Dark of the Moon (16 page)

“Seems crude.”

“Whatever.” He stepped away from the truck and looked up at the overhead light. “Does that light come on when the barn door goes up?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll silhouette us. I’ll get it.” He took off his shoes and climbed up on the hood of the truck, and then on the roof, reached up and unscrewed the lightbulb, left it hanging by a thread. “Punch the door lift, just enough to turn on the light.”

She punched the lift button, and the lightbulb remained dark.

“When I say to lift the door, lift it; then climb in the backseat, get down low, and hang on. I’m getting out of here.”

He climbed into the truck, started the engine, and braced the shotgun, muzzle down, between the passenger-side floor and seat. “Punch the button; get in.”

She did, and he watched the door going up, seeming to take an eternity; then he hit the gas and the truck blew through the opening, backward, and he kept it moving, backward, in a circle, around the parking circle, jabbed the brake, jammed the shift into Drive, and tore down the short driveway to the county road, skidded onto the road with a quick brake and another pulse of acceleration, and they were gone.

“We okay?” Joan asked.

“Yeah. He’s long gone; but we’re so far away from help that we didn’t dare take the chance…”

He drove past the hill, away from town. “Where’re we going?” Joan asked.

“Got some people to talk to.” He slowed, pulled over, and said, “Let me get rid of the shotgun, and you can ride up front.”

T
HEY STOPPED
at five farms along Highway 7, and spoke to one guy mowing a ditch: Who had they seen on the highway?

Shrugs and shaken heads: nobody in particular.

On the way back to town, Virgil said, “I thought everybody knew everybody else’s car.”

“Not out here. In town. If it’d been something unusual, like a Toyota or a Mercedes, somebody might have noticed. But a Ford or a Chevy, unless there’s a sign on it…”

V
IRGIL DIDN
’
T WRITE
much that night: he was stuck on story development.

Virgil went to sleep hoping that Homer would come up with an idea; because at this point, Virgil himself had none at all.

Went to sleep dreaming of Joanie Stryker on the rock at the dell…

V
IRGIL OPENED
his eyes: daylight.

He felt good, but a little stiff from sleeping on the floor.

Worried about the gunman, he’d taken the cushions off the couch, and had thrown them on the floor behind the bed, and put the pistol under the bed next to his hand. He didn’t like the idea of sleeping through the night next to a sliding glass door. Joan was at her mother’s. No point in taking a chance.

But he
did
feel good. Things were happening, and he was still alive.

Part of it was the absence of sex after the long naked interval in the pool. He’d tried to talk Joan into sneaking through the glass door into the Holiday Inn, but she turned him down: “Everybody in town would know before you got the curtain pulled. It’s all right to sneak around and have sex, but it has to be creditably sneaky.”

“Ah.”

“My place,” she said. “You could walk over in half an hour.”

“I don’t want you going to your place tonight. I was thinking…your mother’s. You’d be close, but not where you’d have a target on you; he could be waiting for us to get back to your place…”

“Well, we’re
not
doing anything at Mom’s…”

So, they called it off.

Hands all over each other, parked three blocks from Mom’s, like a couple of teenagers; and he dropped her.

And woke up feeling good. Maybe he could take a break from the hook-and-bullet magazines, and write a piece for
Vanity Fair
: “Violence: The New Aphrodisiac.” But that wouldn’t be right—it’d always been an aphrodisiac, as far as he could tell. Something primitive there…

Maybe, he thought, they should have stayed in the barn for a while, up in the hayloft.

When he was a teenager, there were locker-room fantasy stories—maybe one or two were true—of guys getting the farmer’s daughter up in the hayloft. His best friend, Otis Ericson, had claimed to have nailed one of his girl cousins, Shirley, who was in their high school class, and even in eighth grade, had tits out to here.

In what Virgil assumed was nothing more than an effort at verisimilitude, the alleged fuckee warned Virgil against hay cuts, or hay rash: “And you sure as shit don’t want to get any hay in her crack. She’ll be bitching and moaning for a week. Take a blanket.”

The thought that Otis Ericson might have actually gotten Shirley Ericson naked, in a hayloft, had, at the time, seriously turned him on; still did, a little, though the last time he saw Shirley, she’d sort of spread out.

L
YING ON THE FLOOR
, he looked at his watch: eight o’clock. Threw the cushions back on the couch, yawned, stretched, did his sit-ups and push-ups, cleaned up, and called Davenport.

“Still too early,” Davenport said.

“I was shot at last night,” Virgil said.

“Virgil! You okay?”

“Nothing but scared,” Virgil said. “The shooter wasn’t that good. Scoped rifle, I was up on a friend’s farm, missed me by a couple of feet and I wasn’t moving that fast.”

