He gave her the rest of the details and said, “Find that kid.”
Monday
VIRGIL WOKE UP in Joan’s bed. She was lying flat on her back, her head cocked off to one side, and a less charitable man might have said that she was snoring, if only softly. She was wearing a T-shirt as a nightgown and had pushed down the sheet. He pulled it up to her chin, then slipped out of his side of the bed, yawned, stretched, did some sit-ups and push-ups, as quietly as he could, then got his clothes and walked naked down the hall to the bathroom. He used her toothpaste, which was a cinnamon-flavored gel, and scrubbed his teeth with his index finger. When he came back down the hall, pulling yesterday’s shirt over his head, she cracked her eyes and said, “I’m not getting up yet.”
“That’s okay.” He looked at his watch. “Seven forty-five. I’m heading back to the motel. Call you later?”
“Call me later,” she said, and closed her eyes and snuggled into the bed. He pulled on his boots, lifted the sheet, looked at her ass, said, “Masterpiece,” and went on out the door. A neighbor was fooling with his sprinkler system, and when Virgil came off her porch, he raised a hand and called, “How’re ya doin’ Virgil?”
“Doin’ good,” Virgil said.
“I bet you are,” the neighbor said, with cheerful, barefaced envy.
AT THE MOTEL he cleaned up, chose a Decemberists T-shirt, which he saved for days that he felt might be decisive, and called Sandy.
“Jeez, Virgil, I hardly got started. The baby was processed through the Good Hope adoption service, which seems like it might not exist anymore. I’m trying to find out what happened to their records. I’m also working it the other way, through child-protective services.”
“Call me the minute you get anything: I want to know every step of the way.”
She called back in ten minutes, as Virgil was sitting in the restaurant, eating pancakes and link sausage. “I’ve got something, but it’s not specific yet.”
“What is it?”
“It’s the list of child-protective-service adoption actions through the district court. I can’t get the files themselves, without jumping through my butt—which I’m willing to do, but there are dozens of them, and I’ve only got one butt.”
Virgil was shocked: “Sandy, you don’t talk that way.”
“I’m a little cranky this morning,” she said. “Anyway, what I can get, without permission, is the file headers, which I can pull up on my computer. These are the names of the adoptive parents. They’re organized by year, and there are…let me see…about a hundred and seventy files for 1969. If the adoptions are randomly distributed through the year, and I don’t see why they wouldn’t be, the adoption of Baby Boy Lane would have taken place in the last half of the year, and probably the last four or five months. I can read the names of the eighty-five adoptive couples and see if anything rings a bell.”
“Can you get the file afterward?” Virgil asked.
“We might need to do some legal stuff, but I can get Lucas to do that,” she said.
“Read the names…”
She started, “Gregory, Nelson, Snyder…” He stopped her when she said, “Williamson…”
“Williamson?”
“Williamson, David and Louise.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” Virgil said.
“Yank the file?”
“Yank the file. Call me as soon as you get it.”
VIRGIL BLEW PAST Stryker’s sullen secretary into his office, shut the door, and leaned across Stryker’s desk, Stryker’s mouth open, and asked, “What do you know about Todd Williamson?”
Stryker said, “Todd? Came here three years ago, pisses me off, sometimes…What’re we talking about?”
“He’s the Miracle Baby. And after thinking about it, thinking about what Judd’s sister-in-law said, about looking at him in the middle of his face…I think he might be Judd’s natural son. From his eyebrows to his lips, he looks like a Judd.”
“Oh…” Stryker held his hands up in the air, what next? “Jeez.”
“Something else occurred to me. He’s the dog that didn’t bark,” Virgil said.
“What?”
“He’s at every crime scene—he knows everything. But I didn’t see him at the Judd fire. Where the hell was he? The fire trucks went out there with their sirens screaming, where was Williamson?”
Stryker said, “I don’t know. Maybe…running away from it?”
Virgil nodded: “He’s the guy. Bet you a dollar.”
