Dark of the Moon (18 page)

“Judd still have a secretary?” he asked Stryker, who was sitting on the floor of the file room.

“Yup. Amy Sweet. We told her to go on home and to send the probate lawyer a bill for her last week of work.”

“Gotta talk to her,” Virgil said. He dropped behind the secretary’s desk, booted up the computer. More files, this time. He ran a search on Arno and one on Florence Mills, and the Florence Mills search kicked out a half-dozen documents.

“Got Florence Mills,” he called to Stryker. He opened the documents, one at a time: payments to High Plains Ag & Fleet Supply, in Madison, South Dakota. Stryker came to look over his shoulder: “Sonofabitch,” he said, reaching past Virgil to tap the screen, a payment for one thousand gallons of Bernhard Brand AA. “Look at this.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Virgil said.

“Anhydrous ammonia. They’ve got an ethanol plant somewhere, and they’re buying AA. I mean, it could be legitimate if they’re growing, as well as cooking, but I’ll tell you what I think: I think they’re manufacturing methamphetamine, bigger than life.”

“Ah, man,” Virgil said.

Stryker: “I checked Feur with the NCIC. He’s had some run-ins with the law, since he got out, but they were all bullshit. You know, disorderly conduct for protests, that sort of thing. Nothing hard, like dope.”

“Sit tight,” Virgil said. He got on his phone, called Davenport. “You told me once if I ever needed anything really bad from the federal government, you’ve got a guy high enough up to get anything.”

“Maybe,” Davenport said. “I’d hate to burn up a favor on an errand, though.”

“Call him. Tell him to go to the DEA and see if there’s anything on a George Feur—any possible connection to methamphetamine distribution through one of those fascist white supremacist convict groups. I need it just as fast as you can get it.”

“You break it?”

“Maybe; not what I thought, though,” Virgil said.

“I’ll have him dump it to your e-mail, if there’s anything,” Davenport said.

V
IRGIL TO
S
TRYKER:
“Do you know any accountants that you can trust, who don’t work for Judd?”

“One…”

C
HRIS
O
LAFSON
ran a bookkeeping, financial planning, and accounting service out of a converted house on the west side of town. Stryker swore her to secrecy: “This is about the murder investigation,” he said. “Virgil has a hypothetical question for you…”

“Go ahead.” She was a bright-eyed, busy, overweight woman, of the kind that drip efficiency.

“If you had a rich father—a millionaire, I don’t know how many millions—and you borrowed a lot of money from him, over the years, how would that complicate your inheritance?” Virgil asked.

She knitted her fingers together and said, “That depends. Did the father gift any money to Junior…to his son?”

They all smiled at each other, acknowledging the fact that she knew who they were talking about, and Virgil said, “I don’t know. What do you mean, gift?”

She gave them a short course in the estate tax. When she was done, she asked, “So, hypothetically, how bad is Junior screwed?”

Virgil rubbed his head. “We’d have to get down some exact numbers to know that,” he said. “I’ve got some tax records down at the motel…but they’re all bureaucratic bullshit. So…I don’t know if he’s screwed at all.”

“He’s not a real good businessman,” Olafson said brightly. “They should have had an estate plan. Does anybody even know where all of Judd’s money is? Was it in trusts, or what? Did the killer burn down the house to get rid of planning documents?”

“We don’t know any of that stuff,” Stryker said.

“Maybe I ought to run for sheriff,” she said.

“Get in early, avoid the rush,” Stryker said.

T
HEY BOTH STOOD,
and Olafson said, “Sit back down for a minute. Would you like Cokes? I want to give you
my
hypothetical.”

“We’re in a bit of a hurry,” Virgil said.

“Take you five minutes,” she said. “Cokes?”

They both took a Coke, and Olafson said, “Suppose Bill Judd had a big tank of money somewhere, that nobody knew about but his son. Like money and interest from the Jerusalem artichoke scam.”

