They ran out of farmers before they got to the fuel makers; and it turned out that oil would have to cost more than $50 a barrel for fuel makers to break even, and in the early eighties, oil was running at half that. The people who’d staked their futures on the Jerusalem artichoke lost their futures.
Judd was more prosperous than ever.
BUT HATED.
Hated enough, even, to be murdered. Nobody knew where the Jerusalem artichoke money had gone—Judd said it all went for lobbying, for getting bills passed in St. Paul and Washington, for preliminary planning and architectural work on an ethanol plant, and loan service—but most people thought that it went into speculative stocks, and then a bank account somewhere, probably with a number on it, rather than a name.
The Stark County sheriff at the time, a man named Russell Copes, had been elected on a ticket of putting Judd in jail. He hadn’t gotten the job done, and had shortly thereafter moved to Montana. The state attorney general took a halfhearted run at Judd, on the evidence developed by Copes, and there’d been a trial in St. Paul. Judd had been acquitted by a confused jury, and had moved back to his house on Buffalo Ridge.
That was a greater mystery than even the Jerusalem artichoke business: why did he stay?
Stark County was a raw, windy corner of the Great Plains that had been losing population for half a century, bitterly cold in winter, hot and dry in the summer, with nothing much in the way of diversion for a rich man.
Now his mansion was burning down.
Everybody in town would know about the fire; even with the thunderstorm coming through, a half-hundred souls had come out to take a look at it.
When Buffalo Ridge became a state park, Judd had donated two hundred acres of prairie, which had been expansively appraised and provided a nice tax deduction. As part of the deal, the state built an approach road to the top of the hill, where an observation platform was built, so tourists could look at the park’s buffalo herd. Judd’s driveway came off the road. The way the locals figured it, he not only got a tax deduction for donating two hundred acres of unfarmable rock, he also got the state to maintain his driveway, and plow it in the winter.
Virgil had been to the park a dozen times, and knew his way in, threading past a line of cars and trucks pulled to the edge of County Road 8. A sheriff’s squad car blocked the park road up the hill, and a crowd of gawkers stood just below it. Even from a half mile away, the fire looked enormous. He eased the truck past the rubberneckers and up to the squad. A cop in a slicker walked up and Virgil rolled down the window and said, “Virgil Flowers, BCA. Is Stryker up there?”
“Hey, heard you were coming,” the cop said. “I’m Little Curly. Yeah, he’s up there. Let me get my car out of the way.”
“What about Judd?”
Little Curly shook his head: “From what I hear, they can’t find him. His housekeeper says he was up there this afternoon. He’s senile and don’t drive himself anymore…so he might still be in there.”
“Burning pretty good,” Virgil observed.
“It’s a fuckin’ tornado,” Little Curly said. He walked back to his car, climbed into the driver’s seat, and pulled it through the fence. A woman with a beer can in her hand flipped back her rain-suit hood and peered through the driver’s-side window at Virgil. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and good-looking, and she grinned at him and twiddled the fingers on her beer-free hand. Virgil grinned back, gave her a thumbs-up, and went on by Little Curly’s car and followed the blacktop up the hill.
At the house, the first thing he noticed was that the firefighters weren’t fighting the fire. No point. The rain meant that the fire wasn’t going anywhere, and when Little Curly called it a tornado, he hadn’t been joking. Throwing a few tons of foam on the burning house would have been a waste of good foam.
The cop cars were parked behind the fire trucks, and Virgil moved into last place. He unbelted, knelt on the seat, and dug his rain suit out of the gear bag in the back. The suit had been made for October muskie fishing and New England sailing; not much got through it. He pulled it on, climbed out of the truck.
The sheriff’s name was Jimmy Stryker, whom Virgil had more or less known since Stryker had pitched for the Bluestem Whippets in high school; but everybody on the hill was an anonymous clump of waterproofed nylon, and Virgil had to ask three times before he found him.
“THAT YOU, JIMMY?”
Stryker turned. He was a tall man, square-chinned, with pale hair and hard jade-green eyes. Like most prairie males, he was weather-burnt and wore cowboy boots. “That you, Virgil?”
