, so that Virgil rolled down the window. “What you want to know about, didn’t happen,” she said. “Absolutely did not.”
“What are you talking about?” Joan asked her mother.
“Virgil knows,” Laura said, and she turned away and headed up her front sidewalk.
“WHAT THE HECK was that about?” Joan demanded, as they rolled down toward her house.
“About eliminating Strykers, as suspects.”
“What?”
Virgil sighed. “She was telling me that she didn’t have an affair with old man Judd, and, as a corollary, that that’s not why your father killed himself, and so there’s no reason for any Stryker, and in particular, Jim, to have killed him. Or the others.”
She stared, aghast. “My God, Virgil. What have you been up to?”
Virgil said, “I’ve been listening to talk. There’s talk that your mother and Judd were involved back around the time of your father’s death.
She worked in an insurance office that Judd owned. If she says she was not involved, I believe her. I don’t think she’d lie, when we’ve got all these killings on our hands, not if she thought it might make a difference.”
“Of course she wouldn’t,” Joan said, angry now.
Virgil shook his head. “You can’t tell what people will do, when their reputations are on the line. But: she didn’t. I believe her.”
“It’s hard to believe that you suspected,” Joan said.
“I didn’t, really,” Virgil said, again, without much contrition. “I’m just investigating.”
10
JOAN DIDN’T INVITE him in, when they stopped at her house. Her attitude wasn’t exactly frosty, he decided as he pulled away, but she was thinking about him, about her mother, about Jim, and about her father.
After he dropped her off, Virgil called Davenport in St. Paul, got the cell-phone number for Sandy, the researcher, and caught her as she was walking back to her apartment from class at the university.
“I need massive Xeroxes,” he told her. “I need income tax returns for a whole bunch of people. Do you have a pencil? Okay: William Judd Sr., William Judd Jr., a whole family named Stryker”—he spelled it for her—“including Mark, Laura, James, and Joan, also a Roman and Gloria Schmidt, husband and wife, Russell and Anna Gleason, husband and wife, Margaret and Jesse Laymon, mother and daughter. They all live in Stark County, most of them in Bluestem, and the Laymons live in the town of Roche. R-O-C-H-E. Can you do that?”
“Yes. Want me to run them through the other agencies—department of public safety, corrections, all that?”
“Everything you can find on them. Put it in a FedEx and see if you can deliver it to the Holiday Inn in Bluestem, tomorrow.”
“Never happen,” she said. “How far is Bluestem from here?”
“Four hours.”
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