Stryker started to say something, but she held up a finger. “Suppose Judd Senior starts to fail, first mentally, and then physically, and it looks like he’s about to die. Once he’s dead, any money taken from the account could only be taken by fraud. And the fraud would be pretty visible: the bank says money was taken out on August first, but lo, Judd was dead three weeks before that. Even Junior’s smarter than that.

“In the meantime, the son goes to his accountants, and they say, ‘It’s really bad. You’ve been gifted right up to the limit, so the whole estate is exposed to taxes. Plus, you’re so far in debt to him that you’re going to
owe
money to the state and federal government and they are going to foreclose you. You can’t even go bankrupt, because bankruptcy doesn’t wipe out back taxes.’ So what do you do?”

Virgil shrugged: “It’s your hypothetical.”

“So the old man is failing mentally, and you’re down there in his business office, and you know about this big tank of money. You know the codes, or you have the checkbooks, that you need to transfer money to the old man’s bank account…and the old man is so far gone mentally, he won’t see it. You couldn’t give it to yourself, because that would either be fraud, or more debt, and it would all be on paper. But if you were willing to forge his signature, if you gave that money to a business that the old man supposedly owned—even if he was too far gone to know that he owned it—and if you had a way to take that money back out of his business, whatever it was, say, for services that were never performed…”

“You’re saying he was embezzling from his old man.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying that if I’m elected sheriff this fall, I’ll look into it.”

“Suppose he was pouring money into a corn-ethanol plant?” Virgil said.

She shook her head: “The government would take the plant, and any profits should show up in tax filings. You have to remember: you have all this paper—checks and banks, purchases and sales. The government won’t believe you, if you say that you lost it.”

“Suppose the profits coming out of the plant were hidden?”

“What I’m trying to tell you is,
you can’t hide it.
Not very well. The feds would do the books,” she said. “They’re good at books.”

“Suppose the plant was making two products. The above-ground books worked out to the penny. The underground stuff, there were no books at all. You know, like they make a hundred thousand gallons of ethanol, sell ninety thousand, claim they only made ninety thousand, and sold the other ten thousand gallons as over-the-bar vodka, two bucks a quart, underground.”

“Then, if nobody gave you up, you’d make some money,” she said. “But the distribution network, the low unit value of the product, would hardly make it worth the risk. Somebody would talk, and there you are on tax evasion.”

V
IRGIL TOOK
S
TRYKER
outside and asked, “You think she can be seriously trusted? No gossip?”

“She’s been an accountant here for twenty years, since she got out of school—you couldn’t get one word out of her about how anybody spent a nickel,” Stryker said. “And nobody’ll get a word out of her about what we were talking about. She’s like a Swiss bank.”

Virgil said, “I got a lot of paper in from St. Paul. Tax records, corporate stuff, stuff I took out of the bank. It really needs an accountant—somebody who can work it overnight.”

“Ask her,” Stryker said. “You’ll have to pay her—but there’s no question about trusting her.”

“We can pay her. We need the analysis.”

T
HEY WENT BACK
to Olafson, and she agreed to do it: “Too many people dead. Of course I’ll do it. I’ll even give you my state rate—overtime, of course, rush job.”

“And that would be…”

“Hundred and ten dollars an hour,” she said.

Sounded like a lot, but then, it was only for eight or ten hours: “It’s a deal. I’ll go get the paper, you type up an agreement and I’ll sign it.”

B
ACK OUT ON
the sidewalk, Stryker said, “If you’re supposedly developing an ethanol plant, but what you’re really doing is using the plant to buy bulk chemicals to manufacture methamphetamine—I mean, we’re not talking about a coffeepot on a stove somewhere; we’re talking about tons of it. The profits wouldn’t be two dollars a quart. The profits would be astronomical. You’d need quite a bit of up-front money…”

“From the Judd money bin. And you’d need a distribution network.”

“From Feur, if he’s really involved in it.”

