Dark of the Moon (28 page)

So why didn’t Virgil know that? Why hadn’t a record popped up? He could think of one good reason…

He looked down at the speedometer: one-oh-one. He called the Highway Patrol in Marshall again, and cleared the way out front. Got off the phone, then got back on when the cell burped.

Sandy.

“S
ANDY:
I want you to find Todd Williamson’s adoptive parents. Search every database you can find. Look at their taxes, find out when they stopped paying them, then check all the surrounding states and Florida, California, and Arizona, see if you can find them. Call old neighbors, if you have to.”

“I can do that,” she said.

“Then: Check Margaret Lane, died seven-twenty-sixty-nine. See if you can find a birth certificate. Find out if her parents are still alive—this would be Todd Williamson’s grandparents. Then, check the NCIC for a Lane, unknown first name, born seven twenty sixty-nine.”

“You think he used his mother’s name?” Sandy asked.

“If he got a birth certificate, he could use it to get a driver’s license, and he could use that to get a Social Security number. He could do the same thing with his adoptive parents’ names, have two perfectly good IDs based on official state documents.”

“How soon do you need it?”

“I’m on the way up there, hundred miles an hour,” Virgil said. “Feed it to me as you get it. If you find people, route me to their locations.”

When he got off, he looked down at the speedometer. Hundred and five. He’d always liked speed—but the truck was squealing like a pig.

S
ANDY CALLED BACK
as he was making the turn north on I-35. “The NCIC has a William Lane, seven twenty sixty-nine, showing arrests in eighty-seven and twice in eighty-eight, possession of a small amount of cocaine on the first one, and then two assault charges in eighty-eight, apparently a domestic thing. He spent four months in the Hennepin County jail on the second assault…let me look, blah, blah, a Karen Biggs, I’ll see if I can find her…”

“E-mail it to me…”

S
HE CALLED
fifteen minutes later: “I’ve got the Biggs woman, she lives in Cottage Grove now, her name is Johannsen, got a bunch of DWIs. I checked William Lane, he shared an address with Todd Williamson in ’eighty-eight and ’eighty-nine…”

“Got him,” Virgil said.

“Yup. Haven’t found his parents yet, they left too long ago,” Sandy said.

“Keep looking. How about the grandmother?” Virgil asked.

“Ralph and Helen Lane. Ralph died a long time ago. Helen is still alive, she lives up in Roseville, but I haven’t been able to reach her.”

“Give me those addresses.” He propped his notebook in the center of the steering wheel, kept one eye half-cocked toward the highway, took the addresses down.

T
EN MINUTES AFTER THAT,
Sandy was back. “The Williamsons are in Arizona. I’ve got an address but no phone number. I’ll try to get one.”

“Good. If you have to, check on neighbors, have them go next door and find out the number.”

“Okay. I’m looking at license photos on Williamson and Lane and they are indeed the same person, though Lane has some facial hair and an earring,” Sandy said.

“E-mail them.”

He got off the phone, stayed on the accelerator, took a call from Davenport as he swung onto I-35E south of the Cities. “I talked to Sandy. She says you’re rolling on this thing.”

“I think so.”

“You got anything for a trial?” Davenport asked. “Gotta think about trial.”

“Not yet. Gonna have to think of something cute, to get that. Right now, I’m trying to nail down the fact that my guy’s a psycho.”

“All right. Stay in touch.”

H
E CAME OFF
I-35E, cut east across the south end of the Cities on I-494, and then south on Highway 61, the same one that Bob Dylan revisited, heading into Cottage Grove. Off at 80th Street, he called Sandy, who got on MapQuest and took him straight in to Johannsen’s place.

Johannsen’s son came to the door, wearing rapper jeans with the crotch at knee level, and a T-shirt that was four sizes too big; he had a GameBoy in his hand. His eyes were at half-mast, and the odor of marijuana floated out of the house when he opened the door.

“She’s at work,” he said, sullenly.

“Where?”

“Either SuperAmerica or Tom Thumb. She works at both of them,” he said. “I don’t know where she’s working today.”

K
AREN
J
OHANNSEN
was at the SuperAmerica, throwing expired doughnuts in a dumpster. “I have some questions about William Lane, who was convicted of assaulting you,” Virgil said, flashing his ID.

“Shoot. That was twenty years ago, almost.” She was a short, broad woman with black hair and watery brown eyes, a pushed-in nose, older-looking than her years.