“Tell me you had your gun,” Davenport said.

“I had the gun. Saw him running, fired seven shots at maybe four hundred yards, chances of hitting him were zero…but…thought I should let you know. I’m pushing something here. I’m going to write some notes and e-mail them to you. Just in case.”

“Goddamnit, Virgil, you take care,” Davenport said. “You want help?”

“Just get me that paper that Sandy put together.”

O
N THE WAY
to breakfast, the desk clerk said, “You’ve got mail,” fished an envelope out of a desk drawer, and handed it to him. The address was typed; no return address. Mailed yesterday from Bluestem. He went on to the dining room, holding the envelope by its edges, slit it open with a butter knife, and slid the letter out.

That was it—no signature, of course, and the note was
typed,
not printed. Who’d still have a typewriter? Somebody old, like Gerald Johnstone, the funeral director. The stamp was self-sticking, so there’d be no DNA.

Estate tax? Florence Mills? Sounded like something more for Sandy to do, when she got back.

He finished breakfast, went back to his room for his briefcase, went out to the truck; went back to the room to get his gun, back to the truck; and headed out to the Stryker farm, past the farm, around behind the hill.

The far side of the hill, opposite the dell, had once been pastureland, before the countryside had emptied out, with the red quartzite right on the surface. There were clumps of wild plum and scrubby shrubs, thistle and open spaces with knee-high grass.

Virgil cruised the backside of the hill until he saw the truck tracks leading off-road. He turned off, bounced across a shallow ditch, and then ran parallel to the tracks, up the hill, to a copse of trees and bushes just below the crest of the hill. The tracks swerved around the copse, and ended. This was where the shooter had parked, out of sight from the road. He sat in the car for a minute, watching the road, and saw not another single vehicle; he was alone except for a red-tailed hawk, which circled the slope, looking for voles.

The hawk dropped, hit the ground, out of sight: breakfast. Virgil stepped out of the truck and looked at the tracks made by the shooter’s vehicle. There were enough weeds and grass that any tread marks were hidden. He followed one of the tracks back down the hill, and never saw a clear print. Followed the other one back up, found nothing.

From the car park, looking up the hill, with the sun still at his back, he could see disturbed grass where the shooter had been. He got the shotgun out of the back of the truck, loaded it alternately with buckshot and solid slugs, jacked a shell into the chamber, and followed the trail to the top of the hill. A hundred yards over the crest, he could see the front lip of the pool, and the farther down the hill he went, the more of the pool he could see. The trail wasn’t straight at this point. It moved between clumps of shrubs, which meant that he and Joan must’ve already been at the pool.

Another hundred yards, and he found the shooter’s stand: a circle of crushed grass next to the broken-off and rotted stump of a small tree. If he’d rested the rifle on the stump, he’d have been able to see two-thirds of the pool. To see more, he would have had to go right up to the lip of the dell, without cover.

He checked around the nest: no brass. The guy had cleaned up after himself.

F
ROM
V
IRGIL
’
S VIEWPOINT
, the dell, down below, didn’t look like much: a crack in the landscape, with a wider spot, and a pool, near the bottom. He walked down, and when he got right on top of it, the character changed. Down here, the ground seemed to have been hit with a mammoth cleaver, carving a sharp trench right through the quartzite down to the pool.

If the shooter had been cooler, or braver, he could have waited until they were fooling around under the spring, out of sight, and then walked or crawled up to the back wall. From there he would have had them at sixty or seventy yards, and there would have been no place for Virgil and Joan to hide.

On the other hand, if they’d seen him sneaking down, and had gotten back to Virgil’s gun and down the canyon, he’d have been screwed. In the folded, broken rocks of the canyon, a guy with a pistol could hold off a small army.

On that thought, Virgil took out his cell phone: he had a signal. You might not down in the dell, but you wouldn’t know unless you were down there. Maybe the shooter had taken that into account. He
could not
allow somebody to see him, and walk away…

L
OT TO THINK ABOUT.
The day would be hot again. Another good day for the pool, but he wouldn’t be swimming again until the killer was caught, or dead.

Virgil went back to the truck, shucked the shells out of the shotgun and put it away, and headed back to Roman Schmidt’s place. Larry Jensen, Stryker’s investigator, was there, with the crime-scene people. Virgil took Jensen aside.

“Where’s Jim?”

“At the office. He said you’d probably show up and want to get in. We’re just about done. Let me go talk to Margo.”

“Okay. I got a note in the mail today, I was wondering if you could check it for fingerprints.”

He explained, and gave Jensen the note and envelope, folded into a piece of hotel writing paper. Jensen read it, frowned. “Shoot. That’s not a direction we’ve gone.”

