He ambled past her desk and stuck his head in Stryker’s office. Stryker was sitting with his feet up on his desk and a stunned look on his face. He pointed Virgil at a chair and rubbed his face with his hands and said, “Ah, shit.”
Virgil sat. “What?”
Stryker dropped his feet to the floor, turned his chair around, opened a two-six-pack-sized office refrigerator, and took out a bottle of Coke. “You wanna Coke?”
“No, thanks…”
“Got the goddamnedest telephone call,” Stryker said, twisting the top off the bottle. He tossed the bottle top at a wastebasket, sank the shot. “There’s a woman lives out in Roche—you know where that is?”
“Yeah. Other side of Dunn.”
“That’s it. Town the size of my dick. Her name is Margaret Laymon and she called me up, about five minutes ago. Says her daughter, Jessica, is the natural daughter of William Judd. She wants to make sure that her daughter gets her rights. As she put it.”
They sat staring for a moment, then Virgil said, “Jesus. If there’s no will, and she can prove it…”
Stryker nodded: “Bill Jr. is gonna have a stroke.”
“Wonder if there are any more little Judds running around?”
“That’s an interesting question, but I don’t know how you’d find out,” Stryker said. “Unless they call you up and tell you.”
“Huh. You gonna tell Junior?”
“Not up to me,” Stryker said. “I told Margaret to hire a lawyer, real quick. She’s going to do that. I suppose, what? She’d file something with the court?”
“I don’t know. There’d be some DNA tests to do…”
“She says that’s not a problem. But I’ll tell you what is a problem.” He turned his chair around again, a full circle, thinking, and then said, “Of all the women I ever wanted in my entire life, Jesse Laymon is right at the top of the list. We even went out twice, but not three times. She wants somebody with more of an edge. A ramblin’ gamblin’ man.”
“A bad country song,” Virgil said. The second he’d found in so many days. The prairie was full of them.
“But it’s true,” Stryker said. He took a hit on the Coke. “I get my heart in my mouth every time I see her, but the fact is, what she wants is one of those black-eyed dope-dealing rascals who drinks too much and drives too fast and dances good. That’s not me.”
“Well, hell.”
“Yeah.”
THEY SAT for a minute, thinking it over, then Virgil said, “Maybe it’s because your dick is the size of Roche.”
Stryker had been taking another sip of Coke, and he choked, sputtering, laughed, said, “Come to speak of it, what were you and Joanie doing on her front porch last night about ten o’clock?”
Virgil laughed, but not hard, touched by a finger of guilt. So much apparent friendship, and he was sitting here smiling, and thinking that the Strykers would be suspects in the Judd killing, on any rational list…
VIRGIL SAID, “I’m gonna go talk to Todd Williamson, see if he’ll let me look in his files, if he’s got any. Then I’m heading out to see George Feur.”
Stryker’s eyebrows went up. “You got something?”
“Not exactly. I want to talk to him, look him over, push him a little,” Virgil said.
“When you say, ‘Not exactly’…”
“Feur’s a Bible beater and he’s an asshole and he was working on Judd,” Virgil said. “Bible beaters don’t beat anything harder than the book of Revelation. I noticed when I was up at the Gleasons’ yesterday, that Anna Gleason had a book of Revelation right under her hand when she was shot. A pretty new one, it looked like.”
“She did?” Stryker frowned and leaned forward. “Why didn’t I know that?”
Virgil shrugged. “Maybe nobody noticed. This was before Judd was killed, and Feur’s name didn’t really come up until the fire.”
“Hell of a thing not to notice, though,” Stryker said. “I’ll have to talk to Larry and Margo about this. They should have seen it. At least had it in the back of their minds.”
Virgil didn’t disagree. “Maybe they should have,” he said. “Especially for a guy with Feur’s history.”
“You know about him and me, right?” Stryker asked. “I busted him for robbery, when I was a deputy? He went to Stillwater. Claims I railroaded him.”
“Nothing to that, though,” Virgil offered.
