Dark of the Moon (7 page)

Virgil read about the suicide of Mark Stryker, which happened after a family picnic, a detail nobody had mentioned. The story did mention that Stryker had been involved in the Jerusalem artichoke scandal, and had sold 1,280 acres of the family farm to pay off associated debts.

A
NNA
G
LEASON
was the headliner in her family, as the result of sixteen years on the county commission, and with her own drawer of stories. Judd was mentioned in several of them, but most were routine appearances before the county commission to discuss zoning changes or drainage problems. Russell Gleason had a few envelopes, mostly from when he worked as a coroner in the seventies and eighties, before the medical examiner system was adopted; and in most of those clips, he was simply the voice that pronounced somebody dead.

He read the clips on both Jim Stryker and Joan Carson. Joan’s divorce attracted three six-inch articles, which noted only that the marriage was irretrievably broken after five years, and that the judge approved the agreement worked out by the private attorneys. All the good stuff had been left out.

She was described as an “affluent farmer” with residences both in Bluestem and at the family farm. Virgil knew where her town home was, having stood on her front porch the night before, trying for a gentle, sensitive, yet promising good-night kiss, while simultaneously trying to cop a feel.

He looked and finally found the Laymons. Nothing about Margaret, but Jesse had been busted once in Worthington for possession of a minor amount of marijuana, and was cited as a witness in a fight in a Bluestem bar, in which a man had all of his teeth broken out. The man sued, but the suit never went to trial.

Finally, George Feur. He showed up only on the computer, but there were fifteen hits, including an article by Williamson that must have been five thousand words long.

He was, Virgil thought, reading through the computer files, a brass-plated asshole.

V
IRGIL LEFT
the newspaper office, rolling out of town, back on I-90, heading west. I-94, I-90, I-80, I-40, I-20, and I-10 stretched across the heart of the country like guitar strings, holding the East Coast to the West Coast, with the Rocky Mountains as the bridge. I-90 shared much of its length with other interstates, but was on its own from Tomah, Wisconsin, to Billings, Montana. Virgil had driven all of it, and more than once.

Some people found it deadly boring, but having been raised on the prairie, Virgil liked it, like sailors enjoy the ocean. The prairie rolled in waves, with small towns coming up and falling behind, and farmhouses and pickups and people riding horses, and buffalo and antelope and prairie dogs. And towns, like freshwater pearls, small, all different, and all the same.

N
OT THAT
he was going far; just an exit or two.

Feur lived a mile east of the South Dakota line, ten miles north of I-90, in a compound of four steel buildings and one old white clapboard four-square farmhouse, a Corn Belt cube, that tilted slightly to the southeast, and badly needed a coat of paint. The buildings were set in a grove of bur oaks, box elders, and cottonwoods, surrounded by rocky pasture.

The driveway crossed a ditch with a thread of water in the bottom, past a sign that said
GOD
’
S FORTY ACRES,
and beneath that,
NO TRESPASSING.
As he pulled into the dirt roundabout in front of the house, a young man came out on the front porch with a shotgun.

Virgil said, “Ah, man.” He was still far enough away that he could do it without being obvious, and he reached down under the seat for his pistol, and put it on the seat next to him. As he stopped and parked, he picked up the weapon, as if picking up a pen or a book, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

When he climbed out of the truck, the man with the gun called, “Who’re you?”

“Virgil Flowers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to see Reverend Feur.”

“You got an appointment?” the man asked. He was maybe twenty-five, and had the foxy look of somebody who’d grown up hungry.

“Nope.”

“Maybe you could come back some other time. He’s pretty busy,” the man said.

“I’d rather talk now,” Virgil said. “If I’ve got to drag my ass all the way back to Bluestem, then when I come back, I’ll come back with a search warrant and five deputies and we’ll tear this place apart.”

“You ain’t got no cause.” The shotgun was there, but the man hadn’t twitched it in any direction: it was simply there.

“You think a Stark County judge would give a shit?” Virgil asked.

The man stared at him for a moment, as if calculating the inclinations of every judge he’d ever met, then said, “Wait here.”

