“Hardly had time,” Virgil said. “Anyway, I’m on it. I’ve got a researcher up in St. Paul who can pull the corporate information, and I’ve got some income-tax forms coming in. If you could check this letter…”
“Wonder who uses a typewriter?”
“Somebody Roman’s age,” Virgil said.
MARGO CARR, the crime-scene specialist, showed him Schmidt’s home office, a table made out of a wooden door, set across two filing cabinets. A computer, no typewriter. “Everything in here has been worked,” she said.
“You think the killer was in here?”
“No. I think the killer shot Roman, shot Gloria, then came and shot Roman twice more, then dragged him outside and propped him up with a stick he’d already cut. I don’t think he went anywhere in the house, off the line of the bedroom.”
“Do you think he knew the inside of the house?” Virgil asked.
“Maybe. Or maybe Roman turned on a light in the bedroom and gave it all away.”
“Find anything at all?”
“One thing,” she said. She went back to a plastic trunk, opened it, and brought back a Ziploc bag with a cigarette filter in it. “Found this right by the back steps. Cigarette butt. I can figure out what kind, I’m sure, but I know it’s a menthol—I can smell it. Wasn’t rained on, so it’s recent. The Schmidts didn’t smoke.”
He looked at the butt, and then at Carr: “You think?”
“I’m grasping for straws, here. That’s what I got.”
A MOMENT LATER, he was sitting at Roman’s desk, his eyes closed, trying to remember: the pack of cigarettes next to George Feur’s elbow, when Virgil interviewed him at his house. Salems? Virgil thought so. His visual image was of a green package, an aqua green…
His cell phone rang: Joan.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“Not bad. I’m confused, but I’m looking pretty good,” he said. “I might go out tonight, see if I can pick up some chicks.”
“Good luck.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I’m at Schmidt’s. I’ve got something for you to think about: how many people, once they figured we were going out to the farm, would have known how to come down that slope to a place where they’d have a free shot at us?”
She thought for a moment, and then said, “Well, probably not everybody.”
“Not everybody?”
“It’s a fairly famous swimming hole, Virgil. Kids would park up on that hillside, up in the trees, then sneak in past the stock tank and go up the canyon and skinny-dip. I mean, if you didn’t do that at least once in high school, and get laid up on that rock, you were nobody.”
“How often did you do it?” he asked.
“We agreed not to talk about our histories,” she said.
“No, we didn’t.”
“We have now,” she said.
He offered to take her to the Dairy Queen, having exhausted the fine-dining possibilities at McDonald’s.
“I’ll order a pizza from Johnnie’s,” she said. “My place at four o’clock, we’ll go back out to the farm. It’s a great day. Be careful. And bring a better gun.”
“You be careful.”
VIRGIL DUG THROUGH the Schmidts’ filing cabinet, which turned out to be a waste of time. He did learn that they were fairly affluent: Gloria had been an elementary-school teacher in Worthington—a friend of the alcoholic schoolteacher? Probably not, though: Gloria was most of a generation earlier, and would have taught in a different school. Wonder where the money came from? They had half a million dollars in a Vanguard account; but then, they’d had a long time to build it up.
The most interesting material was in Schmidt’s computer. He had a dial-up account, and he had e-mail from Big Curly, and they were talking politics. Curly was looking for support for his son to run against Stryker in the next election.
Schmidt was talking, but wasn’t eager to side with someone who might be a loser. “We better wait until we are close to the time, have a better idea of what the opportunities are,” he wrote back in one of the notes. But he didn’t say no.
Sitting there, looking at the Schmidt material, Virgil started thinking about the letter he’d given to Larry Jensen. How many people knew what tree he was barking up? The banker, of course, and anyone he might have gossiped with.
And the Johnstones.
“That damn picture,” he said aloud. Had the photograph somehow generated the note?
