Dark of the Moon

you’re not queer, or something?”
    Stryker grinned. “Nope.”
    The woman tossed her white-blond hair as she stepped up on the far curb, and might have glanced back at them—as all women would, she knew they were talking about her—and then Virgil turned to Stryker, about to continue his analysis of her better points, and noticed that Stryker had precisely the same white-blond hair as the woman; and Stryker had those jade-green eyes.
    A thought crossed Virgil’s mind.
    He said, “That’s your sister, isn’t it?”
    “Yup.”
    They both looked down the street, but the woman had disappeared behind a hedge, at a crooked place in the sidewalk. Virgil said, “Listen, Jimmy, that whole thing about her ass and all…”
    “Never mind about that,” Stryker said. “Joanie can take care of herself. You just take care of this cocksucker who’s killing my people.”

4
    A T THE H OLIDAY I NN, Virgil spread the Gleason murder files across the bed and the small desk, isolating names and scratching out a time line on a yellow legal pad.
    The sheriff himself had served as the case manager, with a deputy named Larry Jensen as lead investigator. A woman named Margo Carr was the crime-scene tech, and a variety of other deputies provided backup. The medical examiner was based in Worthington and covered an eight-county area of southwest Minnesota. The pathology looked competent, but didn’t reveal much more than the first cop figured out when he got to the scene: four shots, two dead.
    Carr, the crime-scene tech, had recovered all four slugs, but they were so distorted that their use in identifying the weapon would be problematic. The .357 was almost certainly a revolver—Desert Eagle semiautos, made in Israel, were chambered for .357, but that would be a rare specimen out on the prairie. The fact that no brass was found at the scene also suggested a revolver, or a very careful killer.
    A heavy-load .357 was not a particularly pleasant gun to shoot, because of recoil. A lot of samples passed through the hands of lawmen, who were more interested in effect than in pleasant shooting. A .357 would reliably penetrate a door panel on a car, which made them popular with highway patrolmen and sheriffs’ deputies, who were often working in car-related crime.
    Something to think about.
     
    J ENSEN AND C ARR both mentioned in their reports the possibility that the break-in had been drug related, an attempt to find prescription drugs in the doctor’s house. Two aspects militated against the possibility: Gleason had been retired for years, and anybody who had known where to find him would have known that; and Carr had found several tabs of OxyContin in a prescription bottle in a medicine cabinet, left over from a knee-replacement operation on Anna. A junkie would not have missed them.
    Russell Gleason still had a hundred and forty-three dollars in his wallet. Anna had seventy-six dollars in her purse. Junkies wouldn’t have missed that, either. The money hadn’t been missed, Virgil thought. The killer simply wasn’t interested.
     
    T HE COPS HAD INTERVIEWED fifty people in the case, including the housekeeper, and all the neighbors, friends, relatives, business associates, members of the golf club. There were some people who had disliked the Gleasons, but in a small-town way. You might go to a different doctor, or you might have voted against Anna when she was running for the county commission, but you wouldn’t shoot them.
    One question popped out at him: why the lights on the body? The body would have been discovered the next morning, at the latest, sitting, as it was, so close to the street. If the killer had left the body in the dark, he’d have been certain of more time to get away. Was it possible that he didn’t need more time, that he’d come from very close by?
     
    V IRGIL GOT A MAP at the front desk and asked the clerk about the Gleason house. The clerk was happy to put an ink dot on its precise location: “You go up this little rise here, and you come around to the right, I think, or is it left? No, right. Anyways, you’ll see a mailbox down on the street that says Gleason, and the house is reddish-colored and modern-looking.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Folks say you’re with the BCA,” the clerk said. He was young and ginger haired and weathered, and looked a little like Billy the Kid.
    “Yup. We’ve been asked to look in on the Gleason case, bring a new point of view,” Virgil said.
    “Seen anything