“Hangin’ in there. I think…Doug made it this far, I think he’s going to hold on.”
“Prayin’ for them,” Virgil said, though he wasn’t, because he didn’t think prayer would help. He went back to the motel.
JOAN WAS COMING down the hall from the direction of his room, saw him, and asked, “Are you pissed at me?”
“Mildly,” he said. “I don’t need to take any shit about what happened today. Either to Jim or me or even the dead guys. It just happened—it’s nobody’s fault but Feur’s, and he paid for it.”
“We were scared,” she said.
“That’s okay. I don’t want to hear about it. Tomorrow, you can tell me all about being scared.”
She touched his hair, with the matted blood. “I could wash your hair out for you. That’s going to hurt.”
“You could do that,” he said.
THEY SNUGGLED UP on the bed, no sex, just snuggling, Virgil full of Aleve, his hair wet, and she said, “In the press conference, when you said you didn’t know if the killing was all done…what you meant was, it isn’t.”
“I don’t think so. In fact…”
“What?”
“We’re looking for Bill Judd Junior. Got watches out for him, but he seems to be gone. The thing is, I think he might be dead.”
She rolled up on her elbow. “You still think Williamson?”
“The Williamson thing freaks me out. When we braced him…I sort of bought it. He seemed as freaked out as I was, when I figured it out. He was screaming at us.”
“So…?”
“So I don’t know. If you pointed a gun at my head and told me to spit out a name, I’d spit out his. You think a guy, he’s in the Cities, he’s a newspaperman, wouldn’t he know who his real mother was? Just do a search? He says he didn’t, he didn’t care who she was. And I guess even if he did, he wouldn’t necessarily know that Judd was his father.”
“If he’d ever gone for a birth certificate, to get a passport or something…”
Virgil rolled over on his back, felt the skin pulling around the cuts on his scalp and face. “I got to think about him…What was he talking to Jesse about? I saw you guys together in the back of the room.”
“Well, he started out by shaking her hand, saying ‘long-lost sister,’ and then he started pushing her around. Where was she last week? When did she really find out she was Judd’s daughter? Where was her mother?”
“Like he thought she might be involved?”
“He was unpleasant,” Joan said, “But he’s never been a real pleasant man.”
“I keep trying to think, who else?”
SLEEP PULLED HIM UNDER. He woke up at two o’clock, and Joan was gone. Went to the bathroom, and then back to the bed, went under again, thinking…Who else? Nobody had said a thing about the .357…
Of course, Jesse wouldn’t; but he didn’t think that Jesse was the killer, because that would be aesthetically incongruent. She was just too good-looking.
He smiled, and mentally wrote his little story, in which the best-looking woman would never be the guilty one:
Homer shook his head. The shoot-out with Feur, the death of Feur, had blocked up a lot of potential information.
Brilliant, though, the way Stryker had picked up that seam in the hillside. Homer would never have seen it. And thank God for Stryker’s reflexes: he cut Feur down before he had a chance to open up on Homer himself.
Mmmm…
Anyway:
ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND of Austria got his ass shot in Sarajevo in 1914, touching off World War I. His wife was killed at the same time. A little less than ninety years later, a bunch of guys in Scotland formed a band called Franz Ferdinand, which was why Virgil was pulling a Franz Ferdinand T-shirt over his head the next morning at seven o’clock.
Find out what happened to the DEA guys. He stopped at a gas station across the street from the motel and bought a MoonPie and a Coke: sugar, fat, and caffeine, the breakfast of champions.
Pirelli was awake in a standard room, Gomez asleep on a couch under a window. Virgil asked, “How’re you doing?”
Pirelli said, “I’m hurting. Ah, God.”
“How’re your guys?”
“Both still alive.” Pirelli reached out his good hand, and knocked on the wood-grained plastic of the bedside table. “I think, I hope…”
“What about Harmon?”
“I talked to his wife last night,” Pirelli said. “She’s coming out today.”
“I don’t want to be there,” Virgil said.