“No. He was caught on a liquor store camera,” Stryker said. “He had a hat pulled down low, but I knew him the minute I saw the tape. Went and dug him out of his hole, got his gun, too. The gun did it as much as anything—it was an old piece with a nine-inch barrel, and that, you see perfectly, on the tape.”
“So it was a good bust.”
“Yup. It was, and still is.”
VIRGIL SAID, “Another thing—if this all somehow involves Judd’s money, then your friend Jesse might be in trouble, could be a target for somebody.”
“You think?”
“Maybe. Or maybe not.” Virgil scratched his ear. “If she’s got one of those ramblin’ gamblin’ guys around, who figured she might become a millionairess, under the right circumstances…”
“Man, that hadn’t occurred to me,” Stryker said. He sat back in his chair, rocking.
“Could Jesse or Margaret set something up?” Virgil asked.
Stryker rubbed his chin. “Not Margaret. Don’t see that. Jesse wouldn’t do it on purpose. I could see her sitting around, suckin’ a little smoke, bullshitting with somebody, dreaming about all the money…and she wakes up in a world of hurt, when her pal goes off and does something about it.”
“A concept to consider,” Virgil said.
“I will,” Stryker said.
“And if she doesn’t have anything to do with it, hell, maybe she’ll need her body guarded.”
Stryker stood up. “I’m heading out there. You want to look at her, or go see Feur?”
“I’ll go after Feur,” Virgil said. Stryker had been looking for an excuse to go out. “You can tell me what you get from Jesse and maybe I’ll talk to her later in the day.”
“Good enough,” Stryker said. “You take care.”
THE DAY LOOKED like the day before, sunny, a touch of wind, about as nice a July day that you could hope for; four kids, two boys and two girls, were dancing along the sidewalk ahead of him, boys in dropped-crotch pants, the girls with pierced ears and noses, but there was a small-town innocence about it; testing their chops, and sometimes, forgetting, they’d hold hands. They all looked back at him a couple of times, knowing him for a cop.
Nice a day as it was, there was too much humidity hanging around, and thunderstorms would be popping by late afternoon. If it got hot enough, some of them could be bad. Nothing to do about it.
Virgil walked down to the Record, stopping at the drugstore for a sleeve of popcorn, and at the newspaper, found Williamson putting the last bit of the next day’s newspaper together.
Williamson lit up as soon as Virgil walked through the front door. “I was hoping I’d see you this morning. I called down to the motel and they said you were gone already.”
Virgil nodded. “I was hoping to poke through your library, if you’ve got one. Clippings, and such.”
“We can do that. But it’d be pretty damn ungrateful of you, if you didn’t answer a couple of questions.”
“You can ask,” Virgil said.
“You took a different attitude yesterday…”
“Well, I was in public. I’ll talk to you, but the deal is this: I talk off-the-record, and you write it like it came from God,” he said. “I might not tell you everything, but I won’t lie to you.”
“Deal,” Williamson said. He punched a couple of keys on his computer, switched out of his compositing program into a word processor, and asked, “Do you think the .357 used in the murders was one of the guns issued to the sheriff’s office years ago?”
“I have no idea,” Virgil said. Williamson opened his mouth to object, but Virgil held up
a hand. “I’m not avoiding the question. I really don’t have any idea. They’re not a commonly bought weapon anymore. Most people go for automatics, because they’re on TV, and if you’re looking for hunting power in a revolver, you might go for a .44 mag or a .454 Casul. The .357s were a cop’s gun, at one time, and that’s the only reason anybody ever talked about the idea. There were a bunch of them in the sheriff’s office, and they all went away, and maybe…who knows?”
“All right,” Williamson said. “Second question: Do you think the killer is local?”
“Yes,” Virgil said.
“You want to expand on that?” Williamson asked.
“No.”
“Any suspects?”
“Not at the moment.”
Williamson said, “I’m not getting much for my clips.”
Virgil: “What time do you have to finish putting the paper together? It’s out tomorrow morning, right?”