STYMIED at the Schmidts’—there was nothing right on the surface, and a full analysis of all the Schmidts’ financial transactions would take a lot of time. He heard people knocking around in the back of the house, and gave up. Back another day, if nothing else popped up.
He went out through the kitchen, saw Big Curly, Little Curly, and a deputy he didn’t know, standing in the yard with Jensen. He waved and said, “I’m outa here.”
“Anything?” Jensen asked.
“We need an accountant,” Virgil said.
“Yeah…”
He’d be back to Schmidts’, Virgil thought, to see if somebody erased that e-mail about the election…if somebody would mess with evidence at a murder scene. Be an interesting thing to know.
ON THE WAY into town, he saw another hawk circling, like the one he’d seen out at the farm, and that made him think of the shooting, and the slope, and the farm, and skinny-dipping, and the whole question of why the shooter hadn’t come closer and taken the sure shot.
And how he’d missed by two feet at three hundred yards. Of course, it wasn’t that hard to miss by two feet. But if you had the rifle sitting on a stump, the shot should have been closer than that.
He thought about that for a minute and then slowed, pulled to the side of the road, and called up the Laymon place. Jesse picked up the phone: “Hello?”
She did have a nice whiskey voice, Virgil decided. “This is Virgil,” he said. “I’m calling on behalf of Jim’s sister, who’s reluctant to gossip with you. But did we see you guys up in Marshall last night? About seven? We had to dodge a restaurant because she was sure it was you guys.”
“Not us. We went over to Sioux Falls,” Jesse said.
“Ah, shoot. So I ate pizza while you guys were doing surf ’n’ turf. You pay? Being a rich woman?”
She laughed, and said, “No, I didn’t. And really, why are you calling? You’re sneaking up on something.”
“I am not,” Virgil said cheerfully. “Honest to God, this is nothing but the purest gossip. I personally took his beautiful sister up to the Stryker Dell late last night. You guys coulda come along.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Skinny-dipping with your sister? Jim’s waaaaayyy too straight for that.”
“Didn’t think of that,” Virgil said. “I’d be, too, if I had a sister…So’d you have a good time?”
“Yes, I did. He’s just like a puppy,” Jesse said. “But he pays attention to me.”
“Told you, that you might like it,” Virgil said. “I was afraid he wasn’t going to make it at all, with the Schmidt case. I couldn’t see how he’d be out of there before eight o’clock, and everything around here closes up at nine.”
“No problem,” she said. “He just dumped what he was doing and came over; that’s what he said, anyway. We were in Sioux Falls by eight-thirty.”
“Ah, well…so now I come to the real reason I called,” Virgil said.
“I knew it…”
“I haven’t been able to catch him this morning,” Virgil said. “He isn’t there, is he?”
“Virgil!”
“Sorry, honey, I need to find him.”
“I don’t sleep with guys on the first date,” she said. “Not at home. Most of the time, anyway.”
“Suppose that leaves something for him to look forward to,” Virgil said. “Don’t tell him I called and asked you this, or he’d probably beat the snot out of me.”
THEY CHATTED for another minute, then he closed the phone. All right: if they’d been in Sioux Falls at eight-thirty, Stryker pi
cked her up at eight, and would have been available to do the shooting. Why? That was another question, but knowing who was available was a step in the right direction.
Though he really, really didn’t think Stryker had anything to do with it.
Really.
HE STOPPED AT the courthouse, found Stryker leaning in the window at the assessor’s, chatting with a clerk. He straightened when he saw Virgil, and Virgil asked, “You got a minute?”
“Yup.” As they walked away from the assessor’s desk, Stryker said, “Larry called me, said you got a letter this morning…”
They went into Stryker’s office and closed the door, and Virgil sat in a visitor’s chair and grinned and said, “I don’t know how to exactly approach this particular report…”
“Spit it out.”
“A friend of mine from here in town…”
“Joanie…”
“…and I decided to go for a swim last night, and she knew this famous local swimming hole…”
Stryker’s eyebrows went up. “You went skinny-dipping up at the dell? With my baby sister?”