“Neither do I.”
They both looked into a corner for a moment, and then Virgil asked, “Was it worth it? If you’d had a good idea somebody was going to be killed…?”
“Fuck no, it wasn’t worth it.” Pirelli shook his head. “Don’t tell anybody I said that. If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have set up five hundred yards away and hosed down Franks and his trucks and the house and killed the whole bunch of them. But I didn’t know.”
“So what’s next? For you?”
Pirelli shrugged: “Media, today. Docs say I’m gonna be out of work for six months or so. Then back to Chicago. Try to figure out why we’re all of a sudden rolling in heroin down in Gary…same ol’ same ol’.”
“Nobody’s pissed at you?”
Pirelli shook his head. “DEA guys get killed. It’s not like the FBI.”
STRYKER CAME IN. “Morning, bright eyes,” he said to Pirelli. Gomez sat up on the couch, shaking his head, smacking his lips. Stryker said, “Talked to the doc one minute ago: things aren’t looking too bad, but they’re gonna move you all to Rochester today. Mayo.”
“I don’t think I need the Mayo…” Pirelli started.
“They say you’re gonna need some reconstruction on that shoulder,” Stryker said. “A couple of pins. Might as well get the best.”
THEY TALKED FOR A WHILE. A DEA team was flying in from Washington to reconstruct the fight, and the house, and do an after-action report. The South Dakota ethanol plant had been taken down without a fight; most of the plant was legit. The lab was not: it was a clean, efficient, meth production line. There was a national stop-and-hold on Bill Judd Jr.
They were talking about that when Stryker took a call, listened for a minute, then said, “Five minutes.”
And to Pirelli, Gomez, and Virgil: “Bill Judd. He’s dead. Up at his old man’s place.”
STRYKER AND VIRGIL went together in a county truck. Gomez and another agent followed in one of the blacked-out DEA trucks, out to the main drag, out of town and up the hill to the Buffalo Ridge park entrance, through the park gate, and up the driveway to Judd’s.
Four sheriff’s cars were parked by the burned-out basement, one deputy leaning on his car, talking on his radio, four more deputies standing in the high grass, north of the house, near the crest of the hill. Virgil and Stryker hopped out of the truck and Stryker raised a hand to the deputy at the car, and then they led Gomez and the other agent through the grass up the hill.
“Hell of a thing,” Big Curly said, as they came up.
“What happened to him?”
“The crows were here…but it looks like something cracked his skull open. His brains…take a look.”
Judd was on his back, wearing a suit and dress shoes. He didn’t have sightless eyes staring at the sun, because he no longer had any eyes. Crows. The top of his head was misshapen. Not as though he were shot, but more as though his skull had been crushed. Flattened.
“Piece of rebar over here,” one of the deputies said. “We’re waiting for Margo to come up, but it’s got blood on it, and some hair.”
Virgil and Stryker went over and looked: a piece of rusty steel that might have been picked out of the burned house. “That would have done it.”
No gunshot wounds. “We know one thing,” Little Curly said. “It wasn’t suicide.”
GOMEZ ASKED, “What do you think? Feur?”
“We need a time of death, but I don’t think so. It??
?s my other guy,” Virgil said.
Gomez grimaced, did a slow three-sixty, looking at the prairie lands stretched out around him forever, said, “Interesting little culture you got going here.”
“Gotta be Feur,” Stryker said. “Gleasons, Schmidts, the Judds—it’s a Feur cleanup operation. They were gonna get out, they weren’t gonna leave anything behind.”
“I don’t know,” Virgil said.
Another deputy’s car pulled in below them, and Margo Carr got out, took a gear bag out of the trunk, and trudged up the hill. “Another one,” she said, heavily.
“Last one, but maybe one,” Virgil said.
“What does that mean?” Stryker asked.
Virgil shrugged.
Down the hill, another truck pulled in, and Todd Williamson got out. The deputy at the truck put out a hand to him, but Williamson jogged straight past him, beat the deputy to the edge of the heavy grass, and pulled away, the deputy still yelling at him.