“I know that,” Virgil said. “What we’re trying to do is, we’re trying get a grip on what kind of a guy he is. The assaults…were they heavy-duty, or just sort of…routine domestic fighting?”

“He was trying to kill me,” Johannsen said, matter-of-factly. She waved her hand in front of her face, like a fan. They were too close to the dumpster, which smelled of spoiled bananas and meat, and sour milk. “He would have, too, if he’d been stronger. The first time, he was hitting me with a chair, and he couldn’t get a good swing and I was running around, so he never did hit me square. The neighbors called the cops. There was a car in the neighborhood, and they got there in time. But he would have killed me.”

“What set it off?” Virgil asked.

“Basically, we were drinking, and started arguing,” she said. “I was working and he wasn’t and I told him he was a worthless piece of shit who couldn’t even pay the rent, and he punched my arm and I hit him with my purse, and knocked him down, and he just went off…completely out of control.”

“What about the second time?” Virgil asked. “When he went to jail?”

“That time, he choked the shit out of me,” she said. Her hand went to her neck, as she remembered. “He came home, drunk. I was asleep, he woke me up and wanted, you know, and I didn’t want to. He started screaming at me, and I wised off, and he jumped on me and choked me. He had some friends with him, out in the living room, and they heard the fight…One of his friends pulled me off, and then I wasn’t breathing so good, so the girlfriend of the friend called the cops, and they called an ambulance and they started me breathing again.”

“That was all for the two of you?”

“Yeah. When he was in jail, I moved. Changed my address and got an unlisted phone…but I saw him anyway. We had some of the same friends. But we were all done, and he didn’t come around anymore,” Johannsen said. “Good thing, too. He would have killed me, sooner or later.”

“Did he ever mention his parents?” Virgil asked.

“Said his mom was killed in a car wreck,” she said. “Didn’t say who his dad was.”

“What about his adoptive parents…some people named Williamson?”

She shook her head. “Oh…I thought they were his foster-care people, or something. They adopted him?”

“Yes. When he was a baby.”

“Jeez—I didn’t know that,” she said. “That makes it worse.”

“Worse.”

“Yeah. I met them two or three times, I guess, going over there with Bill. We used to go over there for beer—he had a key. But. They were like, total assholes.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like they believed in slavery,” she said. “They used to tell him about how much he owed them—in money. Bill ran away when he was fourteen; he was living on the street when I met him. He ran away because they wanted him to work in their store all the time. They called it earning his keep, but most kids who are thirteen or fourteen don’t have to work sixty hours a week. That’s what they wanted. No kidding—they were assholes.”

“Did Bill ever call himself Todd Williamson?”

She shook her head: “Nope. He was Lane to all of us guys—the people he hung around with.”

“Good guy, bad guy?” Virgil asked. “I mean, when he was sober?”

“Not bad, when he was sober,” Johannsen said. She looked at her thumb; it had frosting on it, and she wiped it on the dumpster. “Bad when he was drunk. But that was twenty years ago. He was a teenager. You work in this store, you realize that a lot of teenagers are assholes, and a lot of them change when they get older.”

“Think Bill would change?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. He was like a dog that you beat for ten years. Not the dog’s fault if he goes crazy.”

S
ANDY CALLED.
“I got the grandmother. She’s home. I told her to stay there.”

“Call her back, tell her I’ll be there in half an hour,” Virgil said.

H
E SAID GOOD-BYE
to Johannsen and headed north, twenty minutes to an inner-ring suburban neighborhood, green lawns, cracked driveways, older ranch-style and split-level homes, two long-haired teenagers doing intricate and athletic bike tricks.

Helen Lane, Williamson’s natural grandmother, was alone in her living room, watching television when Virgil pulled into the driveway. She came to the door, kept the screen locked: “I don’t know where Todd is. I don’t want to know. He was in jail for a while. Did he do something else?

“Did he give
you
a hard time?” Virgil asked.

“He’d steal money from me. He’d sneak into the house and steal,” she said.

“How’d he find out you were his grandmother?” Virgil asked.

“He was smart. Got his brains from my daughter,” she said. “I guess the Williamsons had a paper, maybe his birth certificate.”

“Did he ever figure out who his real father was?”

She frowned and said, “None of us knew who it was. I don’t think Maggie knew, for sure. She was running wild.”

“You never knew?”

