Dark of the Moon

Pirelli said, 'I'm hurting. Ah, God.'

'How're your guys?'

'Both still alive.' Pirelli reached out his good hand, and knocked on the wood-grained plastic of the bedside table. 'I think, I hope…'

'What about Harmon?'

'I talked to his wife last night,' Pirelli said. 'She's coming out today.'

'I don't want to be there,' Virgil said.

'Neither do I.'

They both looked into a corner for a moment, and then Virgil asked, 'Was it worth it? If you'd had a good idea somebody was going to be killed…?'

'Fuck no, it wasn't worth it.' Pirelli shook his head. 'Don't tell anybody I said that. If I'd known what was going to happen, I'd have set up five hundred yards away and hosed down Franks and his trucks and the house and killed the whole bunch of them. But I didn't know.'

'So what's next? For you?'

Pirelli shrugged: 'Media, today. Docs say I'm gonna be out of work for six months or so. Then back to Chicago. Try to figure out why we're all of a sudden rolling in heroin down in Gary…same ol' same ol'.'

'Nobody's pissed at you?'

Pirelli shook his head. 'DEA guys get killed. It's not like the FBI.'

STRYKER CAME IN. 'Morning, bright eyes,' he said to Pirelli. Gomez sat up on the couch, shaking his head, smacking his lips. Stryker said, 'Talked to the doc one minute ago: things aren't looking too bad, but they're gonna move you all to Rochester today. Mayo.'

'I don't think I need the Mayo…' Pirelli started.

'They say you're gonna need some reconstruction on that shoulder,' Stryker said. 'A couple of pins. Might as well get the best.'

THEY TALKED FOR A WHILE. A DEA team was flying in from Washington to reconstruct the fight, and the house, and do an after-action report. The South Dakota ethanol plant had been taken down without a fight; most of the plant was legit. The lab was not: it was a clean, efficient, meth production line. There was a national stop- and-hold on Bill Judd Jr.

They were talking about that when Stryker took a call, listened for a minute, then said, 'Five minutes.'

And to Pirelli, Gomez, and Virgil: 'Bill Judd. He's dead. Up at his old man's place.'

STRYKER AND VIRGIL went together in a county truck. Gomez and another agent followed in one of the blacked-out DEA trucks, out to the main drag, out of town and up the hill to the Buffalo Ridge park entrance, through the park gate, and up the driveway to Judd's.

Four sheriff's cars were parked by the burned-out basement, one deputy leaning on his car, talking on his radio, four more deputies standing in the high grass, north of the house, near the crest of the hill. Virgil and Stryker hopped out of the truck and Stryker raised a hand to the deputy at the car, and then they led Gomez and the other agent through the grass up the hill.

'Hell of a thing,' Big Curly said, as they came up.

'What happened to him?'

'The crows were here…but it looks like something cracked his skull open. His brains…take a look.'

Judd was on his back, wearing a suit and dress shoes. He didn't have sightless eyes staring at the sun, because he no longer had any eyes. Crows. The top of his head was misshapen. Not as though he were shot, but more as though his skull had been crushed. Flattened.

'Piece of rebar over here,' one of the deputies said. 'We're waiting for Margo to come up, but it's got blood on it, and some hair.'

Virgil and Stryker went over and looked: a piece of rusty steel that might have been picked out of the burned house. 'That would have done it.'

No gunshot wounds. 'We know one thing,' Little Curly said. 'It wasn't suicide.'

GOMEZ ASKED, 'What do you think? Feur?'

'We need a time of death, but I don't think so. It's my other guy,' Virgil said.

Gomez grimaced, did a slow three-sixty, looking at the prairie lands stretched out around him forever, said, 'Interesting little culture you got going here.'

'Gotta be Feur,' Stryker said. 'Gleasons, Schmidts, the Judds-it's a Feur cleanup operation. They were gonna get out, they weren't gonna leave anything behind.'

'I don't know,' Virgil said.

Another deputy's car pulled in below them, and Margo Carr got out, took a gear bag out of the trunk, and trudged up the hill. 'Another one,' she said, heavily.

'Last one, but maybe one,' Virgil said.

'What does that mean?' Stryker asked.

Virgil shrugged.

Down the hill, another truck pulled in, and Todd Williamson got out. The deputy at the truck put out a hand to him, but Williamson jogged straight past him, beat the deputy to the edge of the heavy grass, and pulled away, the deputy still yelling at him.

Big Curly blocked him: 'You can't be here.'

'Screw that,' Williamson said. He poked a finger at Virgil. 'If the genius here is right, I'm next of kin. So what happened to my brother?'

VIRGIL HEADED BACK to the motel, with one stop at the accountant's office. Olafson had just gotten up. She raised the shade on her office door, cocked an eyebrow at Virgil, and opened the door.

Virgil stepped inside and asked, 'If something happened to Bill Judd Jr., would that change what happens with his father's estate?'

'Is he dead?' she asked.

'Pretty much,' Virgil said. He told her about it, and she shook her head and said, 'May the Good Lord keep him.'

'Estate?'

Olafson made a noise, then said, 'I'd have to look up the law, and you might even have to get a special ruling. But you know what? I think it's possible that Jesse Laymon and Todd Williamson, if they can prove a blood connection to Senior, could stand to get a bigger piece of the estate.'

The argument would be complicated, she said, and hung on what the IRS would do about Junior's debt, how it would be counted against the estate. 'And with this nut cake running around killing everybody, I'm not sure I'd hang around to make the argument.'

Virgil thanked her, and continued on to the hotel. Shut down his cell phone, took off his boots, put the chain on the door, stretched out on the bed. There'd been a thread running through this thing, he thought, right up to the firefight at Feur's place. If he could only find one end of it, and pull it…

21

VIRGIL ROLLED OFF THE BED, looked at the clock-he'd been down an hour-brushed his teeth, and stood in the shower. At the end of a case, when the facts were piling up, a nap often worked to clarify his thoughts: instead of being scattered around like crumbs, they tended to clump together.

AND THAT HAD HAPPENED.

ABOUT FEUR: Jim Stryker was at least partly correct. When Virgil thought about it, it seemed unlikely that a town the size of Bluestem would be home to two, separate but simultaneous, very large crimes. Yet Feur had denied the connection, even when it wouldn't make any difference to him. Could he have been protecting someone? Seemed unlikely-seemed unlikely that in Bluestem he could have an unknown relationship so close that he would die protecting it; that he would swear on a Bible.