As he got back in the truck, he thought about the welcome mat being moved, sighed, dug his pistol out from under the car seat, and clipped it to his belt. He drove back across the coulee, went to the newspaper, and found Williamson sitting at his computer, writing.
He looked up when Virgil came through the door: “Hell of a story on the Laymons,” he said. “I owe you a large one.”
“You hear anything new on the Schmidts?”
“No. Damnit, if they were gonna get killed, I wish they hadn’t done it on the day the paper comes out. We won’t be able to print a word for a week. In the meantime, we’re getting eaten alive by the Globe and the Argus-Leader.” The Globe and the Argus-Leader were the dailies in Worthington and Sioux Falls.
“You can pay me right now, for the one you owe me,” Virgil said. He looked at his watch; fifteen minutes to two. “I’d like to see the papers from 1970.”
Williamson said, “We don’t have them that way. Not whole papers. Back before 1995, they’re on microfilm, and they have them at the library. If you have a name, it’d be in the clip file…?”
Virgil shook his head. “No name. I don’t even know what I’m doing. Where’s the library?”
“Just up the hill…Are you going to the press conference?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Virgil said.
“Neither would anybody else in town. I don’t know what Stryker’s going to do—people are already starting to crowd into the courtroom. Won’t be room for the reporters.”
VIRGIL HUSTLED UP to the library, a flat red-brick building on the corner of Main Street. Inside, a pale-eyed, blond librarian with the smooth skin of an eighth-grader, took him to a microfilm booth at the back of the stacks. “I’ll show you how to thread the microfilm. It can be a trial,” she said. She went to a wooden file cabinet with dozens of small drawers, muttered, “Nineteen seventy.” She pulled it open, took four boxes of microfilm out, and handed them to Virgil, then went back to the file and said, “Darn it. We’re missing a box. Somebody has misfiled it.”
He was interested: “Which box?”
She started sorting through them again, explaining, “We don’t start a new drawer until the last drawer is full, and when I opened it, it was loose—so there’s a box out somewhere. It looks like…” She stood on her tiptoes, pushed her glasses up her nose, looking into the drawer, and finally said, “We stop at the middle of May, and start again in September. So one box is missing. We have four months on each roll…Darn. I tell people to leave the refiling to us, but they don’t listen.”
“Could it be misfiled?” Virgil asked.
She pulled open a drawer from the nineties, that was only partially full of microfilm boxes. Checked them, said, “These are right,” and then went through a bunch of empty drawers at the bottom of the case. She said, “I think it’s been taken by somebody. I’ll check these after we close—I have to work the desk—but I think it’s been taken.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d check,” Virgil said.
THE MISSING BOX intrigued him. The librarian showed him how to thread the film they had, and he looked at four months around Schmidt’s mortgage loan, and in the quick review, saw nothing that struck him. No strange women in automobile accidents…
Not enough to work with; not yet. And it was possible that Judd had simply bought Schmidt, to be used as necessary.
VIRGIL WAS OUT the library door at twenty minutes to three. By ten minutes of three, he’d changed into a pale blue shirt with a necktie, khaki slacks, and a navy blue sport coat. Looking at himself in a mirror, he decided he looked like a greeter at a minor Indian casino.
He got back to the courthouse at one minute to three. Twenty people were standing outside the courthouse door, mostly older, mostly men, mostly deep in conversation. Two television remote trucks were parked on the lawn, cables snaking through the doors of the courthouse.
Inside was chaos. The courtroom might take a hundred people if nobody breathed too hard. In addition to two TV cameramen, who’d rigged lights over an attorney’s table that had been dragged in front of the judge’s bench, there were two on-camera people, both women; four tired-looking men and two tired-looking women who were probably from newspapers; two guys with tape recorders who might be from radio stations; and about a hundred locals who weren’t going anywhere.