“No…and after she died, there was no way to find out. Sure as heck weren’t no men coming around to ask about it.”

“And the baby…?”

“Was adopted. We didn’t have any money, my husband was sick all the time—he was a roofer, he hurt his back,” she said, sorry for herself. “I was working all the time, so, it seemed like the best thing to do was to let the baby go.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You know, to a good family.”

V
IRGIL GRABBED
a McDonald’s meal on the way back to Bluestem, ten minutes off the highway and back on, the car smelling like Quarter Pounders with Cheese and fries, driving into the dying light; thinking, as he drove, that Williamson’s past had not been quite what he’d expected. You could take the mad-dog view of things—that Williamson was nuts, driven that way by parental neglect and, possibly, actual abuse. And that as sorry a tale as that might be, a mad dog is still a mad dog.

You could just as easily take another view: orphaned kid, abused by adoptive parents, pushed onto the streets when he was still a kid—and somehow, he rights himself, goes in the Army, learns a trade, and becomes a respectable citizen.

Virgil, who basically had a kindly heart, preferred the second story. But his cop brain said, a mad dog is still a mad dog, even if it’s not the dog’s fault.

H
E WAS
in Bluestem a little before eleven o’clock. Larry Jensen’s house was lit up like a Christmas tree, and when he got out of his truck, on the driveway, Virgil could feel an impact through his feet, as though somebody were shooting a big gun in Jensen’s basement, but not quite like a gun.

He rang the bell, and a moment later, Jensen’s wife came to the door. She was a small woman, sweaty, very pregnant. She turned on the porch light and Virgil felt the impact again, whatever it was. She peered out through the window in the door, then opened it and said, “You’re Virgil.”

“Yes. Is Larry here?”

“He’s down breaking up the basement,” she said. “What’s going on?”

J
ENSEN WAS BREAKING UP
the basement floor with a sledgehammer, working bare chested. The basement had been finished sometime long before, and now the walls had been stripped of the Sheetrock, showing the bare studs and long streaks of old PL200, with chunks of drywall still stuck to it.

Virgil came down the steps just as Jensen came through a swing, the hammer cracking into the concrete, and then he turned and his eyes narrowed when he saw Virgil. He wiped his head and asked, “What’s up?”

“Putting in a toilet, huh?”

“Gonna have one more kid,” he said, propping the hammer against the basement wall. “That’ll be three girls and a boy, and we sure as shit won’t get along with one bathroom…So what’re you doing?”

“Gotta ask you a question, Larry. If Stryker’s popularity takes a fall…are you running for sheriff?”

Jensen looked at him for a moment, not answering, then, “Why would you want to know?”

“Larry, believe me…Just answer the question, okay?”

Jensen wiped his forehead with the palm of his hand, wiped his hand on his jeans, and said, “Naw. I’m happy like I am. I’ll get my twenty-five when I’m forty-five, and then maybe try something new. Double-dip.”

“The power doesn’t appeal to you,” Virgil said.

Jensen shook his head: “What’re you up to, Virgil? And no, it doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Come on. Get your jacket: we gotta make a call.”

“It’s midnight, Virgil. Does Jim know about this?”

“Get your jacket, Larry. We gotta make a call, and I’m not going alone. I need a witness. And Margo Carr—call her up, too. Jim doesn’t know about it, because it would embarrass him to know about it. Officially.”

Jensen put his hands on his hips: “Well, shit.”

“Larry…”

T
HEY GOT
a key from the evidence locker and rode out to the Schmidt house in silence. “This worries me; I really don’t like it,” Jensen said.

“I don’t like it either,” Virgil said.

The Schmidt house was dark and silent, an air of gloom gripping it like a glove. They parked under the yard light, and Jensen led the way across the yard, joked, “You’re not afraid of ghosts, are you?”

“No. Not that I’d mess around with one, if I had the chance,” Virgil said.

I
NSIDE, THEY BROUGHT
the computer up. Virgil went to the inbox, checked Schmidt’s e-mail. The letters from the Curlys were gone, as Virgil thought they would be.

“Doesn’t necessarily mean a lot,” Jensen said.

“No, it doesn’t—it can’t be entirely innocent, but it might not be entirely guilty, either. Just trying to keep their asses out of the fire,” Virgil said.

A set of headlights swept the yard, and a minute later, Margo Carr knocked, then stepped inside. “What’ve you got?”