“Yeah. What happened?”
Stryker turned back to the fire. “Don’t know. I was down in my house, and one minute I looked out the window and didn’t see anything, and the next minute, I heard the siren going, looked out the window, and there it was. We got a guy who was driving through town, saw it happen: he said it just exploded.”
“What about Judd?”
Stryker nodded at the house. “I could be wrong, but I do believe he’s in there.”
Up closer to the fire, a man in a trench coat, carrying an umbrella, was standing with three firemen, waving his free hand at the fire, and at the trucks, jabbing a finger. In the light of the flames, Virgil could see his mouth working, but couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Strkyer said, “That’s Bill Judd Jr. He’s pissed because they’re not putting out the fire.”
“The New York City Fire Department couldn’t put that out,” Virgil said. The heat came through the rain, hot as a hair dryer, even at fifty yards. “That thing is burning a hole in the storm.”
“Tell that to Junior.”
The fire stank: of burning fabrics and old wood and insulation and water and linoleum and oil and everything else that gets stuck in a house, and maybe a little flesh. They watched for another moment, feeling the heat on the fire side, the cool rain spattering off the hoods on their rain suits, down their backs and necks. Virgil asked, “Think he was smoking in bed?”
Stryker’s features were harsh in the firelight, and the corners of his mouth turned down at Virgil’s question. “Bill Parker, he’s a guy lives up in Lismore, was coming into town on Highway Eight. He saw the fire, mmm, must’ve been a few minutes after it started. He was driving toward it when a truck went by, moving fast. He figures it was going eighty, ninety miles an hour. And it was raining to beat the band. It took the turn on Highway Three, headed down to Ninety.”
“He see what kind of truck?”
“Nope. Not even sure it was a pickup. Might’ve been an SUV,” Stryker said. “All he could see was, the lights was set up high.”
They looked at the fire some more and then Virgil said, “Lot of people hated him.”
“Yup.” A few locals sidled past, grinning, hiding beer cans, having snuck past the cops below. Small town, you took care of yourself: Stryker told them, “You folks stay back out of the way.”
They watched for another minute, then Virgil yawned. “Well, good luck to you, Jimmy. I’m heading down to the Holiday Inn.”
“Why’d you come up?”
“Just rubbernecking,” Virgil said. “Saw the fire when I was coming down Ninety. Knew what it must be.”
“Goddamnedest thing,” Stryker said, peering into the flames. “I hope that old sonofabitch was dead before the fire got to him. Nobody needs to be burned to death.”
“If he did.”
“If he did.” Stryker frowned suddenly, again turned his green eyes to Virgil. “You don’t think he might’ve faked it? Skipped out to wherever he put that money?”
“I think the money might be a legend, is what I think,” Virgil said. He slapped Stryker on the shoulder. “You take it easy, Jimmy. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Not too early. I’ll be out here awhile.” As Virgil walked away, Stryker called, “That money wasn’t no legend, Virgil. He’s burnin’ because of that money.”
Behind him, up closer to the fire, Bill Judd Jr. was still screaming at the fire
men, looking like he was one step from a heart attack.
THE HOLIDAY INN was smoke free, and Strictly No Pets, but Virgil’s room smelled of smoke and pets anyway—snuck cigarettes and cats in the night—as well as whatever kind of chemical they sprayed in the air to kill the smell of smoke and cat pee. You got two beds whether you wanted them or not. Virgil tossed his bag on one of them, pulled off the rain suit, and hung it over the showerhead to drip-dry.
He was a medium-tall man with blond hair and gray eyes, a half inch over six feet, lean, broad shouldered, long armed with big hands; his hair was way too long for a cop’s, but fell short of his shoulders. He’d played the big-three sports in high school, had lettered in all of them, a wide receiver in football, a guard in basketball, a third baseman in baseball. He wasn’t big enough or fast enough for college football, he was too short for basketball, and had the arm for college baseball, but couldn’t hit the pitching.