Big Curly blocked him: “You can’t be here.”
“Screw that,” Williamson said. He poked a finger at Virgil. “If the genius here is right, I’m next of kin. So what happened to my brother?”
VIRGIL HEADED BACK to the motel, with one stop at the accountant’s office. Olafson had just gotten up. She raised the shade on her office door, cocked an eyebrow at Virgil, and opened the door.
Virgil stepped inside and asked, “If something happened to Bill Judd Jr., would that change what happens with his father’s estate?”
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“Pretty much,” Virgil said. He told her about it, and she shook her head and said, “May the Good Lord keep him.”
“Estate?”
Olafson made a noise, then said, “I’d have to look up the law, and you might even have to get a special ruling. But you know what? I think it’s possible that Jesse Laymon and Todd Williamson, if they can prove a blood connection to Senior, could stand to get a bigger piece of the estate.”
The argument would be complicated, she said, and hung on what the IRS would do about Junior’s debt, how it would be counted against the estate. “And with this nut cake running around killing everybody, I’m not sure I’d hang around to make the argument.”
Virgil thanked her, and continued on to the hotel. Shut down his cell phone, took off his boots, put the chain on the door, stretched out on the bed. There’d been a thread running through this thing, he thought, right up to the firefight at Feur’s place. If he could only find one end of it, and pull it…
21
VIRGIL ROLLED OFF THE BED, looked at the clock—he’d been down an hour—brushed his teeth, and stood in the shower. At the end of a case, when the facts were piling up, a nap often worked to clarify his thoughts: instead of being scattered around like crumbs, they tended to clump together.
AND THAT HAD HAPPENED.
ABOUT FEUR: Jim Stryker was at least partly correct. When Virgil thought about it, it seemed unlikely that a town the size of Bluestem would be home to two, separate but simultaneous, very large crimes. Yet Feur had denied the connection, even when it wouldn’t make any difference to him. Could he have been protecting someone? Seemed unlikely—seemed unlikely that in Bluestem he could have an unknown relationship so close that he would die protecting it; that he would swear on a Bible.
ABOUT THE OTHER SUSPECTS: Stryker, now, or some other cop—the Curlys, or the Merrill guy, or even Jensen or Carr—or one of the Laymons, or Williamson. Did he, Virgil, have a perceptual problem? Did he come to town and view certain people as suspects because those were the only people he saw, or spoke to, or heard about? He’d gotten all over Williamson. Had he been conditioned to do that, because Joan had mentioned Williamson’s name the first time he met her? He thought about it and decided: No. That might have been the case, except for the Revelation…
The book of Revelation at the Gleasons’, the cigarette butt at the Schmidts’, the anonymous note, and the corporate evidence on Judd’s secretary’s computer, all had pointed him at Feur, or Judd and Feur together. He was being pushed by somebody.
A PASSING THOUGHT: Bill Judd’s secretary. Who was she? The evidence for the Judd-Feur connection came right out of her computer. He’d heard her name, but didn’t remember it…
MORE IDEAS: Could he clear anyone? If he could clear Stryker or Williamson, or the Curlys, the Laymons, or the Judds, then he’d know something. Other suspects would come into sharper focus. Was Joan a suspect? She’d gotten close to him by noon on his first day in town. How about Jesse Laymon, or her mother, Margaret? How long had they really been waiting for Judd to die?
ALSO: In one way or another, the killer of the Gleasons and the Schmidts, and probably the Judds, had been in Jesse Laymon’s closet. Stryker had been there, he thought. Who else? Technically, her mother, but her mother wouldn’t be framing Jesse…at least, not for any reason that Virgil knew of. There was the additional problem that the Laymons’ house could be entered by any teenager with a stick…
HUH.
VIRGIL GOT his gun, clipped it under his jacket, put on his straw hat, and called Stryker.
“When we were in Judd’s office, looking at the secretary’s computer…What was her name again?”
“Amy Sweet. You think we ought to talk to her?”
