Dark of the Moon

exactly the same age, so there’s gotta be a tie. Maybe this killer-guy is waiting to go after somebody else, sitting out there thinking about it.”
    “Could have gone all day without saying that,” Virgil said.
     
    V IRGIL FOLLOWED J ENSEN back into town, cut away when Jensen turned north toward the courthouse. The motel clerk had recommended two lunch spots, Ernhardt’s Café and Johnnie’s Pizza, both on Main Street. Virgil decided Italian might be too much, and checked out Ernhardt’s.
    The café turned out to be a combination German deli and bakery, cold meat, fresh-baked potato bread, pickles, and sauerkraut. Virgil got a roast beef on rye with rough mustard, a pickle, and a half pound of bright yellow potato salad, and took it to one of the low-backed booths that lined the wall opposite the ordering counter.
    A minute or so after he sat down, the sheriff’s sister stepped in, blinked in the dimmer light, said hello to the woman behind the counter, ordered a salad and coffee, spotted Virgil in the back booth and nodded to him. He nodded back, and a moment later, she carried her lunch tray over and slid into the seat on the other side of the booth.
    “Are you going to save Jimmy’s job?” she asked.
    She was not perfectly good looking—her eyebrows might have down sloped a little too much, her mouth might have been a quarter-inch too wide—but she was very good-looking, and certainly knew it. She was smiling when she asked her question, but her green eyes were serious.
    “Does it need saving?” Virgil asked.
    “Maybe,” she said. And, “My name’s Joan Carson. Jimmy said you had some nice things to say about my ass.”
    “Jimmy’s job just got in deeper trouble,” Virgil said, but she was still smiling and that wasn’t bad. “Tell me about that, though. His job.”
    She shrugged, dug into her salad. “This is his second term. Most sheriffs have to get over the third-election hump. That’s just the way it is, I guess. You’ve pissed off enough people to get fired, if they’re not so impressed that they feel obligated to vote for you.”
    “They’re not impressed?”
    “They were, until the murders,” she said. “Jimmy runs a good office, he’s fair with his deputies. Now, he’s got these murders and he’s not catching who did it.”
    “Did he tell you that?” Virgil asked.
    “Common knowledge,” she said. She picked a raw onion ring out of her salad and crunched half of it, and pointed the crescent-moon remainder at Virgil. “Everybody knows everybody, and the deputies talk. Nobody’s got any idea who did the shooting.”
    “Who do you think did it?”
    “It’s just a goddamn mystery, that’s what it is,” she said. “I know every single person in this town, and most of the relationships between them, and I can’t think of anybody who’d do something like that. Just can’t think of anybody . Maybe…” She trailed off.
    “Maybe…”
    She fluffed her hair, like women do sometimes when they think they’re about to say something silly. “This is really unfair. The newspaper editor, Todd Williamson, has only been here for three or four years, so I know him less than I know other people. So maybe, before he came here, there was some knot in his brain that we can’t see because we didn’t grow up with him.”
    “That’s it?” Virgil asked.
    “That’s it,” she said.
    “That’s nothing,” Virgil said.
    “That’s why I said it’s unfair. But I lie in bed at night, going through everybody in town over the age of ten, figuring out who could have done this. Maybe…”
    “What?”
    “Could we have some little crazy thrill-killer in the high school? Maybe somebody who had some kind of fantasy of killing somebody, and for some reason picked out the Gleasons? You read about that kind of thing…”
    “I hope so,” Virgil said. “If it’s like that, I’ll get him. He’ll have told his friends about it, and they’ll rat him out.”
    Virgil’s cell phone rang, and he slipped it out of his pocket and she said, “I hate it when that happens during lunch,” and Virgil said, “Yeah.” The call was coming in from a local number, and he opened the phone and said, “Hello?”
    “Virgil, Jim Stryker. You know that Bill Judd had a heart bypass fifteen years ago, and also had some work done on his lumbar spine?”
    “Yeah?”
    “My crime-scene girl found a coil of stainless-steel wire in the basement of Judd’s house, and she swears it’s what they