He drifted through a degree in ecological science, with a minor in creative writing, because it was easy and interesting and he liked the outdoors, the botany, and the girls in the writing classes. He joined the Army after graduation, got semicoerced into the military police, saw some trouble, but never fired his weapon in anger.
He came back home, found that there was no huge demand for bachelor-degree ecologists, and went off to the Police Academy. Got married, got divorced, got married, got divorced, got married, got divorced, and at the end of a five-year round of silliness, decided he didn’t want to be a four-time loser, so he stopped getting married.
He was working for the City of St. Paul as an investigator—eight years on the force, getting bored—when he was borrowed by a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) unit looking into a home-invasion ring. One thing led to another, and he moved to the BCA. There, he fell into the orbit of a political appointee named Lucas Davenport who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: “We’ll only give you the hard stuff.”
HE’D BEEN DOING the hard stuff for three years, with a personal side-venture as an outdoor writer. He had credits at most of the magazines that still took freelance stuff, but he wasn’t going to make a living at it; not unless he got a staff job, and magazines weren’t looking real healthy.
Didn’t know if he wanted to, anyway.
Davenport had told him that smart crooks were the most interesting game, and Virgil sometimes agreed.
VIRGIL WORE native dress out on the prairie: faded jeans and scuffed cowboy boots and musical T-shirts, and because he was a cop, a sport coat. In the sun, in the summer, he wore a straw hat and sunglasses. He usually didn’t wear a gun, unless he was in St. Paul, where Davenport might see him. The law required him to go armed, but in Virgil’s opinion, handguns were just too goddamned heavy and uncomfortable, so he kept his under the seat of the car, or in his briefcase.
After hanging his rain suit in the shower, he got a laptop out of his briefcase, went online. In his personal e-mail, he found the note from Black Horizon, a Canadian outdoor magazine, that he’d been expecting for a couple of days. They were working late in Thunder Bay: “Virg, I had to take a couple graphs out of the section on the portage—nothing I could do about it, it’s all about the space. I tried not to hack it up too bad. Anyway, it works for us if it works for you. Get back to us, and I’ll stick a check in the mail.”
He was pleased. This was his third piece in BH. He was becoming a regular. He opened the attached Word document, looked through the edited section.
Good enough. He closed the document and sent a note to the editor: “Thanks, Henry. It’s fine. I’ll look for the check. Virgil.”
Whistling now, he went to the National Weather Service, typed in the zip code for Bluestem, got the week’s forecast: thunderstorms tonight—no shit—with fair skies and warm weather the next three or four days, thunderstorms possible in the afternoons. He checked Google News to make sure London hadn’t been nuked since he left Mankato; it hadn’t.
He shut down the computer, got undressed, shook the little remaining water off his rain suit, got in the shower, cranked the heat until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then turned it up one more notch. He got out, scalded half to death, crawled into bed, and thought about Bill Judd roasting like a bratwurst in the embers of his own home, and a truck speeding away in the night. That would be an interesting murder.
THEN HE THOUGHT about God for a while, as he did most nights.
The son of a Presbyterian minister and a professor of engineering, who saw in God the Great Engineer and believed as devoutly as her husband, Virgil had gotten down on his knees every night of his life, to pray before bed, until the first night he’d spent in the dorm at the University of Minnesota. That night, embarrassed, he hadn’t gotten down on his knees, and he’d shivered and shaken in fear that the world would end because he hadn’t said his prayers.
By Christmas, like most freshmen, he was done with religion, and he mooched around campus with a copy of The Stranger under his arm, hoping to impress women with long dark hair and mysteries that needed to be solved.
He’d never gotten back to religion, but he had gotten back some faith. It came all at once, in a bull session in an Army bachelor-officers’ quarters, when one of the guys professed to being an atheist. Another one, and one who wasn’t too bright, in Virgil’s estimation, had said, urgently, “Oh, but you’re wrong: look at all the wonders of the world. There are too many wonders.”
Virgil, having grown up in the countryside, where there were wonders, and having studied ecology, where he found even more, had been stricken by the correctness of that statement from the not-too-bright believer: there were too many wonders. Atheists, he came to believe, generally worked in man-made cubes, with blackboards and computers and fast food. They didn’t believe in wonders because they never saw any.