“Yeah.”
“Do any good?”
“Somebody with a rifle ambushed us,” Virgil said.
He was watching Stryker’s face, and Stryker’s smile died so naturally that it seemed impossible that he already knew. “What!”
“Two shots, from up on that hillside. Trying to hit me, not Joanie,” Virgil said.
“Virgil…”
“I hit a nerve someplace,” Virgil said.
“Holy shit, man.” Stryker bucked up in his chair, the wheels skittering over the plastic floor-protecter. “You gotta stay away from Joanie until this is over. Jesus, he coulda killed both of you. Like shooting sitting ducks, down in there…”
“Yeah. I’ve been trying to figure out why he missed. Maybe just a bad shot,” Virgil said.
They talked about it for a couple of minutes, then Virgil said, “They’re not after Joanie, whoever it is. I think…I gotta run down the letter from this morning. Are you looking at prints?”
“Yeah, they’re doing the glue thing right now…”
“All right.” Virgil pushed out of his chair. “I got one more thing—I tell you because you’re a friend. I was going through Roman Schmidt’s e-mail this morning. Big Curly was trying to get Schmidt to support Little Curly in a run against you this fall. They were talking back and forth, going over the possibilities.”
Stryker rubbed his chin with his forefinger: “Doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “What’d Roman have to say?”
“He suggested that they don’t do anything until they get closer to the election, see which way the wind is blowing. Didn’t say no.”
VIRGIL WAS WALKING back to his car when a tall, older man in a white straw hat yelled at him. “Hey! Mr. Flowers…”
Virgil waited by his truck as the man cut across the street and came up to him. He was gray haired, weathered, wiry, in jeans and a golf shirt. “I’m Andy Clay, I live up by the Johnstones? And, you know, where the Gleasons used to live?”
“Yeah, how are you?”
“Fine. Well, maybe not,” Clay said. “I want to tell you something, just between you and me, and maybe ask a question.”
“No problem.”
“I saw you at the Johnstones’ yesterday. Everybody in town knows who you are, now,” Clay said. “Anyway, later on, I was down at the gas station, getting gas for my mower, and Carol pulls up in their Lexus truck. She doesn’t even say ‘hi,’ she just starts filling it up and washing the windshield and she looks like she’s in a hurry. So I went on back up the hill, and I’m gassing up the mower and here comes Carol in the Lexus. She parks in the driveway instead of the garage, and then here comes Gerald out the front door with a big bag, and he throws it in the truck. Then they both go back inside and then they come out with a couple more bags—I’m mowing the lawn by this time—and then she locks the door, and they take off.”
“Take off?” Virgil asked. “You mean, like getting out of town?”
“Unless they were donating a bunch of suitcases to the Goodwill,” Clay said. “The thing is, they’ve got these timer lights, that turn the lights on and off when they’re gone? Well, everybody up there knows about them, and they were going last night. One comes on here, another goes off there. Then the first one goes off, and the second one comes on. You know. It’s almost like a signal: The Johnstones are gone.”
“Huh,” Virgil said. He thought about it for a moment, then said, “So what’s the question?”
“We were talking about it last night, up on the hill,” Clay said. “Should we all get out?”
THE FUCKIN’ JOHNSTONES, Virgil thought as he went back to the motel.
Too late to get the highway patrol to drag them back. Gerald Johnstone knew something about the picture of the dead woman, and Virgil needed to know what it was.
Time for threats, now—if he could find them. Didn’t they say something about visiting a daughter in Minneapolis?
He called Davenport. “I got a couple of people who may be running. Not the killers, but they know something. If Jenkins and Shrake are sitting on their asses…”
He explained and told Davenport that he didn’t know the daughter’s name. “We can probably find it in the vital records,” Davenport said. “I’ll get the guys on it. They’ve been restless.”
“Well, Jesus, don’t let them beat these people up,” Virgil said. “These are old people.”