THEY WERE TALKING to the judge about a search warrant when Sandy called again: “Lucas screamed at a man at CPS and they won’t cough the file without a court order, but the guy confirmed off the record that the kid was Baby Boy Lane.”
“I will kiss you on the lips next time I’m up there,” Virgil said.
“I’ll look forward to it,” she said, primly.
THE JUDGE SUGGESTED that there was little evidence to support a search warrant.
Stryker said, “Randy, goddamnit, don’t dog us around with some pissant evidence bullshit. It’s about fifty percent that Todd is the killer and he’s gonna do it again. I want to get all over him before he has a chance.”
“What if you don’t find anything? He’s gonna sue your pants off,” the judge said.
“Not my pants, the county’s pants,” Stryker said. “If I don’t solve this case pretty damn quick, I’m gonna lose my job anyway, so why should I care? Sign the warrant.”
“Okay, okay, keep your shirt on.”
Outside the judge’s office, warrant in hand, Virgil said, “Your judicial efficiency is a marvel.”
“Out here, you take care of yourself,” Stryker said.
They brought in Larry Jensen, the investigator, and four other deputies. Stryker and two of the deputies took the newspaper office. Virgil, Jensen, and two more deputies headed for Williamson’s home. “Call me every five minutes, tell me what you got,” Stryker said. “Find a .357.”
“Find a typewriter,” Virgil said.
WILLIAMSON LIVED in a square, flat, single-story white house with a flat-roofed garage set farther back, and a long screen porch on the front, in an old neighborhood on the east side of town. From Williamson’s house, Virgil thought, getting to the Gleasons’ would have been a snap: Williamson was two blocks from the riverbank.
In the heavy rain the night of the murders, he could have walked over to the bridge across the river, off the far end of the bridge, along the riverbank, and up the slope to Gleason’s. After the killings, he could be back home in fifteen minutes. No muss, no fuss, no cars in the night. And that, he thought, was why the killings may have taken place during a thunderstorm. The neighbors wouldn’t be out, everybody would have been snuggled up in front of the TV.
Virgil drove over, alone in his truck, because he’d learned that if he went to a crime scene in somebody else’s vehicle, he’d need to leave before they did, or after they did. Jensen and the other two cops followed in two sheriff’s patrol cars. Virgil stopped in front of the house, and the deputies pulled into the driveway, one car going all the way to the garage, to cover the back door.
They got out, watching the doors, Virgil with a hand on his weapon, Jensen with a hand on his own. The screen door was open and he and Jensen went through, hammered on the front door. No answer. Tried the door: locked.
Jensen said, “Wait one.” He went out to his car, brought back a long-shaft Maglite, and used the butt end to knock out a pane of glass in the door. Reaching through, he flipped the lock. “We’re in.”
THEY CLEARED the place, making sure that Williamson wasn’t inside, then started pulling it apart. The furniture was comfortable, but old, as if it had come from a high-end used-furniture place. There were six rooms, all on the first floor: kitchen, small dining room, living room, good-sized bath, a bedroom used as a home office, and the actual bedroom. Exterior doors leading out through the kitchen to the garage; and out the front.
Virgil took the bedroom, Jensen took the of
fice, one of the other deputies did the kitchen. Virgil opened and emptied all the drawers, worked through the closet, checking all the pockets in all the clothes, checked the walls and baseboards for hidey-holes, plugged a lamp into the outlets to make sure they were real, turned and patted the mattress, lifted and turned the box springs, lifted the braided rug.
The only thing he found of even the remotest interest was a half-dozen vintage Penthouse magazines, featuring well-thumbed hard-core porn, stashed under the corner of the bed, within easy reach.
Jensen was hung up in the office. “Lot of paper,” he said, looking up from the office chair, his lap full of files. “So far, nothing about being adopted. Got job stuff; he was in the Army in Iraq in ninety, in supply…No guns at all.”
