Dark of the Moon (14 page)

Virgil said to Gerald Johnstone, “I’m looking at Reverend Feur. But there’s also a possibility—because the victims are somewhat elderly—that something happened way back when,” Virgil said. “I’d like you to look at a photograph of a body and tell me if it was in your funeral home.”

And to Carol Johnstone: “It’s not a pleasant picture, ma’am…”

“Pictures of bodies never bothered me,” she said. “I worked in the funeral home for thirty years and saw everything you can see.”

Virgil nodded, and took out the color Xerox of the woman on the table. He handed it to Gerald Johnstone, who looked at it with his vague eyes, focused, and then seemed to shudder with recognition.

He said, “That looks like our funeral home. This is a funeral home in the picture, and it looks like our dressing table…but I can’t say that I remember the case. It appears to be an automobile accident, is what I’d say. We had lots of those. Didn’t have full funerals—just dress the body and ship it back to wherever they came from. So…I can’t remember.”

Virgil thought,
He’s lying.

Carol was shaking her head: “I’d remember it if I’d seen it, but I never saw it. Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

She shook her head. “I was there, but I never saw that woman. Must have been a dress-and-ship. Whoever she is, she isn’t local.”

“Okay,” Virgil said. Gerald Johnstone was still peering at the picture, replaying something in his mind, but again he shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Carol Johnstone, Virgil thought, was telling the truth. Gerald Johnstone was lying through his teeth.

H
E PUSHED
the old man: “It’s important that we know if it’s your place or not,” he said. “Is it your funeral home?”

“It could be,” Johnstone said. “But the way the picture is…it’s too close up. The table is the same kind we had, a stainless-steel Ferno. We don’t have it anymore.”

Carol Johnstone said, “That
is
our place, Jerry, before the remodel.” She tapped one corner of the photo, the corner of an odd machine that looked like an oversized blender. “That’s that old Portiboy, remember? I’m sure that’s our place.”

Gerald Johnstone shook his head: “I think it is, but I don’t remember the case. We did hundreds of automobile accidents over the years, and I’m just…too old.”

Still lying, Virgil thought. “When did you do the remodel?” he asked.

“That was 1981 into 1982. All new equipment by ’eighty-two,” Carol Johnstone said. “Whoever that is, had to be killed before that. But the table and the Portiboy go way back. Before our time.”

V
IRGIL ASKED,
“What about the man in the moon?”

Knew he’d taken a misstep. They were both mystified, and showed it. Carol said, “What?”

“Betsy Carlson said something about the man in the moon. That she’d seen the man in the moon. She seemed to think there might be a connection…”

Carol shook her head, but again, Virgil thought he saw a spark in Gerald’s eye. Virgil said, “She told me, ‘Jerry was there for the man in the moon, Jerry knew about it.’”

Carol was shaking her head, but Gerald’s eyes drifted away as he said, “It’s a complete mystery. What does it mean?”

V
IRGIL, LOOKING DIRECTLY
at Gerald Johnstone, said, “If you remember
anything
, you let me know. You called this killer a nutcase, and that’s the exact truth of the matter. Keep your doors locked—if he thinks you might be involved in whatever is going on, you’re both at some risk.”

Carol Johnstone said suddenly, “This will sound silly…”

“Tell me,” Virgil said.

“The night the Gleasons were killed, we weren’t here. We’re here two hundred fifty nights a year—we have a place in Palm Springs where we go in the winter—but that was one night we weren’t. We were in Minneapolis, visiting our daughter, and seeing a show. When we came back the next day, there were police all over the street…”

“Ah, this is nothing,” Gerald Johnstone said.

“I’d like to hear it anyway,” Virgil said.

Carol nodded: “Anyway, we stopped and found out from one of the deputies what happened, and Larry Jensen came over and interviewed us, but we didn’t have anything to tell him. We were gone. But when we first came in the door, the welcome mat was moved.”

“Oh, Carol,” the old man said, rolling his eyes.

“Well, it was,” she said. “You know how I like everything neat, and it was off to the side of the door. I thought then that somebody moved it. Well, the Gleasons were killed in the middle of the night, and we were back at one o’clock in the afternoon, so…who moved it?”