They looked at each other, and Virgil said, “Let’s check back at the hotel. Maybe Davenport’s guy got me something.”

D
AVENPORT
’
S GUY WAS
Louis Mallard, who was something large in the FBI. He sent along a single paragraph: “A Rev. George Feur of the first Archangelus Church of the Revelation was one of a number of people under surveillance in Salt Lake City and in Coeur d’Alene for his association with extremist antigovernment groups like the Corps. The Corps was known to distribute drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamine, to finance its activities and for the purchase of weapons. Surveillance was terminated after three months with no evidence of Feur’s involvement in illegal activities, although he had extensive connections with people who were involved in illegal activities.”

“That’s it,” Stryker said. “He’s involved. He’s got the connections.”

“What about Roman Schmidt and the Gleasons?” Virgil asked.

“I don’t know about the Gleasons—except that they had some contact with Feur. There was that Book of Revelation. Maybe they were investors. Roman…”

“What?”

“Roman was pals with Big and Little Curly,” Stryker said. “Guess who patrols west county?”

“Big and Little Curly?”

“That’s their country out there,” Stryker said. “They know it like nobody else. If you were moving a lot of meth around, it’d be useful to have a lookout with the sheriff’s department.”

“Hate to think it,” Virgil said.

“So would I,” Stryker said. “I’d rather lose the election than find that out.”

T
HEY SAT STARING
at the laptop screen for a couple of minutes, then Virgil asked, “What’re you doing tonight?”

“Thought I’d go see Jesse,” Stryker said. “I’ve got something going, there. I don’t know…but the case comes first. What do you have in mind?”

“I don’t want to talk to the Curlys. I’m thinking we might want to do some trespassing. Feur and Judd have the ethanol plant over in SoDak, so what’s his farm all about? What I’m thinking is, it’s the distribution center. He’s way out in the countryside, he has those religious services, there are strangers coming and going from all over the place, not unexpected with that kind of church…might be when they move the stuff. Lots of guys in trucks.”

“If we’re gonna do it, best to do it late,” Stryker said, looking at his watch. “It’s almost four, now.”

“I wouldn’t ask, but I’d be a little worried going out there without some backup,” Virgil said.

“Wait until the town goes to sleep…and move,” Stryker said. “Meet me at my place at one in the morning?”

“See you then. You might bring some serious hardware,” Virgil said.

Stryker nodded. “I’ll do that. Feur’s boys have some heavy weapons out there.”

“One good thing,” Virgil said, after another minute.

“What’s that.”

“You’ll still get to see Jesse.”

“She’s got me if she wants me,” Stryker said. He seemed puzzled by it all. “I looked in her eyes last night, in that candlelight, and I thought my heart was gonna explode.”

“Where’re you going tonight?” Virgil asked.

Stryker shrugged: “I don’t know. Jesus, thinking of someplace interesting just about kills you. I can’t take her out to the club. I’m afraid to go to Tijuana Jack’s or anyplace in Worthington—it’s just too close, and I really don’t want to be seen out on the town. Not yet.”

“Life sucks, then you die.”

“Easy on the die stuff,” Stryker said. “I’m a little nervous about sneaking up on Feur.”

V
IRGIL WAS STUCK.
With the accountant working the records, he had nothing to do until four, and then he had a date—and the date wasn’t going to help with the investigation. On the other hand, wandering around town wouldn’t help much, either.

Time to talk to Judd? And look at other names in his notebook? Suzanne Reynolds, the overweight ex–sex groupie?

Judd first.

H
E WENT DOWNTOWN;
a guy at the SuperAmerica, gassing his truck, waved at him, and Virgil waved back. Parked in front of the Great Plains Bank & Trust, looked at a Red Wing jug in the window of an antique shop, and strolled down to Judd Jr.’s office.

His office was a mirror image of his old man’s: same dark wood generating financial gloom, a secretary at a desk behind a railing, two wooden chairs for visitors to wait in.