“No need to bother you. I might stop by and have a chat,” Virgil said. “Sort of at loose ends, is what I am. Can’t get over Junior getting hit like that.”
“Yeah. Still think it was Feur…You still think it wasn’t?”
“I’ve moved a few inches in your direction,” Virgil said. “But keep your ass down anyway.”
A MY SWEET WAS another middle-aged woman, who might have been a rocker at one time, too heavy now, round-shouldered, wrapped in a housecoat with pink curlers in her hair. “I’d be happy to talk to you,” she said at the door of her small home, “but I’ve got to be in Sioux Falls for a job interview at one o’clock.”
“Take a couple of minutes,” Virgil said.
“What was all the excitement a while ago?” She pushed her face toward him, squinting, nearsighted.
“Uh, there’s been another murder.”
“Oh, noooo…” She stepped across the room, fumbled around on a TV tray, found steel-rimmed glasses, and put them on. “Who?”
“Bill Judd Jr.”
“Oh, noooo.” Round, Swedish oooo’s.
“Miz Sweet, when we were going through Judd Sr.’s office, we found some invoices on your computer, for chemicals that were apparently used in an ethanol plant out in South Dakota…”
“I heard about it on TV. That was the same one? The one where they were making drugs?”
“Yes, it was,” Virgil said.
“Oh, nooo.”
The sound was driving him crazy; she sounded like a bad comedian. “Who in town knew about the ethanol plant?”
She turned her face to one side and put a hand to her lips. “Well, the Judds, of course.”
“Both of them?” Virgil asked.
“Well…Junior set it up, but Senior knew about it.”
He pressed. “Are you sure about that?”
“Well, yes. He signed the checks.”
“Did you see him signing the checks?” Virgil asked.
“No, but I saw the checks. It was his signature…”
“Do you remember the bank?”
She shook her head. “No, no, I don’t.” She frowned. “I’m not even sure that the bank name was on the checks.”
“Did you ever talk to Junior about that?”
“No. It wasn’t my business,” she said. “They wanted to keep it quiet, because, you know, when ethanol started, it sounded a little like the Jerusalem artichoke thing. The Judds were involved in that, of course.”
“So how quiet did they keep it?” Virgil asked. “Who else knew? Did you tell anybody?”
He saw it coming, the noooo. “Oh, noooo…Junior told me, don’t talk about this, because of my father. So, I didn’t.”
&n
bsp; “Not to anybody?”
Her eyes drifted. She was thinking, which meant that she had. “It’s possible…my sister, I might have told. I think there might have been some word around town.”
“It’s really important that you remember…”
She put her hand to her temple, as though she were going to move a paper clip with telekinesis, and said, “I might have mentioned it at bridge. At our bridge club. That a plant was being built, and some local people were involved.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “So who was at the bridge club?”
“Well, let me see, there would have been nine or ten of us…”
She listed them; he only recognized one of the names.
WHEN HE WAS DONE with Sweet, he strolled up the hill to the newspaper office. He pushed in, and found Williamson behind the business counter, talking to a woman customer. Williamson looked past the woman and snapped, “What do you want?”
“I have a question, when you’re free.”
“Wait.” Williamson was wearing a T-shirt and had sweat stains under his arms, as though he’d been lifting rocks. “Take just a minute.”
The customer was trying to dump her Beanie Baby collection locally—ten years too late, in Virgil’s opinion—and wanted the cheapest possible advertisement. She got twenty words for six dollars, looking back and forth between Virgil and Williamson, and after writing a check for the amount, said to Virgil, “I’d love to hear your question.”
Virgil looked at her over his sunglasses and grinned: “I’d love to have you, but I’m afraid it’s gotta be private, for the moment.”
“Shoot.” She looked at Williamson, who shrugged, and she said, “Oh, well.”
WHEN SHE’D GONE out the door, Williamson said, “I’m working. You can ask me out back.”
“You still pissed about the search?”
“Goddamn right. Wouldn’t you be?”