“You think that whoever killed the Gleasons…?”

She shivered. “They were right there, down the street. We have timers on our lights so it looks like somebody’s home, lights going off and on…Maybe…”

He looked directly at Johnstone: “If you remember anything, you tell me. We don’t want somebody else to die.”

“I’ll think as hard as I can,” he said.

“If it turns out you’re lying to me, you could spend the rest of your life in prison, as an accomplice.”

Carol got hot: “Hey! He’s not lying. We’d do anything to catch this…monster.”

“I’m just saying,” Virgil said.

H
E LEFT THEM
at that—interesting, that Gerald Johnstone should be lying. He needed to track down the photo, and then he needed to come back and pound on Johnstone.

As he got back in the truck, he thought about the welcome mat being moved, sighed, dug his pistol out from under the car seat, and clipped it to his belt. He drove back across the coulee, went to the newspaper, and found Williamson sitting at his computer, writing.

He looked up when Virgil came through the door: “Hell of a story on the Laymons,” he said. “I owe you a large one.”

“You hear anything new on the Schmidts?”

“No. Damnit, if they were gonna get killed, I wish they hadn’t done it on the day the paper comes out. We won’t be able to print a word for a week. In the meantime, we’re getting eaten alive by the
Globe
and the
Argus-Leader
.” The
Globe
and the
Argus-Leader
were the dailies in Worthington and Sioux Falls.

“You can pay me right now, for the one you owe me,” Virgil said. He looked at his watch; fifteen minutes to two. “I’d like to see the papers from 1970.”

Williamson said, “We don’t have them that way. Not whole papers. Back before 1995, they’re on microfilm, and they have them at the library. If you have a name, it’d be in the clip file…?”

Virgil shook his head. “No name. I don’t even know what I’m doing. Where’s the library?”

“Just up the hill…Are you going to the press conference?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Virgil said.

“Neither would anybody else in town. I don’t know what Stryker’s going to do—people are already starting to crowd into the courtroom. Won’t be room for the reporters.”

V
IRGIL HUSTLED UP
to the library, a flat red-brick building on the corner of Main Street. Inside, a pale-eyed, blond librarian with the smooth skin of an eighth-grader, took him to a microfilm booth at the back of the stacks. “I’ll show you how to thread the microfilm. It can be a trial,” she said. She went to a wooden file cabinet with dozens of small drawers, muttered, “Nineteen seventy.” She pulled it open, took four boxes of microfilm out, and handed them to Virgil, then went back to the file and said, “Darn it. We’re missing a box. Somebody has misfiled it.”

He was interested: “Which box?”

She started sorting through them again, explaining, “We don’t start a new drawer until the last drawer is full, and when I opened it, it was loose—so there’s a box out somewhere. It looks like…” She stood on her tiptoes, pushed her glasses up her nose, looking into the drawer, and finally said, “We stop at the middle of May, and start again in September. So one box is missing. We have four months on each roll…Darn. I tell people to leave the refiling to us, but they don’t listen.”

“Could it be misfiled?” Virgil asked.

She pulled open a drawer from the nineties, that was only partially full of microfilm boxes. Checked them, said, “These are right,” and then went through a bunch of empty drawers at the bottom of the case. She said, “I think it’s been taken by somebody. I’ll check these after we close—I have to work the desk—but I think it’s been taken.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d check,” Virgil said.

T
HE MISSING BOX
intrigued him. The librarian showed him how to thread the film they had, and he looked at four months around Schmidt’s mortgage loan, and in the quick review, saw nothing that struck him. No strange women in automobile accidents…

Not enough to work with; not yet. And it was possible that Judd had simply
bought
Schmidt, to be used as necessary.

V
IRGIL WAS OUT
the library door at twenty minutes to three. By ten minutes of three, he’d changed into a pale blue shirt with a necktie, khaki slacks, and a navy blue sport coat. Looking at himself in a mirror, he decided he looked like a greeter at a minor Indian casino.

He got back to the courthouse at one minute to three. Twenty people were standing outside the courthouse door, mostly older, mostly men, mostly deep in conversation. Two television remote trucks were parked on the lawn, cables snaking through the doors of the courthouse.