So faith came back, but a strange one, with a God his father wouldn’t have recognized. Virgil thought about Him almost every night, about his sense of humor, and the apparent fact that He’d made rules that even He couldn’t bend…
Then at one o’clock in the morning, having thought of God, Virgil drifted off to sleep, and dreamt of men sitting in motel rooms, in the dark, secretly smoking Marlboros, watching their cats ghosting illegally around their rooms.
3
Tuesday Morning
THE OLD TOWN of Bluestem, named for a prairie grass, lay almost a mile north of I-90. Over the years, the space between the old town had filled up with the standard franchise places—McDonald’s, Subway, Country Kitchen, Pizza Hut, Taco John’s; a Holiday Inn, a Comfort Inn, a Motel 6; four or five gas stations with convenience stores, the Ford dealership and two used-car lots. There were also a half-dozen farm and truck service shops, with worn tires stacked outside and muddy-yellow driveway puddles from the overnight rain.
The old town was prettier. The residential areas were dominated by early-twentieth-century homes, each one different than the next, and big, with porches and yards with swings. The shopping district, on Main Street, was four blocks long, yellow-brick two-and three-story buildings, including a prewar movie theater that still showed movies, and all the businesses left over after you took out a Wal-Mart: law firms, insurance agencies, too many gift shops and antique stores, a couple of small clothing stores, four restaurants, a drugstore.
The courthouse was built two blocks back from Main, and was still used as a courthouse. In most small towns, the old courthouses had been retired, to be replaced by anonymous county government buildings and law-enforcement centers built outside town.
VIRGIL PARKED in the courthouse lot, walked past the war memorial—thirteen Stark County boys lost in World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq—and inside, down the long hall to the sheriff’s office.
Stryker’s secretary was a heavyset fiftyish woman with an elaborate pearly-blond hairdo, accented and bias-cut with a couple of tentative spikes sticking out the back like porcupine quills. She squinted at Virgil, took in the sunglasses and the Sheryl Crow T-shirt with the carp on the
front, and asked, abruptly, “Who’re you?”
“Virgil Flowers. BCA.”
She looked him over again: “Really?”
“Yup.”
“Sheriff said for you to go on back.” She half turned and gestured toward the back wall, which had a frosted-glass window set in a door that said SHERIFF JAMES J. STRYKER. Virgil nodded, and started past, and she asked, “How many times did you shoot at that man in Fairmont?”
Virgil paused. “Fourteen,” he said.
She looked pleased: “That’s what I heard. You never hit him?”
“Wasn’t particularly trying to,” Virgil said, though he’d just about given up on this argument.
“They say he was shooting at you,” she said.
“Ah, he didn’t want to hurt me,” Virgil said. “He was letting off some hot air, because he was pissed about being caught. Wasn’t really a bad guy, except for the fact that he held up gas stations. Had eight kids and a wife to feed.”
“Sort of his job, huh?”
“That was about it,” Virgil said. “Now he’s gonna be making snowplow blades for six years.”
“Huh,” she said. “Well, I think most of the boys around here would have shot him.”
“Must be pretty goddamn hard-hearted boys,” Virgil said, not liking her; and he went on back to Stryker’s office.
STRYKER WAS on the phone. Virgil knocked and Stryker called, “Come in,” and he waved Virgil to a chair and said into the phone, “I gotta go, but the first minute you find a toenail, I want to hear about it.” He rang off and shook his head and said, “Can’t find him. Judd.”
Virgil eased into the chair. “Nothing in the house?”
“I’ll tell you something. When most people build houses, there’s a whole bunch of stuff in it that just don’t burn too well,” Stryker said. He tapped his fingers on his desktop; anxiety. “Judd’s house was all wood—floors, paneling, bookcases—and a good amount of it was pine. Dry as a broom straw. There was nothing left up there this morning but the basement and a few pieces of metal and rock—refrigerator, stove, furnace, and even those are melted down into lumps. We think he was in there. But we haven’t found a thing.”