“Can’t push it past three o’clock. I download it to the printing plant—it’s over in Sioux Falls—and pick it up at eleven,” he said. “If I push it one minute past three, they won’t give it to me until midnight or one o’clock, just to fuck with me.”
“All right. At two o’clock, you call me on my cell phone,” Virgil said. “You might have the story by then, but maybe not. But it would be…your lead story.”
Williamson’s eyebrows went up. “The Judd fire is the lead story.”
“Two days old. Everybody knows it,” Virgil said. “This other story is known by damn few, and you’d sure as hell wake up the town tomorrow morning, if you printed it. But if you give me up as the source, you’ll never get a word from me for the rest of the investigation.”
“Another story from God, huh?” Williamson’s tongue touched his lower lip: he wanted the story. “Let me show you the morgue. We still call it that, here.”
THE MORGUE was the size of a suburban bedroom, painted a color that was a combination of dirt green and dirt brown. The walls were lined with oak library chests, with hundreds of six-inch-high, six-inch-wide, two-foot-deep drawers, surrounding a desk with an aging Dell computer. Williamson knocked on one of the cabinets. “We file by name and subject. Before 1999, if the subject is something with a hundred names in it, we file the five most important names to the story, and cross-reference to the subject. So if you’re showing a goat at FFA, and you’re thirty-third on the list, somebody would have to look under FFA to find your name, because we didn’t put it in the name file. After 1999, we stopped clipping, and put everything on CDs, cross-referenced by a reference service. You’ll find all names and subjects after 1999.”
“Even if you’re thirty-third on the list?”
“With a goat,” Williamson said. “I’d sit here and show you how to use the computer, but you can figure it out in five minutes and I’m on deadline. Instructions are Scotch-taped on the desk on the left side. Have at it.”
HE STEPPED AWAY, but lingered, like he had another question, so Virgil asked, “Another question?”
“How’re you getting along with Jim Stryker?”
“Good. We’ve known each other for a while,” Virgil said.
“Yeah…the baseball. But the word out of the sheriff’s shop is that they really had to stuff you down his throat,” Williamson said.
“Is that right?”
Williamson nodded: “Could just be office politics, but the word was, you could show off the sheriff’s…inadequacies.”
“I work on eight or ten murders a year,” Virgil said. “You guys go decades without one. I’m a specialist. No harm in calling in a specialist.”
Williamson chuckled. “That wasn’t how they were skinning the cat at the courthouse.”
WHEN WILLIAMSON was gone, Virgil wandered around, looking at yellowed labels on the drawers, figured out the system, names over here, subjects over there. The tall files were photos, mostly eight-by-ten originals, which stopped entirely in 2002; must have bought a digital camera, Virgil thought. The photos still smelled of developer and stop bath; the clips smelled of old cigarette smoke and pulp paper gone sour.
The Judd photo files showed Judd in every decade starting in the 1940s, as a young man in a pale suit, but even then with bleak, black eyes.
The pre-1999 Judd clipping files took up four drawers, hundreds of crumbling clippings entangled in small gray envelopes. Judd Jr. had several packets of his own, but they occupied only half a drawer. The measure of a couple of lives, Virgil thought.
The file envelopes had an average of eight to ten articles each, and the bulk of the Judd Sr. clips, amounting to several stories a week, came in the 1980s, during the Jerusalem artichoke controversy.
Judd was eventually accused of thirty-two counts of fraud by the Minnesota attorney general, based on evidence partly local and partly developed out of St. Paul. The assistant AG who prosecuted, and who apparently didn’t understand his own evidence, was torn to pieces by Judd’s defense attorneys in a trial in St. Paul. The local county attorney and the local sheriff were both defeated in the next election, by pissed-off voters.
After the trial, there was further wrangling over federal and state taxes. The fight dragged through the courts for years, and in 1995, the Record reported that attorneys for both sides had agreed to settle the case, the settlement being confidential as a matter of tax law.