“Hardly had time,” Virgil said. “Anyway, I’m on it. I’ve got a researcher up in St. Paul who can pull the corporate information, and I’ve got some income-tax forms coming in. If you could check this letter…”

“Wonder who uses a typewriter?”

“Somebody Roman’s age,” Virgil said.

M
ARGO
C
ARR,
the crime-scene specialist, showed him Schmidt’s home office, a table made out of a wooden door, set across two filing cabinets. A computer, no typewriter. “Everything in here has been worked,” she said.

“You think the killer was in here?”

“No. I think the killer shot Roman, shot Gloria, then came and shot Roman twice more, then dragged him outside and propped him up with a stick he’d already cut. I don’t think he went anywhere in the house, off the line of the bedroom.”

“Do you think he knew the inside of the house?” Virgil asked.

“Maybe. Or maybe Roman turned on a light in the bedroom and gave it all away.”

“Find anything at all?”

“One thing,” she said. She went back to a plastic trunk, opened it, and brought back a Ziploc bag with a cigarette filter in it. “Found this right by the back steps. Cigarette butt. I can figure out what kind, I’m sure, but I know it’s a menthol—I can smell it. Wasn’t rained on, so it’s recent. The Schmidts didn’t smoke.”

He looked at the butt, and then at Carr: “You think?”

“I’m grasping for straws, here. That’s what I got.”

A
MOMENT LATER,
he was sitting at Roman’s desk, his eyes closed, trying to remember: the pack of cigarettes next to George Feur’s elbow, when Virgil interviewed him at his house. Salems? Virgil thought so. His visual image was of a green package, an aqua green…

His cell phone rang: Joan.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“Not bad. I’m confused, but I’m looking pretty good,” he said. “I might go out tonight, see if I can pick up some chicks.”

“Good luck.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I’m at Schmidt’s. I’ve got something for you to think about: how many people, once they figured we were going out to the farm, would have known how to come down that slope to a place where they’d have a free shot at us?”

She thought for a moment, and then said, “Well, probably not everybody.”

“Not everybody?”

“It’s a fairly famous swimming hole, Virgil. Kids would park up on that hillside, up in the trees, then sneak in past the stock tank and go up the canyon and skinny-dip. I mean, if you didn’t do that at least once in high school, and get laid up on that rock, you were
nobody
.”

“How often did
you
do it?” he asked.

“We agreed not to talk about our histories,” she said.

“No, we didn’t.”

“We have now,” she said.

He offered to take her to the Dairy Queen, having exhausted the fine-dining possibilities at McDonald’s.

“I’ll order a pizza from Johnnie’s,” she said. “My place at four o’clock, we’ll go back out to the farm. It’s a great day. Be careful. And bring a better gun.”

“
You
be careful.”

V
IRGIL DUG THROUGH
the Schmidts’ filing cabinet, which turned out to be a waste of time. He did learn that they were fairly affluent: Gloria had been an elementary-school teacher in Worthington—a friend of the alcoholic schoolteacher? Probably not, though: Gloria was most of a generation earlier, and would have taught in a different school. Wonder where the money came from? They had half a million dollars in a Vanguard account; but then, they’d had a long time to build it up.

The most interesting material was in Schmidt’s computer. He had a dial-up account, and he had e-mail from Big Curly, and they were talking politics. Curly was looking for support for his son to run against Stryker in the next election.

Schmidt was talking, but wasn’t eager to side with someone who might be a loser. “We better wait until we are close to the time, have a better idea of what the opportunities are,” he wrote back in one of the notes. But he didn’t say no.

Sitting there, looking at the Schmidt material, Virgil started thinking about the letter he’d given to Larry Jensen. How many people knew what tree he was barking up? The banker, of course, and anyone he might have gossiped with.

And the Johnstones.

“That damn picture,” he said aloud. Had the photograph somehow generated the note?

S
TYMIED
at the Schmidts’—there was nothing right on the surface, and a full analysis of all the Schmidts’ financial transactions would take a lot of time. He heard people knocking around in the back of the house, and gave up. Back another day, if nothing else popped up.

He went out through the kitchen, saw Big Curly, Little Curly, and a deputy he didn’t know, standing in the yard with Jensen. He waved and said, “I’m outa here.”

“Anything?” Jensen asked.

“We need an accountant,” Virgil said.

“Yeah…”

He’d be back to Schmidts’, Virgil thought, to see if somebody erased that e-mail about the election…if somebody would mess with evidence at a murder scene. Be an interesting thing to know.

O
N THE WAY
into town, he saw another hawk circling, like the one he’d seen out at the farm, and that made him think of the shooting, and the slope, and the farm, and skinny-dipping, and the whole question of why the shooter hadn’t come closer and taken the sure shot.