'Just don't be too nice,' Virgil said. 'She likes edge. Mix up nice, with a little law-enforcement edge.'
'That what you're doing with Joanie?'
'Joanie and I are operating on a higher level,' Virgil said. 'You're not. So do what I tell you.' He looked back at Schmidt, sitting in the dirt, with the fork under his ears. 'Isn't this the most fucked-up thing you've ever seen?'
'When I get this cocksucker, I'm gonna kill him,' Stryker said.
'Atta boy,' Virgil said. 'Feel the burn.'
A WHILE LATER, Virgil said, 'I'm going back to town. As soon as your crime-scene people will let me inside, I want to know. Something in there might tell us what's going on. It'll be on paper, if there's anything. I don't think this guy is leaving any DNA behind.'
'What's in town?'
'Historical research,' Virgil said.
He drove back to town, parked, got his briefcase out of the car with his laptop, went to the newspaper office, and found a scrawled note Scotch-taped to the window: 'Out on story, back later.' The note looked like it had been written in a rush. He'd probably passed Williamson as the newspaperman headed to Schmidts', and he was coming in.
Frustrated, he rattled the doorknob, and to his surprise, it turned under his hand. He had a quick snapshot vision of Williamson lying on the floor, with two black holes where his eyes should be. He pushed in: the place was empty. He really needed to look at the files…
He reached back, pulled the taped note off the window, and let it fall to the floor. Hey, he never saw it, and the door was open. On the counter inside was a fresh stack of papers, with a coin box. The lead story was headlined NEW CLAIM FOR JUDD FORTUNE.
That would sell a couple papers, he thought.
Back in the morgue, he pulled clip files on every name he had in town: the Judds, the Gleasons, the Schmidts, the Stryker family, the Laymons, George Feur.
Judd's wife had been named Linda-and when she died, in 1966, the story must've been the biggest one in the paper that week, with a seventy-two-point headline. She'd been rushed to the hospital, the story said, but had been declared dead on arrival by a doctor named Long. An autopsy had been done, and found the cause of death to be an aortic aneurysm. The clip on the autopsy said that the coroner, Thomas McNally, declared that 'once the aneurysm tore open, there was no possibility of survival. She bled to death within a minute or two.'
Judd was characterized as 'distraught.'
That was not quite the story he'd gotten from Margaret Laymon, who remembered it as a heart attack, but it was close enough.
HE READ FORWARD in the Judd files, but after Linda Judd's death, it appeared to be mostly business news, and then the Jerusalem artichoke scandal.
He went back, looking through the huge collection of clips on Roman Schmidt, who had even more than Judd Sr., and found a few intersections with Russell Gleason. Gleason was occasionally cited as the coroner, apparently alternating with Thomas McNally. That hadn't been uncommon in country towns, Virgil knew, where local doctors took turns doing an unpaid extra duty.
Roman Schmidt and Gleason were cited together in fifteen or twenty highway accidents, an accidental gunshot death during deer season, a man who was killed by a deer, old people found dead at home, several drownings and infant deaths, one 'miracle baby,' a kid who'd stuck his arm in a corn picker and had bled to death, and several more gruesome farm accidents, including a man who'd been cut in half by an in-gear tractor tire, after the tractor rolled on him.
But Virgil couldn't find Judd's name in any of them.
The Laymon files he'd already seen, but there was nothing to indicate that Margaret Laymon had had a romance with Judd. Garber, the alcoholic schoolteacher, had no file at all; to his surprise, neither did Betsy Carlson, Judd's sister-in-law. Shouldn't there be a story at the time of the sister-in-law's death, since she was the witness? Or maybe, like Williamson had said, they only filed the most important names, and she just wasn't important enough. Have to ask, but it seemed strange.
The Stryker files were large: Mark Stryker's suicide was covered extensively, but most of the story detailed the family history before Mark. Laura Stryker was mentioned as working as an office manager at State Farm. Virgil checked files under 'State Farm Insurance,' and found that the local agency was owned by Bill Judd Sr.
Huh. Nobody had mentioned that. No way to tell from the clips when she began working there, or when she left…
THE ROOM WAS close and warm, and after a while, Virgil leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Let Homer out: worked on a little fiction.
Laura Stryker rolled away from Bill Judd, both covered with a sheen of sweat, gasping from the sex, and dropped her feet to the floor. No doubt about it: she was missing life with Mark. Nice guy, but not what she needed. 'I'm going to tell him,' she said, pulling up her underpants.
'Aw, don't do that. You know that we're not long for this. We're just fooling around, honey.'
'Doesn't necessarily have everything to do with you, Bill. Has to do with me: and I'm telling him…'
Try again.
Mark Stryker, trembling with anger, rigid there in the kitchen, shaking: 'I won't put up with it. I put up with shit all of my life, and I won't put up with this. I'll tell the kids, I'll tell your folks, I'll talk to anybody who'll listen. You're not leaving me, you're leaving Bluestem. You won't be able to walk down the street…'
'I wanted to be civilized…'
'Civilized, kiss my ass,' Mark Stryker said, his voice rising, shrill. 'This is the last time you'll ever see the kids. I'm not letting some whore come around to the farm…'
He turned and went outside, shouted back at her, 'I knew what you were doing, whore. I knew…'
Laura, the anger rising in her, with the fear, hadn't thought about the kids; Mark was outside, looking up at the screen over the sink, still there, shouting. The gun was there, in the kitchen drawer, behind the towels, the clip in the next drawer, took only a second to slam the clip into the butt, jack a round into the chamber…the gun right there in her hand, hot, Mark in the yard…
'I killed him…I'm freaking out here, I killed him in the yard.'
'Jesus Christ, Laura…'
'You fix this.' Not weeping, but out of control. 'You tell them it's suicide. I'm not going to lose the kids…'
'Jesus Christ, Laura…'
'You call Russ Gleason…you tell him…I know about his little abortion mill. You tell him that Mark committed suicide…'
Virgil yawned and opened his eyes. Fiction. But a story was going there, beginning to feel like something-at least he was pulling the dead people together.
And then he thought, what if this wasn't about the men? What if it was about the wives? What if Gloria Schmidt and Anna Gleason had been in bed with Judd, and now somebody was killing them, and the shooting of their husbands, through the eyes, was symbolic of some kind of blindness, or a looking-away…
What if Laura Stryker wasn't the perpetrator, but was the next target?
HE SAT in the morgue for two hours, altogether, typing notes into his laptop, thinking. Every few minutes, the outer door would rattle, he'd hear change go into the coin box, and the door would close again. Once, there'd been no change, and he'd been tempted to peek and see who it was, stealing a newspaper; but he stayed with the clips.
When he was finished, he knew a lot more than when he'd started, but nothing that seemed to connect with the murders. Everybody in town may have known that Judd was sleeping with local women, and sometimes in a pile of them, but it never got into the newspaper.
He took ten minutes to get the clips back in their envelopes, close down his computer. He walked back through the newspaper office, picked up the note on the floor, taped it back on the window, and went to his truck.
Laura Stryker.
HE CALLED JOAN: 'Did you hear about Roman Schmidt?'
'I did.' Her voice was hushed. 'Virgil, this is god-awful. Completely aside from the fact that Jim is going to lose his job-it's god-awful all on its own.'
'Well, if we catch the guy, Jim could still pull out of it,' Virgil said.