The cop in the kitchen had come up empty, and had then gone out to the garage, gotten a stepladder, and now had his head poked through a hatch that led into a space under the roof. “Lots of insulation,” he said. “Lots of dust. Doesn’t look like it’s been opened in years…”
Virgil was working through the living room—found another stash of porn, this on video, behind the DVD player—when he heard the deputy outside calling, “Hey, hey, Todd. Hold it, Todd.”
Virgil drew his pistol, felt Jensen moving in the office, and then Williamson came through the screen door and the front door on the run. Virgil, from the corner of his eye, could see through the porch screen that Williamson’s car had been dumped in the street, the door still open.
Williamson’s hands were empty but he was screaming and came straight at Virgil, and Virgil pushed the weapon back into the holster and when Williamson kept coming, hands up, he took one wrist and turned him, pushed him, and Jensen was there to push him again, and the other cop came in from the kitchen, and the outside deputy ran in the front door, his pistol drawn, and Virgil turned to Williamson and Virgil was shouting, “Hands over head, hands on the wall, on the wall.”
Williamson shouted, “What the fuck are you doing, what the fuck is going on…” but he put his hands on the wall, and Virgil patted him down.
“What the fuck…”
Virgil said, “You can slow down, or we’ll have to put some handcuffs on you. Calm down; you can step away from the wall.”
Williamson’s face was dead red, and he was breathing like a man having a heart attack. “What the hell is going on?”
“We’re searching your house. We have a warrant.”
Williamson’s mouth worked, but nothing came out for a minute, and then Virgil saw him relax, make the small move that meant that he’d gotten it together. Virgil stepped back. “You okay?”
Williamson, still angry, but not uncontrolled: “What…are…you doing?”
“We’re looking for anything that might tie you to the murders of the Gleasons, the Schmidts, and Bill Judd.”
“What…what?”
“We know about your adoption,” Virgil said.
“My adoption? My adoption?” His mouth hung open for a moment, then, “What about my adoption?”
“You were born here in Bluestem when your mother was killed in an automobile accident after a party at Bill Judd’s. You’re Bill Judd’s son.”
Williamson actually staggered back away from Virgil. “That’s not possible. How is that possible? That’s horseshit.”
“You didn’t know?” Virgil was skeptical.
“No!” Williamson shouted. “I didn’t. I don’t believe it. My mother…” He reeled away. “My mother got pregnant and gave me up for adoption. Didn’t want me. That’s what my mom told me. My real mom.”
“Your real mom…?”
“My real parents…” Williamson’s face had gone from red to white, and now was going red again. “David and Louise Williamson. Where did you get this bullshit?” He looked around. “What have you done to my house? What have you done? You motherfuckers are gonna pay for this…”
THEY COOLED HIM OFF and Virgil told him, bluntly: “We’re going through here inch by inch. Frankly, it’s not possible that you wound up here by accident.”
“Not by accident. Not by accident,” Williamson said. “I was working up in Edina, at the suburban papers, and Bill—it was Bill, not me. My editor met Bill at an editor-and-publisher meeting. My guy came back and said Judd had seen some of my stuff, and wondered if I’d be open to working in a small town.”
“So you left Edina and moved to Bluestem?” Virgil’s eyebrow went up. “Not a common thing to do.”
Williamson looked around and said, “Okay if I sit down?” Virgil nodded, and he dropped onto a couch, and wiped his sweaty forehead on the sleeve of his shirt. “Look. I was working in the Cities, I was making thirty-eight thousand a year, and it wasn’t going to get any better. I learned journalism in the Army; I don’t have a college degree. The big papers were losing staff, everything was going in the toilet. So Judd says, come on down to Bluestem, I’ll pay you forty thousand a year and vouch for you, so you can get a mortgage.”
Williamson looked around the house. “You know how much this place cost?”
Virgil shook his head, but Jensen said, “I think it was up for forty-five thousand?”
“They took forty. I’m paying two hundred a month for a pretty decent house. In the Cities, I lived in a slum apartment that cost me eight hundred a month. The job wasn’t going to get any better, either, even if the papers survived. Out here…” He shrugged. “I’ve got my own house, I’m sort of a big shot…I like the work.”