Virgil stuck his head inside, took it all in, then headed down the hall to Stryker’s office before he attracted any attention. His phone went off, and he pulled it out of his pocket: Stryker. He buzzed past the secretary, stuck his head into Stryker’s office and said, “Yo.”
Stryker hung up the phone. “Where’n the hell have you been?”
“Running around,” Virgil said. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”
“Well.” Stryker shrugged. “Tell the truth, I guess.”
“Jesus, Jim, you can’t do that.” Virgil looked around, saw the secretary watching, and closed the office door on her. “It’d stop us in our tracks.”
“Maybe if you’d been here an hour ago, we could have cooked something up.”
“There’s no cooking,” Virgil said. “You go out there, you give them the gory details of the three scenes—Gleason, Judd, and Schmidt. Everybody local already knows about them, so you’re not giving anything away. Talk about them being shot in the eyes. Talk about Judd being burned right down to the anklebones. TV people will like that. Tell them that we’ve developed information that would suggest that the killer is local, and that we’ve come up with a number of leads that we can’t talk about, but that…if they come back in a week or ten days, we believe that we’ll have a lot more. That we’re rolling.”
“Are we?” Stryker asked.
“Kind of.”
“Virgil…”
“You don’t tell them what it is, dummy,” Virgil said. “That’s the confidential part. We’re rolling, but we can’t talk about it.”
“If I do that, and if I don’t come up with something in ten days, I am truly screwed.”
“If you go out there and say we ain’t got jack-shit, you’re truly screwed anyway,” Virgil said. “If you go out and say the hounds of hell are on the killer’s heels, maybe he’ll make a move that we can see.”
“Mother of God.”
“She ain’t here, Jim. It’s just you and me.”
STRYKER STRAIGHTENED himself out, and as they were about to go out, asked, “How much detail?”
“More than you think you should. The eyes, and the fact that it seems to be a ritual. The stick that propped up Schmidt, facing toward the east. That Gleason was propped up, facing the east. That nothing was left of Judd but his ankle and wrist bones, and the wire from his heart. They’ll eat that up…”
“I’m gonna need some heart work,” Stryker said. “Honest to God, I’m gonna need some heart work.”
At the last minute, walking down the hall, Virgil whispered, “You’re the grim sheriff of a rural county. You’re an honest, upright, tight-jawed, God-fearing cowboy. You don’t want to talk about it, but you think you should, because we’re in a democracy. You’re grim. You don’t smile, because the dead people are friends. This guy is killing your people.”
“Grim,” Stryker said.
HE WAS, and he pulled it off, barely moving his jaws.
Virgil said thirty-two words: “We’re working on it hard, and like the sheriff says, we’re rolling. But the BCA’s position is that the sheriff runs the operation, and we let him do the talking for us.”
A woman from a television station in Sioux Falls liked Stryker a lot, got tight with him, pushed him a little: “What’re you gonna do when you catch this guy?” she asked.
“Gonna hope that the sonofabitch fights back,” Stryker said, his face like a rock. “Save the state some trial money.”
They didn’t even cut the sonofabitch.
AFTERWARD, in Stryker’s office, Virgil told him the truth: “I think you did it.”
“So we got ten days or two wee
ks.” He took a turn around his office. “What’d you think about the chick from Sioux Falls?”
“If Jesse doesn’t work out, give her a call,” Virgil said.
“She had a nice…bodice.”
Made Virgil laugh.
THE TV PEOPLE were packed up and gone by four-thirty, leaving behind a crowd of locals who were dissipating like the fizz on a hot Coke. Virgil picked up the box lunch at Ernhardt’s, and called Joan: “You ready?”
“Not until after the news.”
Virgil went back to the motel, peed, put on a cowboy shirt and running shoes, let the shirt hang outside his pants to cover the pistol. On the way to Joan’s house, he dialed Sandy, Davenport’s research assistant. “How are we doing with the tax returns?”
“I’ve got them stacked up to my elbows,” she said. “I talked to Lucas, and I’m sending them down there with a messenger. He’ll leave here tomorrow at eight, you should have them by noon.”
