Dark of the Moon

ordered to sit down, or forced to sit, she would have been facing into the room, where the killer was; she wouldn’t have been facing the TV.
    He quickly checked the end table for any possible effort by Anna to leave something behind—a scribbled name, anything. Felt foolish doing it, but would have felt more foolish if he hadn’t, and something was found later. Nothing. The books were a novel by Martha Grimes and a slender volume titled Revelation , which turned out to be, indeed, the book of Revelation.
    Virgil muttered, to nobody but the ghosts, “And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him…”
     
    H E CHECKED the table by Russell’s reading light; nothing interesting. Drifted out of the shooting area, through the rest of the place. A den opened off the dining room, with file cabinets and an older computer. A hallway next to the den led to a big bathroom, but without a tub or shower—the public bath—and three large bedrooms, each with a full bath.
    He walked through the master bedroom, looking, not touching, and into the kitchen. He was in the kitchen when he heard the sound of a vehicle outside. He went back to the front door, and found a sheriff’s patrol car stopped behind his, and a deputy looking at his license plate.
    He stepped out on the porch, and the deputy’s hand drifted to his hip, and Virgil called, “Virgil Flowers, BCA.” Across the way, at the next house down the ridge, he could see a man standing in his backyard, watching them with binoculars.
    The deputy said, “Larry Jensen. I’m the lead investigator for the sheriff.”
    Jensen was another of the tall, thin types, burned and dry, sandy hair, slacks and cowboy boots, sunglasses. They shook hands and Jensen asked, “See anything in there?”
    “Nope. I’d like to come back later and go through those file cabinets.”
    “You’re welcome to…” Jensen turned and waved at the man in the next yard, who waved back. “That’s the guy who ratted you out.”
    “Too bad he wasn’t watching the night the Gleasons were killed,” Virgil said.
    “Got that right.”
    Jensen was easy enough, took him in the house, told him how he thought the killings must have happened, and his reconstruction jibed with Virgil’s. They walked through the rest of the house, including the basement, and on the way back up, Jensen said, “I have the feeling…” He hesitated.
    “Yeah?”
    “I have the feeling that this was something that stewed for a long time. I went through every scrap of business dealings that the Gleasons had in the last ten years, I talked to about every single person that they knew, interviewed the kids and the kids’ spouses. I have the feeling that this goes back to something we don’t know about. I’m thinking, Russell was a doctor. What if he did something bad to somebody. You know, malpractice. What if back there somewhere, years ago, he killed somebody, or maybe didn’t save somebody, a wife or somebody’s daddy, and they just stewed and stewed and now they snapped? I mean, Russell dealt with a lot of death in his time—he was the county coroner for years—and what if it goes back to something that just…happened? Like happens to all doctors?”
    Virgil nodded. “That’s a whole deep pit…”
    Jensen nodded. “When I worked through it, I decided that it meant everybody in the county would be a suspect. So it’s meaningless.”
    Virgil said, “I’ve got a question for you, but I don’t want you to take offense.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “Did your office ever issue .357s? To your deputies?”
    “Yeah, you could of gone all day without asking me that,” Jensen said. “We did, but years ago. We went to high-capacity .40s when the FBI did.”
    “What happened to the .357s?”
    “That was before my time. As I understand it, guys were allowed to buy them at a discount. Some did, some didn’t. Tell you the truth, some went away, we don’t know where. Record keeping wasn’t what it should have been. This was two sheriffs ago, so it doesn’t have anything to do with Jim.”
    “But you thought of that,” Virgil said.
    “Sure.”
     
    T HEY TALKED for another fifteen minutes, and Jensen said that he was looking through medical records at the partnership that had taken over Gleason’s practice, and also at the regional hospital. “It’s buried back there somewhere. Maybe the same guy killed Bill Judd, if Judd is really dead. He and Gleason were almost