The anger flooded back: “So go ahead and search, you fuckers. There’s nothing here because I had nothing to do with any murders.” To Jensen: “You know where I was when the Gleasons were killed? I was at the Firehouse Funder, down at Mitchell’s. There were three hundred people there, and I was reporting it, and I gave a talk.” He started shouting again. “You think about asking me for an alibi?”
“Take it easy…”
Still shouting: “And that stuff about Bill being my father…I want to see some proof. I want to see some DNA. Hey: you got a warrant? Are you searching the office…”
WILLIAMSON WAS out in the kitchen, getting a cup of coffee, watched by a deputy, when Jensen said to Virgil, “If that was an act, it was a pretty good act.”
“If he did the murders, he’s a psycho,” Virgil said. “Psychos spend their lives fooling people…You want the dining room? I’ll take the garage.”
17
Monday Afternoon
CUMULUS CLOUDS WERE thick as cotton balls in a hospital room, some of the bottoms turning blue: more thunderstorms coming in. Stryker was sitting at his desk, fingers knitted behind his ear, heels on the corner of his desk, staring out the window across the parking lot. Virgil sat across from him, saying not much.
Finally Stryker yawned, stretched, dropped his feet to the floor, and said, “Well, that was your basic cluster-fuck.”
“There’s a connection in there. Gotta be,” Virgil said. “I will bet you one hundred American dollars that he’s the guy.”
“It was one dollar this morning.”
“One hundred dollars,” Virgil repeated.
“Straight up? A hundred dollars?”
Virgil thought about it for a moment, then said, “You’d have to give me two to one.”
Stryker tried to laugh, then shook his head, said, “Damnit, he’s gonna crucify us Thursday morning.”
“Then we need to give him a better story,” Virgil said. “I’m thinking about calling Pirelli. See what he has to say for himself.”
“You do that, “Stryker said, standing up. “I’ve got to run over to the jail. If I don’t see you later, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
VIRGIL WANDERED OUT of the office, stopped at the men’s room. The second-best place to think, after a shower, was a nice, quiet urinal.
Williamson claimed that Judd found him; that he hadn’t found Judd. That had a certain straightforward logic to it that appealed to Stryker. If Williamson was Judd’s kid, Judd would have known it. Was it possible that as he’d gotten o
ld, and maybe started to think about what was coming, maybe started to read a little Revelation, that he’d softened up, and gathered his children around him? Was that why his will wasn’t in the safe-deposit box? Had he been thinking of changing it? Would that have given Junior reason to get rid of the old man?
On the other hand, Williamson’s alibi, that he’d been at the Firehouse Funder, was too convenient for Virgil’s taste. The fund-raiser had been held at Mitchell’s, the local sports bar. Mitchell’s back door emptied into an extra parking lot. From the parking lot to the Gleasons’ house was a five-minute jog along the railroad tracks, then across the bridge and up the hill. All suitably dark. And by ten o’clock, the eating had been over for two hours, and the drinking had gotten under way. Would anybody have noticed if Todd Williamson, so evident around the place all evening, had slipped away for twenty-five minutes? Had not gone to the john, but out the back door?
As far as Virgil was concerned, the alibi was far short of watertight.
Stryker disagreed.
Fuck him.
HE WAS WASHING his hands when a deputy stepped in, glanced at the two empty toilet booths, then said, “I need a word with you, but I don’t want it getting out that I talked to you.”
Virgil shrugged: “Sure, but…”
“But what?” The deputy’s name tag said “Merrill.” He was nervous and blunt. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and a brush mustache.
“But this is a murder case,” Virgil said. “If you’ve got something to say, you oughta say it. I can’t promise to hold it confidentially.”
Merrill rubbed his nose, looked at the door, and then said, “I saw you up to the fire at Judd’s.”
Virgil nodded: Let the guy talk.
“So…this is probably nothing, and that’s why I hate to say anything…but…”