“Terrific. Get me one more set of records, if you can: Carol and Gerald Johnstone, both of Bluestem, owners or former owners of the Johnstone Funeral Home.”
“They’ll be in the package,” she said.
“Also: check with the state historical society, and see if they have copies of the Bluestem Record newspaper for the months of May through September, 1969.”
“I couldn’t do that today—they’ll be closed,” Sandy said. “Tomorrow I won’t be here—and then there’s the weekend. I could see if I could find somebody else…”
“Ah, boy…” Virgil said. “Okay. Monday, first thing?”
“First thing.”
He described the dead woman on the table, told her she might have been an auto-accident victim. “If I find anything, I’ll fax it to the motel,” she said.
“No, no—call me on my cell. You can read it to me. I don’t want to give this away.”
11
THE NEWS WAS just coming up when Virgil knocked on Joan’s front door. She shouted, “Come on in,” and he went through into her living room. “Did you see me at the press conference?”
“No…”
“I got crushed,” Joan said. “I was in the back and this fat guy from the Firestone store, I got welded to his butt. Here we go…”
THE PRESS CONFERENCE was the lead story and sucked up four or five minutes of the broadcast. Virgil had been right about the details: they loved it. And the cameras loved Stryker’s face, and the tight jaws. “That’s my brother,” Joan said, delighted, when it was over. “He looked like a movie star.”
“He was good,” Virgil said.
“You’ve been holding out on me, too,” Joan said. She’d stacked a duffel bag near the front door, and picked it up on the way out. “You never told me that you guys were rolling, you’ve been all downbeat.”
“Yeah, well…” he mumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Virgil said.
“What’d you say?” They’d just gotten into the truck. “You said something.”
He leaned over, kissed her on the cheek, and said, “It’s all bullshit. We got nothing.”
She was flabbergasted. “Virgil.”
“That’s the way it is.”
“Virgil…”
“We got ten days.”
He backed out of the driveway, and she didn’t say another word until they were out of town. Then, “Did you bring the food?”
“Exactly what you ordered,” Virgil said.
“You got nothing?”
“Well. Maybe something.”
“Virgil!”
He then fumbled behind the seat, in his briefcase, and hooked out one of the color Xeroxes and passed it to her. She recoiled: “Yuck.”
“Any idea who it is? Probably before your time, though…”
“No. Where’d you find this?” she asked.
“In Roman Schmidt’s safe-deposit box. Nothing but the photograph. No other paper that might suggest what it is. I have a feeling that it’s before the middle of 1970.”
“Did you look in the paper?”
“The paper’s on microfilm, in the library,” he said. “Somebody stole a roll from the middle of 1969, but there’s no way to know if that’s the one we’re looking for.”
“Really. Virgil, you may…” She hesitated, then: “Does Jim know about this?”
“Not yet. I’m going to tell him when I see him, but I think he might be out of town at the moment,” Virgil said.
“Out of town? He can’t be,” she said. “What else happened?”
He grinned. “I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“I don’t care—tell me anyway.”
Virgil laughed and said, “I think he’s taking Jesse Laymon out to dinner. Someplace far away, where nobody’ll see him. Because he’s supposed to be working the Roman Schmidt case night and day, even if there’s nothing to do.”
“Oh, my God.” She pulled her bottom lip: “Well, I hope he gets laid. And if he does, I hope it’s worth it. Because he really is in trouble, here, Virgil. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the Curlys declares that he’s running for sheriff, one of these days.”
“You think?”
“Big Curly thought he was the natural successor to Roman Schmidt. He might be past it now, but Little Curly would take the job in a minute.”
“Neither one of them struck me as a wizard,” Virgil said.
“No, but their families have been here forever, they know everyone, they’ve slapped every back in the county, and, they’re fairly good-natured. If Jim really slips, one of them will run.”
“Ah, we’ll get the guy. Next week or so,” Virgil said.