“You mean, we should only beat up young people?” Davenport asked. “There are as many old assholes as there are young ones. Especially since the boomers got old.”
“Yeah, well…I’d just as soon my witnesses didn’t die of a heart attack. Tell them to take it easy. No kicking.”
“I thought you wanted them scared,” Davenport said.
“A little scared,” Virgil said. “Not too scared.”
AT THE MOTEL, the desk clerk had three cardboard boxes, sealed with tape, stashed behind the counter: “A guy brought them in a half hour ago. He said they were from St. Paul.”
They felt like boxes of bricks. Virgil hauled them to his room and unloaded the stacks of paper. Too much stuff, but it had to be looked at. Some of it, anyway.
Before he started on it, he called Davenport again, got a name, called a guy at the secretary of state’s office, and found that he could look at all current corporate records, online, including the confidential files, if he had a password. “I’ll set you up with a temporary password: chuzzlewit,” said the guy, whose name was Martin. He spelled the password. “That’ll be good through next Wednesday. If you need another one, call me up again.”
“What’s a chuzzlewit?”
“It’s a word unlikely to be figured out by some little hacker-geek between now and Wednesday,” Martin said.
SO VIRGIL, reluctant to start on the pile of paper, pulled out his laptop, stared at it for a moment. A problem had been pecking at the back of his mind for a day or so, and he put in the disk that Stryker had given him on the first day, the one with the paperwork on the Gleason killing. Included with everything else were a couple of hundred jpg photographs of the crime scene. He combed over them for a half hour, then, satisfied, said, “Huh.”
No Revelation, as far as he could see.
THEN HE WENT online with the secretary of state’s office and searched for Florence Mills, Inc.
Florence Mills, according to the information in the original filing, had been created three years earlier to “build, buy, or lease facilities for the production of corn-based and switchgrass-based ethanol as a renewable fuel,” a joint venture between Arno Partners, a limited liability company registered in Delaware, and St. John Ventures, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Not much there. He had a feeling that the Delaware company would be hard to check. Delaware was an easy place to set up a corporation, requiring minimal information, and a stickler for legal procedures when you wanted to mine their corporate records.
Idaho, he thought, might be easier, and it was: called the Idaho secretary of state’s office, was told how to look at online public records, and with a certain sense of what he’d find, looked up St. John Ventures: George Feur, chief executive officer and chairman.
He called Stryker: “What happened with Judd Sr.’s office? Did you seal it up, or what?”
“Yup. Couldn’t say for sure that Junior didn’t get in there, though. They’re right next to each other. If there was a big pot of cash or something…”
“I need to get in,” Virgil said. “Right now.”
“I’ll walk down. Meet you there in ten.”
JUDD’S OFFICE included a small outer waiting room with a secretary’s desk, a side room with a Xerox machine, a printer and a half-dozen file cabinets, and a large inner office with leather chairs, dark-wood paneling, and a new wide-screen television sitting on top of a bar. The newspaper office was on one side, and Judd Jr.’s office on the other; they hadn’t seen either the newspaper editor or Junior when they unlocked Judd Sr.’s office.
Stryker locked the door behind them and Virgil said, “Not too much light. Just the inner office and the file room. I’d just as soon that not everybody in town knows that we’re here.”
“Probably know anyway,” Stryker said, gloomily. He was discouraged by the results of the Schmidt investigation: “Nothing’s coming up, man. What about you? Anything working?”
“The letter this morning implied that Bill Judd Jr. has money problems, and mentioned Florence Mills,” Virgil said. “It supposedly was set up to make ethanol out of corn and switchgrass—and it’s half owned by George Feur.”
“Feur?”
“Yeah. I can’t find out who owns the other half, because that half is owned by a Delaware corporation. We could probably find out next week, but it’s too late today. We’re gonna need some papers, and it’s already two o’clock on the East Coast. I’m thinking that if the Judds are involved with Feur, and…I don’t know. There’s something going on there.”
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