Dark of the Moon

to anybody?”
    Her eyes drifted. She was thinking, which meant that she had. “It’s possible…my sister, I might have told. I think there might have been some word around town.”
    “It’s really important that you remember…”
    She put her hand to her temple, as though she were going to move a paper clip with telekinesis, and said, “I might have mentioned it at bridge. At our bridge club. That a plant was being built, and some local people were involved.”
    “All right,” Virgil said. “So who was at the bridge club?”
    “Well, let me see, there would have been nine or ten of us…”
    She listed them; he only recognized one of the names.
     
    W HEN HE WAS DONE with Sweet, he strolled up the hill to the newspaper office. He pushed in, and found Williamson behind the business counter, talking to a woman customer. Williamson looked past the woman and snapped, “What do you want?”
    “I have a question, when you’re free.”
    “Wait.” Williamson was wearing a T-shirt and had sweat stains under his arms, as though he’d been lifting rocks. “Take just a minute.”
    The customer was trying to dump her Beanie Baby collection locally—ten years too late, in Virgil’s opinion—and wanted the cheapest possible advertisement. She got twenty words for six dollars, looking back and forth between Virgil and Williamson, and after writing a check for the amount, said to Virgil, “I’d love to hear your question.”
    Virgil looked at her over his sunglasses and grinned: “I’d love to have you, but I’m afraid it’s gotta be private, for the moment.”
    “Shoot.” She looked at Williamson, who shrugged, and she said, “Oh, well.”
     
    W HEN SHE ’ D GONE out the door, Williamson said, “I’m working. You can ask me out back.”
    “You still pissed about the search?”
    “Goddamn right. Wouldn’t you be?”
    Virgil followed him through the shop. Williamson’s van was parked in the dirt space behind it, the side doors open. Williamson had been piling bundles of unsold newspapers in the van, and there were still twenty or thirty wrapped bundles inside the shop. Williamson propped the door open, picked up two bundles by the plastic straps, carried them to the van, and asked over his shoulder, “What?”
    Virgil grabbed a couple of bundles, carried them out and threw them in the van. “When did you last see Junior?”
    “About an hour and a half ago.”
    “Alive.” They were shuttling back and forth with the bundles.
    Williamson stopped and cocked his head. “Day before yesterday…let’s see. Down at Johnnie’s, at lunch.”
    “Did you hear him next door? Yesterday?” Virgil asked, heaving two more bundles into the van.
    “No. He wasn’t there. I stopped, I wanted to ask him where I should send the money we’ve got coming in. His office was locked.”
    “What time was that?”
    “First time, about nine o’clock. Right after I got here. Then, when the shooting started out at Feur’s—I heard about it from a cop, and I took off, headed down there, to Feur’s, but the cops had all the roads blocked. Before I took off, I ran next door, I was going to tell Bill about it.”
    “Why?”
    Williamson shrugged. “I don’t know. Big news. Maybe something to do with his old man.”
    “All right,” Virgil said. He threw two more bundles in the van, leaving three in the shop. “So he wasn’t here all day yesterday, and wasn’t here last night?”
    “Nope. And I was here late.”
    Virgil nodded. If Judd had disappeared some hours before the fight at Feur’s, that meant that both Stryker and Feur, or one of Feur’s men, could have killed him.
     
    T HEN W ILLIAMSON STACKED the three remaining bundles, one on top of the other, and stooped to pick them up. As he did it, his T-shirt sleeve hiked up, exposing a tattoo of a crescent moon. The moon with a slash for an eye, and a pointed nose: a man in the moon. The tattoo was rough, with bleeding edges, dark ink from a ballpoint pen.
    Virgil blinked. Another man in the moon.
    Sonofabitch.
     
    H E LEFT W ILLIAMSON with the van, walked back to his truck, got on the phone to Joan: “What’re you doing?” he asked.
    “Headed over to Worthington to do some federal bureaucratic bullshit about crop insurance. What about you?”
    “I’m headed up to the Cities,” Virgil said. “Could be overnight…”
    “I’d love to come,” she said, “but this appointment in Worthington is not optional, if I want to stay in business. I’ve