“You think?”
“Yup.”
“Will anybody else be killed?” she asked.
He had to think for a minute, then said, “Maybe.”
JOAN MADE HIM park the truck in the barn, a gesture toward discretion, and then they walked through the low weeds to the creek, and up the path into the Stryker’s Dell. The running shoes made the going easier; cowboy boots weren’t made for climbing rocks. At the top, on the left side of the pond, Joan opened the duffel and took out a quilt. “Straight from Wal-Mart; makes the rocks softer,” she said.
Virgil unloaded the food and beer, and when he looked up, she was unbuttoning her blouse. He squatted on the rock, watching, as she took it off, slipped out of her shoes, socks and jeans, popped the brassiere, tossed it with the other clothes, and slipped out of her underpants. “See anything you like?”
“Well, yeah,” he said.
“Last one in,” she said, and she was over the side of the rock, six feet into the water, and Virgil was shedding shoes, shirt and pants as quickly as he could get them off. Fifteen seconds after she went over the side, he followed, the water a bracing slap. When he came up, she was there to push his head back under.
They played around the pool for a few minutes, laughing and sputtering, the water cool but not cold, refreshing in the summer heat; and the stones in the direct light of the setting sun were warm as toast.
The pool’s back wall, to the east, where the spring came down, had eroded into a steep ramp. At the top of the ramp was a finger of dirt and grass, and beyond it, a rocky hillside running up to the crest. The pool walls on the north and south sides went straight up forty feet or so, solid red rock. A local kid had once jumped off the top on a dare, Joan said, had landed in not quite the deepest part, and had broken a couple of foot bones when he hit bottom. “That was the end of that,” she said. “We had to carry him out.”
The west side was the canyon, with the sun setting right in the center of the slot. It did that in May and August, she said, then swung farther north and south, depending on the season.
They were facing each other, blowing water, Virgil working on a new game; he had a handful of her pubic hair, and her two hands were on his chest, and he was about to suggest a different move when he caught the reflection up the hillside, beyond the head of the pool.
He thought it might be
water on an eyelash, a refraction off a splash, something else, but then he caught it again and he pushed her head underwater and ducked under himself, caught her arm, and dragged her deeper toward the head of the pool. She struggled against him, but he pulled hard, until he felt the east wall, and then they rose two feet to the surface and she shouted, “Virgil, Virgil, what are you doing…?”
A frightened tone threaded in her voice as she shook water away from her face.
Virgil shoved her against the wall and said, urgently, “There’s somebody on the hillside above us. I saw a reflection off glass, off a lens…”
She turned to look, but they were out of the line, against the face, “What?”
“Somebody up the hill…”
“A camera?”
“Could be a camera,” Virgil said.
“What else…?”
“Could be a scope,” he said. “When somebody’s looking at you with glasses, you can usually see their arms.”
She looked at him, shocked, then looked at their clothes. “Oh…God.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure?” she asked, craning her neck to look overhead.
“I saw it twice.” He looked back at their clothes, and then said, “I want you to stay right here. I’m going underwater to that corner right there, I’m going to come out fast. I don’t think…he’s at least a couple of hundred yards away, maybe three hundred. I don’t think he can get me if I’m moving fast. Once I’m behind that lip, I can get out to the clothes, get my gun.”
“I thought…”
“I started carrying it today…tell you later. Now. Stay here. I’m going.”
He took two deep breaths, then pushed himself straight down the wall. Had to go deep, because the water was clear. When he hit bottom, he oriented himself, pushed off the wall, kept thinking, stay deep, stay deep, felt the bottom shelving, came up slightly off-line, surged forward with a butterfly stroke, lurching toward a groove in the rock and was almost there, almost in, when there was a slap on the wall to the right. One hand slipped and he went down, lurched again, slipping, and then he was into the groove, hurting, registering the crack of a rifle shot, pushed himself up the groove, skinning his knees, crawled up behind the wall, six feet from his weapon.
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