The secretary said, “Mr. Flowers. Let me see if Mr. Judd is available.” The door to Judd’s office was open, and she stuck her head inside and said, “Mr. Flowers is here.”

Judd said, “Send him in.”

J
UDD WAS WEARING
half-frame reading glasses, looking at a printed-out spreadsheet that he folded and pushed to one side of his desk. He pointed at a chair and asked, “You getting anywhere?”

“Somewhere,” Virgil said. “I can’t tell you how I know it, but I can tell you for sure that I’ve upset somebody…”

“That’s good,” Judd said. “That’s something.”

“I’ve got a question for you. I don’t know how far you’ve gotten in working through your father’s estate…”

“The Jesse Laymon deal is going to hose me off pretty good, I can tell you,” Judd said.

“That’s something else…”

“Well, I think there’s a question of whether she might have wanted the old man to disappear,” Judd said.

“That’s being looked into.”

“By the sheriff, personally, is what I hear.”

“By me,” Virgil said. “Anyway: where’d your old man stick the money from the Jerusalem artichoke business?”

Judd looked at him for a minute, then barked; he’d laughed, Virgil thought. “Virgil, there is no money. There is no secret account. As far as I know, there wasn’t much to begin with, and believe me, some very sharp investigators from the state and from the IRS tore up everything they could find. It does not exist.”

“You’re sure.”

Judd tapped his desk a few times, then sighed. “Look, how can you be sure? My dad grew up poor, and he was a hard-nosed sonofabitch. Came out of the Depression, and made his own way. So he might have hid some money, if there was any. But if there was, he never would have told a soul. I mean, if he had it, it was a
crime,
and he wouldn’t have taken any chances with that.”

“But then the money just would have been lost…”

Judd wagged a finger at him. “Not lost if someday you needed it. Like with anybody who dies with money. Say he had an account in Panama or somewhere, invested it in overseas securities. The investment would grow, and if he ever needed it, he could get it. He never needed it.”

“You’re sure.”

“It’s not that I’m sure—I’m not sure about any of this. What I believe is, there never was any money. You’re wasting your time looking for it, and if somebody killed him trying to get it, then the murder was a waste of time. There is no Uncle Scrooge’s money bin.”

T
HEY TALKED
for a couple of more minutes, then Virgil was back on the street. Looked in his notebook, found the address for Suzanne Reynolds, and headed that way, in the truck. Thinking about Judd: and who the heck was Uncle Scrooge?

R
EYNOLDS CAME
to the door of her house, blinking in the sunlight: she’d either been dozing, or watching TV, and her heavy face was clouded with sleep.

She opened the door and said, “You’re Mr. Flowers?”

“Yes, I am,” Virgil said, holding up his ID.

“Michelle said you might be coming,” she said. She pushed open the door.

V
IRGIL FOLLOWED HER
past the kitchen into the tiny living room. Reynolds wasn’t overweight, but rather was morbidly obese. Virgil thought she must weigh three hundred pounds, though she was no more than five-four. The house stank of starch and fat, and doors and windows not opened. In the living room, a plate with three cold surviving French fries sat next to an open jar of mayonnaise. She picked up one of the French fries, dipped it in mayonnaise, pointed it at a plush-magenta La-Z-Boy, said, “Sit down,” and ate the fry.

Virgil sat down and said, “I’m talking to people who had relationships with Bill Judd Sr. back in the late sixties and seventies. I’m not trying to mess anybody up, I’m trying to figure out if there was anything back then that could have led to these murders. All the people were of the same age…”

“Seems like you’re a generation too late, then. They’re all twenty years older than us girls were.”

“Yeah, but you’re what I got,” Virgil said. “Let me ask you this, privately between the two of us. Did the Gleasons or the Schmidts or the Johnstones have anything to do with…this whole relationship thing with Judd?”

She was taken aback: “The Johnstones? Are the Johnstones dead?”