“I need you to take this computer to your place—not the office, to your place—and lock it up,” Virgil said. “Then, tomorrow, I want you to get in touch with the state crime lab about recovering files on the hard drive. Should be simple enough. Don’t have to do it yet, but make the arrangements.”

She looked from Virgil to Jensen and back again: “What are we looking for?”

“Roman Schmidt’s e-mails,” Virgil said. “All of them.”

H
E MET
S
TRYKER
and Jensen again at nine o’clock the next morning, at the sheriff’s office, Virgil carrying a cup of coffee. “Where’s Merrill?”

“He’s on his way,” Stryker said. “Larry’s filled me in: I think you probably ought to do this somewhere else. You could use a courtroom.”

Virgil nodded, then said, “What about the guys from the DEA? They holding on?”

Stryker nodded: “All holding on; I talked to Pirelli this morning. What exactly are you doing, Virgil? You never told Larry exactly what…”

“Talk to you in a bit,” Virgil said. “Send Merrill over when he shows up.” To Jensen: “Let’s go nail down that courtroom.”

T
HE COURTROOM WAS EMPTY,
and Virgil walked back and turned the latch between the courtroom and the judge’s chamber. He asked Jensen, “When are you gonna get that basement finished?” Virgil asked.

“Virgil, I’m not up for any small talk, right now,” Jensen said. “These guys are friends of mine.”

Virgil said, “Don’t worry about it. If they
did
do something wrong, we can always cover it up.”

That made Jensen laugh, once. Then he shook his head and said, “I’ll remember that. You know, when they have me on the witness stand, and they’re puttin’ the screws on my thumbs.”

“Listen,” Virgil said, “does anybody in town teach CPR? You know, where you practice on one of those dummies?”

Jensen was confused: “Yeah. The fire guys do that. They go around to the schools…Why?”

“Small talk, just keeping you occupied,” Virgil said. They heard footfalls outside the courtroom, and Virgil lowered his voice. “Here comes one, now.”

M
ERRILL CAME IN,
looked at Virgil, and said to Jensen, “You called?”

Virgil said, “When you talked to me in the men’s room, about Jesse Laymon, and her car not being there, at the Judd fire…Where were you? I didn’t see you there.”

“I was up the hill, trying to keep people from doing an end run to the fire. I saw you go by.”

“So, you said you didn’t see Jesse’s truck. Did you look at all the trucks?”

“No…”

“Then why pick on Jesse?” Virgil asked.

Merrill hooked his thumbs over his gun belt, which, in a cop, is defensive: “I heard talk that nobody had seen her. And since
I
hadn’t either, I thought you should know.”

“Who’d you hear that talk from?” Virgil asked.

Merrill’s eye went to Jensen. “What’s going on, Larry?”

“Not a big deal,” Jensen said. “We’re just trying to track down where you might have heard that.”

“It’s sort of confidential…”

“It’s not confidential from us,” Virgil said. His voice was mild, and quiet, so Merrill had to concentrate on him. “If I need to immunize you, and put you in front of a grand jury to get it, I’ll do that. Of course, you’ll lose your job. If there are any subsidiary entanglements, you could be going to Stillwater for a few years.”

“What are you talking about?” Merrill barked. “I was giving you a tip.”

Virgil looked at Jensen. “Better read him his rights. Do we have to do that with police officers? I think maybe we should.”

Merrill said, “What the hell?”

Virgil said, “We really need to know where you heard that. That’s all. No crime at this point. Could get to be a crime. Depending. So where did you hear it?”

Merrill looked at Jensen, then back at Virgil. “Jesus…I mean, it’s no big deal, I guess. I heard it from Little Curly.”

Virgil smiled. “See? That was easy enough. We thought you probably had. So, take off. Keep this to yourself. And I mean, Deputy,
keep it to yourself.
We’re right in the middle of a complicated thing here, and you best keep your head down.”

T
HE
C
URLYS CAME
in together. Jensen had called Little Curly, told him to find his father, bring him in. Little Curly was wearing his uniform, Big Curly was off duty, wearing red shorts and a T-shirt that showed off his gut.

“Sit down,” Virgil said.

They sat, and Big Curly asked Jensen, “What’s going on, Larry?”

Virgil said, “You’re talking to me. Not to Larry. He’s more of a witness.”