I
T HADN
’
T BEEN
obvious from the road, but Feur’s house and the outbuildings were actually sitting on the slope, which continued back to the east, but flattened out across the road to the west. To the north and south, you could see forever: and they’d been able to see Virgil’s dust trail from virtually the time he rolled off the tarmac county road and onto the gravel, five miles away.

Looking around, Virgil noticed the heavy tracking on the dirt side-yard, and the crushed grass around the perimeter of the dirt; it reminded him of the grass ad hoc parking at a county fair. There’d been a bunch of cars and trucks in the yard, all at once. A prayer meeting? The shop building off to his left was a leftover Quonset hut from the Korean War era, made out of steel. Wouldn’t defeat a rifle, maybe, but a pistol shot would bounce right off.

A wooden Jesus, carved out of a cottonwood stump by somebody moderately handy with a chain saw, peered across the yard at him, one arm raised, as though blessing Feur’s enterprise.

T
HE MAN
with the gun—now gunless—came out on the porch. “Come in,” he said.

“Thank you.” Virgil nodded at him, climbed the three steps to the porch, said, “After you,” and followed the man into the house.

Feur was sitting in a wooden rocker at the corner of the parlor, smoking, and drinking what looked like tea out of a china cup. A small man with black eyes, black beard, and a chiseled, sunburned nose, he was dressed all in black, and wore shiny black leather boots; in a movie, he would have played Mr. Scratch. There were two pictures on the walls, both of a black-haired, black-eyed Jesus, one on the cross.

Feur said, “Mr. Flower? Do you have some identification?”

Virgil nodded, took his ID out of his breast pocket, and held it out. Feur peered at it without touching, said, “Flowers,” then nodded at a couch and said, “Have a seat. You wouldn’t be related to Rusty Flowers, would you?”

“No. I don’t know the name,” Virgil said. He sat down, lifting his jacket enough that he didn’t pin the gun under his leg.

“Not even sure it’s a real name,” Feur said. He was younger than Virgil had expected—probably the same age as Stryker, in his middle thirties, but his lined face made him look, at first glance, as though he were ten years older. “I was standing on a bridge at Dubuque, Iowa, one time, and I saw a towboat named
Rusty Flowers.
Often wondered if it was a man, or just something that somebody made up.”

They shared a few seconds of silence, then Feur asked, “So what do you want?”

“You’ve probably heard that Bill Judd got burned up,” Virgil said.

“That’s what I heard,” Feur said. He sighed, blew some smoke, tamped out the cigarette in an aluminum ashtray. “He was a bad man, but he was moving toward the Lord at the end. Too late, though. He hadn’t accepted Jesus last time I saw him; he was unwilling to take the step. I suspect Mr. Judd’s house fire was only a preliminary introduction to the flames he’s feeling right now.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Virgil said.

“I
do
know about that,” Feur said, and his black eyes glittered with what might have been humor. “What does Mr. Judd’s death have to do with me?”

“I was hoping for a Revelation,” Virgil said.

“You think I could give you one?”

“If you wanted to,” Virgil said. “People say you hand them out in the streets.”

“A
book
of Revelation. Of course.” He looked past Virgil at the man with the shotgun, and said, “Trevor, could you get a book for Mr. Flowers?” And to Virgil, “Happy to see a man of the law reading the good book.”

Virgil, when the gunman was gone, asked, “Trevor?”

Feur shrugged: “What can you do? Your mother gives you a name, and you wear it.”

T
HEY WAITED,
and Virgil asked, conversationally, “What’s this whole thing with the shotgun?”

“Some people don’t like what we have to say. Some of them would like me dead. We are prepared to exercise our right to common, ordinary self-defense,” Feur said.

“I understand you have a problem with Jim Stryker,” Virgil said.

“We’ve had our differences. He put me in prison for robbing, and I don’t say I didn’t do it. But I’ll tell you something: he’s a man with a lot of hate, a lot of violence in him. You don’t see it, but it’s there. If it hadn’t been for this other killing, the Gleasons, if it’d only been Judd, I would have said that Stryker would be your number-one suspect. Still might be—but I can’t see him doing the Gleasons. Don’t know what that would be about.”

T
REVOR CAME BACK
and handed a red-bound volume to Feur, who looked at it and asked, “Who is worthy to open the book, and loose the seals thereof?”