“No, no. I should have made that clear. It’s just that they were people of this age who might have been involved in something that would snap back—we’re thinking it had to be serious. Revenge, something that festered. Since Gleason was a doctor, and a coroner sometimes, and Schmidt was the sheriff, and Johnstone was the undertaker…”

“I see where you’re going,” she said. She thought about it, and then said, “The only things I can think of, are the Jerusalem artichoke business, and then the sex. Maybe somebody’s husband just found out about the sex and couldn’t stand the thought, but this was a
looonngg
time ago. People get over stuff like sex: it’s just a little squirt in the dark. No big deal.”

“Some people think of it as a little more than that,” Virgil said. “Michelle told me that it might have been the best part of her life. The most fun, anyway.”

A wrinkle spread across the lower part of Reynolds’ face, and Virgil realized that she was smiling. “She was a crazy one,” Reynolds said. “She liked everything: boys, girls, front, back, upside down.” She shook a finger at Virgil: “Here’s something. Polaroids were a big deal back then, and Bill used to take some pictures. You know, homemade porno. You could even get Polaroid slide film, and take pictures and develop them yourself, and then have slide shows…”

Virgil was getting uncomfortable. “You think some of those pictures…”

“Well, suppose somebody’s daddy or brother or husband got a picture of some guys getting his little girl airtight. That could set something off,” she said.

Airtight. He’d Google it later.
“Michelle said she only knew of one other guy who…took part. The postmaster…”

“There were more’n that,” she said. “Two or three more, but not all from right here. Not all the girls were from here, either, there were some that came down from Minneapolis, one used to come down from Fargo. But: like I said, those things fade away. Who cares, when you’re fifty-five and fat? If I were you, I’d be looking at the Jerusalem artichoke scam. That’s what I’d do.”

“You think that might be more combustible…?”

She shook her finger at him again. “Listen. You’re not from here. That thing…you had to be here. There were old men crying in the streets. People lost everything they had: borrowed money against their homes and farms…lost every damn dime of it. Lots of people. If you lost your farm in the eighties, you wound up working in a meat-cutting plant somewhere, or going up to the Cities and working the night shift in an assembly plant, five dollars an hour. Can’t even feed your kids. That’s what could come back on you. That’s what could come back.”

“You think?”

She nodded. “Us girls…we were playing. It was in the sixties, and everybody was playing. But the artichoke thing…that was real, screaming, insane hate. There were people who would have hanged Judd if they could have gotten away with it, and I’m not fooling. He was lucky to live through it: you’d hear people talking about taking their deer rifle out, and shooting him down. Talking out in the open, in the café.” She stopped talking for a moment, and Virgil watched her, and then she said, “And what made it worse was, Bill was laughing at them. His attitude was ‘too bad, losers.’ He was laughing at them, and there was little kids eating lard sandwiches.
Lard sandwiches.
”

A
T THREE-THIRTY,
he was back at the motel; got cleaned up, thinking about Reynolds in her dark living room, with her French fries, and lard sandwiches. She’d once been a pretty girl, he’d been told.

He met Joan at four o’clock. They stopped at Johnnie’s Pizza, found that they agreed on sausage, mushroom, and pepperoni, and the inherent evilness of anchovies. “Little spooky going back to the farm,” Virgil said, as they rolled out of town. “Keep an eye out the back. See if there’s anybody trailing us.”

“You don’t have to trail anybody out here,” she said. “If you see Joan Carson heading out of town on this road, it’s ninety-five percent that she’s going out to the farm. There’s not much else out here.”

“Didn’t think of that,” he said.

“Besides, we’re not going to the farm,” she said. “We’re going up the hill behind it—that’s as nice as the dell in its own way, and I want to see where that guy was when he was shooting at us.”

“I was already up there,” Virgil said. “First thing this morning.”

“You were?”

“It was a
shooting
site, Joanie. I had to go up and look around,” Virgil said. “Didn’t find a thing.”