Big Curly looked at his son, then asked Virgil, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I need to set some quick ground rules,” Virgil said. “You don’t have to talk to me. If you don’t, then the chips fall where they may. One or both of you have done things that helped out the killer of the Gleasons and the Schmidts and the Judds…”

“What? That’s bullshit,” Big Curly said. He looked at his son, shook his head, then said to Jensen, “Larry, are you putting up with this shit?”

Jensen said, “You should listen to him.”

Virgil continued: “Whether you knew it or not—but if you bail on me now, like I said, a prosecutor could take a fairly harsh view of it. Or we can handle it privately, and maybe, if I think it was all innocent, we let it go. Though I’ll have to talk to Jim about it.”

Little Curly: “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

V
IRGIL ASKED,
“Who went into the Schmidts’ house and erased e-mails from Roman Schmidt’s computer?”

The Curlys looked at each other, then Big Curly, his face gone grim, said, “I did. But it had nothing to do with the killings. It was a personal matter.”

“I know—about the election,” Virgil said. “We’ve got the computer sequestered, and we can recover the e-mails if we need to. Keep that in mind. Now, did you walk anybody through the house after the killings?”

Little Curly shook his head. “Not me. Why would I?”

Big Curly said, “Me neither.”

“How about the Gleasons’ house? After the murder?”

Little Curly shook his head, but Big Curly hung his, groaned, and said, “That fuckin’ Williamson.”

“Why?” Virgil asked.

“Because of the election,” Big Curly said, looking up at Virgil. His eyes were wet, as though he were about to start crying. “I was getting on Todd’s good side—the newspaper’s about the only way to campaign here, that anybody can afford. His articles can set the whole tone of the election, and you don’t even have to pay for them. Jim is getting in trouble with these murders, somebody was going to take the job away from him…”

Virgil turned to Little Curly: “You had Merrill suggest to me that Jesse Laymon might have had something to do with the killings—that her truck wasn’t at the park the night of the Judd fire. It
was
there, so why’d you suggest that it wasn’t?”

Little Curly shook his head: “I didn’t see it. I saw her, but not the truck. I was talking with Todd, and he brought it up.”

“Did you ever see Todd up there?”

The Curlys looked at each other, then Little Curly said, “Well, not actually. I assumed…”

“W
HY DIDN
’
T YOU
tell me yourself?” Virgil asked. “About Jesse?”

“Because…Ah shit, because I didn’t want to get involved with you. I didn’t want to talk to you.”

“Because of the election? Because Jim was seeing Jesse, and if you tarred Jesse, you’d get Jim, too?”

Little Curly shook his head: “Look. Todd said she wasn’t there. I didn’t see her. We thought you should know.”

“And smearing Jim was just a side benefit?”

“Fuck you,” Little Curly said.

“All right,” Virgil said. To Big Curly: “When you walked Williamson through, was he ever alone? For even a minute?”

“Well…maybe for a few seconds, here and there—he’d be looking at one thing, taking some notes, I might be looking at another.”

V
IRGIL TURNED
to Jensen: “Did Jim give you a hard time about not spotting that book of Revelation?”

Jensen shrugged. “Not a
hard
time. He got me and Margo in his office, said we should have seen it. Said it was embarrassing that you picked it up first. Wasn’t the most pleasant five minutes of my life.”

“You didn’t pick it up, because it wasn’t there,” Virgil said. “Williamson planted it when Big Curly walked him through. He was trying to point us at Feur. He did the same thing with that Salem cigarette by the Schmidts’ stoop. He knew we’d pick it up. I knew that Feur smoked, and I thought they were Salems. I’m sure it would have come up at some point, if there was ever a question. A trial.”

“Why? Why would he do all this?” Little Curly asked. “Judd’s money?”

Virgil shook his head. “Nope. Basically, he did it because he’s nuts. Nuts, but careful, and he thought he was smart enough that he could get away with it. I don’t think he could really help himself on the killings—not on the first five, anyway, the Gleasons and the Schmidts, and Judd Senior, Judd Junior might have been a cleaning up.

“But after he killed the Gleasons, I think he decided to try to pin it on Feur. Just in case. And maybe, because his office was right there with the Judds’, he knew that Judd Junior and Feur were involved with each other, and he could throw enough suspicion on Feur to create doubt, even if we did tumble to him. So he started by planting the Revelation. Then the Salem. And to tell you the truth, those documents we found in Judd’s computer: there wasn’t a thing in Judd’s own machine, but they were right there in his secretary’s.”