The Judd envelopes not involving the Jerusalem artichoke controversy were generally business news: mortgages given and taken, buildings and land bought and sold, the house being built on Buffalo Ridge—for a rumored five hundred and fifty thousand dollars in 1960, with five baths—and lawsuits filed and settled. Except for the Jerusalem artichoke controversy, it might have been the life record of any greedy, grasping, sociopathic businessman.
Judd Jr. was more of the same, without the scandal, and in a minor key: he was portrayed as a greedy, grasping, and largely unsuccessful sociopath.
Virgil read about the suicide of Mark Stryker, which happened after a family picnic, a detail nobody had mentioned. The story did mention that Stryker had been involved in the Jerusalem artichoke scandal, and had sold 1,280 acres of the family farm to pay off associated debts.
ANNA GLEASON was the headliner in her family, as the result of sixteen years on the county commission, and with her own drawer of stories. Judd was mentioned in several of them, but most were routine appearances before the county commission to discuss zoning changes or drainage problems. Russell Gleason had a few envelopes, mostly from when he worked as a coroner in the seventies and eighties, before the medical examiner system was adopted; and in most of those clips, he was simply the voice that pronounced somebody dead.
He read the clips on both Jim Stryker and Joan Carson. Joan’s divorce attracted three six-inch articles, which noted only that the marriage was irretrievably broken after five years, and that the judge approved the agreement worked out by the private attorneys. All the good stuff had been left out.
She was described as an “affluent farmer” with residences both in Bluestem and at the family farm. Virgil knew where her town home was, having stood on her front porch the night before, trying for a gentle, sensitive, yet promising good-night kiss, while simultaneously trying to cop a feel.
He looked and finally found the Laymons. Nothing about Margaret, but Jesse had been busted once in Worthington for possession of a minor amount of marijuana, and was cited as a witness in a fight in a Bluestem bar, in which a man had all of his teeth broken out. The man sued, but the suit never went to trial.
Finally, George Feur. He showed up only on the computer, but there were fifteen hits, including an article by Williamson that must have been five thousand words long.
He was, Virgil thought, reading through the computer files, a brass-plated asshole.
VIRGIL LEFT the newspaper office, rolling out of town, back on I-90, heading west. I-94, I-90, I-80, I-40, I-20, and I-10 stretched across the heart of the country like guitar strings, holding the East Coast to the West Coast, with the Rocky Mo
untains as the bridge. I-90 shared much of its length with other interstates, but was on its own from Tomah, Wisconsin, to Billings, Montana. Virgil had driven all of it, and more than once.
Some people found it deadly boring, but having been raised on the prairie, Virgil liked it, like sailors enjoy the ocean. The prairie rolled in waves, with small towns coming up and falling behind, and farmhouses and pickups and people riding horses, and buffalo and antelope and prairie dogs. And towns, like freshwater pearls, small, all different, and all the same.
NOT THAT he was going far; just an exit or two.
Feur lived a mile east of the South Dakota line, ten miles north of I-90, in a compound of four steel buildings and one old white clapboard four-square farmhouse, a Corn Belt cube, that tilted slightly to the southeast, and badly needed a coat of paint. The buildings were set in a grove of bur oaks, box elders, and cottonwoods, surrounded by rocky pasture.
The driveway crossed a ditch with a thread of water in the bottom, past a sign that said GOD’S FORTY ACRES, and beneath that, NO TRESPASSING. As he pulled into the dirt roundabout in front of the house, a young man came out on the front porch with a shotgun.
Virgil said, “Ah, man.” He was still far enough away that he could do it without being obvious, and he reached down under the seat for his pistol, and put it on the seat next to him. As he stopped and parked, he picked up the weapon, as if picking up a pen or a book, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
When he climbed out of the truck, the man with the gun called, “Who’re you?”
“Virgil Flowers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to see Reverend Feur.”
“You got an appointment?” the man asked. He was maybe twenty-five, and had the foxy look of somebody who’d grown up hungry.
“Nope.”
“Maybe you could come back some other time. He’s pretty busy,” the man said.