“Did you go to the flat rock?” she asked.

“What flat rock?”

“Ah—didn’t go to the flat rock.” She was being mysterious about it.

T
HEY WENT PAST
the farm, followed the road around behind the hill, cut into the hillside where the shooter had gotten off, and where Virgil was that morning. Joan looked over the spot where the shooter had hidden his truck. Then Virgil got the shotgun out of the back of the 4Runner, and walked her along the now-faint track through the weeds to the stump where the shooter had made his nest. The day had turned hot, the humidity climbing, and far down to the southwest, they could see the puffy white tops of clouds that would become thunderheads; the world smelled of warm prairie weed.

“He might not have known the hillside that well,” Joan said, when she saw the shooting nest. She pointed far down to her left. “There’s a spot down there where you can come in—that’s where kids come in when they’re sneaking out to the dell. Good hidden place to park, too. Then, you’d come up from the side of the dell, where there’s a really sharp break. We never would have seen him. He would have been right over our heads.”

“So he messed up in a couple of ways,” Virgil said. “I was wondering if he meant to miss us…but I can’t see why he would. And he wasn’t that far off. If he meant to miss us, he was playing a dangerous game.”

They probed around some more, then headed back to the truck. Joanie pointed him west, to a clump of shrubs where they left the car, out of the sun. “Ground’s too broken up above here, you can screw up a tire,” she said. “Get the pizza. I’ll get the blanket and cooler.”

She led the way up the hill to a formation that almost looked like an eroded castle, a natural amphitheater in the red quartzite, at the very summit of the hill. They found a spot with shorter grass, in the shade of a clump of wild plum trees, and put down the blanket. Virgil braced the shotgun against one of the trees.

“I need pizza,” Virgil said. “Beer. Hot out here.”

“Get a beer. I’ll show you the flat rock. Put the pizza on the rock in the sun, it’ll stay warm…”

H
E FOLLOWED HER
across the hillside to a narrow bed of flat red rock, twenty feet long, six or eight feet wide, sloping just a few degrees to the south. When he saw it, Virgil thought, “Blackboard,” and Joan said, “Look.”

He looked, but he didn’t see for a moment. Then he saw a handprint, a small hand, the size of a woman’s. Then another, and another, and then a cartoon arrow with a tip and fletching, and a turtle and a man with horns, and then more hands, and circles and squares of things that he didn’t recognize.

“Petroglyphs,” Joan said. “Chipped out of the rock. Pecked out with another stone. Something between three hundred and a thousand years old. There are older ones at Jeffers, but these are pretty old.”

“Jeez…Joanie.” Virgil was fascinated. He got down on his hands and knees, crawling around the rock. “How many people know about these things?”

“The Historical Society people, and folks who are interested in petroglyphs and who won’t mess them up. My grandfather told a reporter that there used to be a circle of stones here, not this red quartzite, they looked like glacial rocks, or river rocks. They were arranged around the flat rock like a clock, and each stone had a symbol on it. People stole them over the years. Nobody knows where they are now—probably some big museum, or Manhattan decorator shop or something.”

“Look at this…” He was pointing. “That looks like an elk. Did they have elk here?”

“That’s what they say. There are three buffalo over in the corner up here.”

“T
HERE
’
S A MAGAZINE
article in this,” Virgil said, eventually. “Something about plains hunting in the Indian days…take a lot of photographs, mess them around in Photoshop, make a story out of it.”

“Leave them alone,” Joan said, shaking her head. “It’s nice to know that they’re out here. That they have nothing to do with magazines or television.”

S
O THEY SAT
under the plum trees and talked, ate pizza, drank beer, and watched the thunderheads grow from white globes into pink anvils, as the sun slid down in the sky. Joan gave him a talk:

“I was thinking about us last night, and I don’t think this is a real relationship. You’re my transition guy. You’re the guy who gets me back into life, and then goes away.”