He handed the book to Virgil, who asked, “How many of these have you given away?”

“Few hundred, I suppose. We also publish other books. We find that with most folks, the Bible goes down easier in small chunks,” Feur said. “But you didn’t come out here to get a book, Mr. Flowers. What do you want?”

“The book, actually,” Virgil said, turning it in his hands. It was identical to the one he’d seen at the Gleasons’. “I came here to investigate the Gleason murders, not Judd’s, but now I’m doing both. I’ve only found one connection to both crimes.”

Feur’s eyebrows went up. “You’re going to tell me?”

“Yeah. It’s you.”

“Me?” Feur’s eyes pinched together. “Are you serious?”

“You were known to have been talking to Judd. You just told me so yourself. When I went into the Gleasons’ house to look around, what should I find at Mrs. Gleason’s right hand, but a copy of your Revelation? So what I need to know is, how close were you to the Gleasons? And how close to Judd, and what is your connection with the two of them?”

Feur sat back in his chair, spread his hands. He had small, feminine hands, but hard and cracked. “I spoke occasionally to Mr. Judd. He shared some beliefs with us, but not all. We were hoping to bring him to the true Lord, and also, to be honest, we were hoping he might provide some financial support. He hadn’t done that at the time of his death. His son, as close as I can tell, is useless as tits on a boar. So that is my connection with Mr. Judd. For the Gleasons, I don’t believe I ever met them, or were in their presence. I have no idea how they got one of our Revelations. Unless the sheriff put it there. The sheriff doesn’t like me. He doesn’t like any of us. He is a politician to his bones, and politicians no longer wish to hear the truth.”

“Yeah, well.” Virgil peered at him for a second, then turned to the other man and said, “Trevor. Get us a Bible, will you?”

Trevor looked at Feur, who nodded. Trevor stepped into what must have been the dining room, and was back a second later with a leather-bound Bible. Virgil passed it to Feur, and said, “Put your hand on it and swear you didn’t have anything to do with the death of Judd or the Gleasons.”

Feur said, “You’re very close to pissing me off, Mr. Flowers.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t strike me as a believer, and this is a cynical way to twist me up,” Feur said.

“You’d be wrong. I am a believer,” Virgil said. “Not quite your kind, but a believer. Now, if you don’t want to put your hand on the Bible…”

Feur grasped the Bible between his small hands and said, his eyes turned to the ceiling, “I swear on this book, and on my everlasting soul, that I had nothing to do with the murders of Bill Judd or Mr. and Mrs. Gleason. I swear that I play no word games here, that there are no prevarications, that I did not do these murders, killings, and I did not cause them to be done.” He looked at Virgil: “Amen.”

“Amen,” Virgil said. He pushed himself out of the chair. “I guess I’ll be going.”

“That’s it?”

“Maybe. I’d still like to figure out where the Revelation came from. When I find out, I could be back.”

“And you’ll be judged according to your works,” Feur said.

“Revelation 20:12,” Virgil said.

Feur cocked his head: “Are you born-again?”

“I’m a preacher’s son,” Virgil said. “I talked the Bible at supper every night of my life until I went to college, Mr. Feur. You don’t get that kind of an education at Stillwater.”

“Maybe not,” Feur said. “But I kept one book in my cell, the King James. When we were locked down, I had that one book to read; and I read it twenty hours a day. When we weren’t locked down, I read it four hours a night, every night for three and a half years, there among the sodomites and catamites and child molesters. You didn’t get
that
kind of education.”

Virgil sat back: “Revelation is your text?”

“It is…” Feur’s eyes went to the light coming through the window, playing on the floor…“It is the most powerful thing I’ve ever read. It
was
a Revelation.”

“My personal belief is that Job is the key book in the Bible,” Virgil said. “The question of why God allows evil to exist.”

Feur leaned forward, intent on the point: “Job talks of the world as it is. Revelation tells us what is coming. I’m not entirely of this world, Mr. Flowers; not entirely. Some of this world has been burned out of me.”

Virgil said, “We’re all entirely of this world, Reverend. You’re just like anybody else, going to and fro on the earth, and walking up and down on it.”