Inside was chaos. The courtroom might take a hundred people if nobody breathed too hard. In addition to two TV cameramen, who’d rigged lights over an attorney’s table that had been dragged in front of the judge’s bench, there were two on-camera people, both women; four tired-looking men and two tired-looking women who were probably from newspapers; two guys with tape recorders who might be from radio stations; and about a hundred locals who weren’t going anywhere.

Virgil stuck his head inside, took it all in, then headed down the hall to Stryker’s office before he attracted any attention. His phone went off, and he pulled it out of his pocket: Stryker. He buzzed past the secretary, stuck his head into Stryker’s office and said, “Yo.”

Stryker hung up the phone. “Where’n the hell have you been?”

“Running around,” Virgil said. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

“Well.” Stryker shrugged. “Tell the truth, I guess.”

“Jesus, Jim, you can’t do that.” Virgil looked around, saw the secretary watching, and closed the office door on her. “It’d stop us in our tracks.”

“Maybe if you’d been here an hour ago, we could have cooked something up.”

“There’s no cooking,” Virgil said. “You go out there, you give them the gory details of the three scenes—Gleason, Judd, and Schmidt. Everybody local already knows about them, so you’re not giving anything away. Talk about them being shot in the eyes. Talk about Judd being burned right down to the anklebones. TV people will like that. Tell them that we’ve developed information that would suggest that the killer is local, and that we’ve come up with a number of leads that we can’t talk about, but that…if they come back in a week or ten days, we believe that we’ll have a lot more. That we’re rolling.”

“Are we?” Stryker asked.

“Kind of.”

“Virgil…”

“You don’t tell them what it is, dummy,” Virgil said. “That’s the confidential part. We’re rolling, but we can’t talk about it.”

“If I do that, and if I don’t come up with something in ten days, I am truly screwed.”

“If you go out there and say we ain’t got jack-shit, you’re truly screwed anyway,” Virgil said. “If you go out and say the hounds of hell are on the killer’s heels, maybe he’ll make a move that we can see.”

“Mother of God.”

“She ain’t here, Jim. It’s just you and me.”

S
TRYKER STRAIGHTENED
himself out, and as they were about to go out, asked, “How much detail?”

“More than you think you should. The eyes, and the fact that it seems to be a ritual. The stick that propped up Schmidt, facing toward the east. That Gleason was propped up, facing the east. That nothing was left of Judd but his ankle and wrist bones, and the wire from his heart. They’ll eat that up…”

“I’m gonna need some heart work,” Stryker said. “Honest to God, I’m gonna need some heart work.”

At the last minute, walking down the hall, Virgil whispered, “You’re the grim sheriff of a rural county. You’re an honest, upright, tight-jawed, God-fearing cowboy. You don’t want to talk about it, but you think you should, because we’re in a democracy. You’re grim. You don’t smile, because the dead people are friends. This guy is killing your people.”

“Grim,” Stryker said.

H
E WAS,
and he pulled it off, barely moving his jaws.

Virgil said thirty-two words: “We’re working on it hard, and like the sheriff says, we’re rolling. But the BCA’s position is that the sheriff runs the operation, and we let him do the talking for us.”

A woman from a television station in Sioux Falls liked Stryker a lot, got tight with him, pushed him a little: “What’re you gonna do when you catch this guy?” she asked.

“Gonna hope that the sonofabitch fights back,” Stryker said, his face like a rock. “Save the state some trial money.”

They didn’t even cut the
sonofabitch
.

A
FTERWARD,
in Stryker’s office, Virgil told him the truth: “I think you did it.”

“So we got ten days or two weeks.” He took a turn around his office. “What’d you think about the chick from Sioux Falls?”

“If Jesse doesn’t work out, give her a call,” Virgil said.

“She had a nice…bodice.”

Made Virgil laugh.

T
HE
TV
PEOPLE
were packed up and gone by four-thirty, leaving behind a crowd of locals who were dissipating like the fizz on a hot Coke. Virgil picked up the box lunch at Ernhardt’s, and called Joan: “You ready?”