Dark of the Moon

about him and me, right?” Stryker asked. “I busted him for robbery, when I was a deputy? He went to Stillwater. Claims I railroaded him.”
    “Nothing to that, though,” Virgil offered.
    “No. He was caught on a liquor store camera,” Stryker said. “He had a hat pulled down low, but I knew him the minute I saw the tape. Went and dug him out of his hole, got his gun, too. The gun did it as much as anything—it was an old piece with a nine-inch barrel, and that, you see perfectly, on the tape.”
    “So it was a good bust.”
    “Yup. It was, and still is.”
     
    V IRGIL SAID, “Another thing—if this all somehow involves Judd’s money, then your friend Jesse might be in trouble, could be a target for somebody.”
    “You think?”
    “Maybe. Or maybe not.” Virgil scratched his ear. “If she’s got one of those ramblin’ gamblin’ guys around, who figured she might become a millionairess, under the right circumstances…”
    “Man, that hadn’t occurred to me,” Stryker said. He sat back in his chair, rocking.
    “Could Jesse or Margaret set something up?” Virgil asked.
    Stryker rubbed his chin. “Not Margaret. Don’t see that. Jesse wouldn’t do it on purpose. I could see her sitting around, suckin’ a little smoke, bullshitting with somebody, dreaming about all the money…and she wakes up in a world of hurt, when her pal goes off and does something about it.”
    “A concept to consider,” Virgil said.
    “I will,” Stryker said.
    “And if she doesn’t have anything to do with it, hell, maybe she’ll need her body guarded.”
    Stryker stood up. “I’m heading out there. You want to look at her, or go see Feur?”
    “I’ll go after Feur,” Virgil said. Stryker had been looking for an excuse to go out. “You can tell me what you get from Jesse and maybe I’ll talk to her later in the day.”
    “Good enough,” Stryker said. “You take care.”
     
    T HE DAY LOOKED like the day before, sunny, a touch of wind, about as nice a July day that you could hope for; four kids, two boys and two girls, were dancing along the sidewalk ahead of him, boys in dropped-crotch pants, the girls with pierced ears and noses, but there was a small-town innocence about it; testing their chops, and sometimes, forgetting, they’d hold hands. They all looked back at him a couple of times, knowing him for a cop.
    Nice a day as it was, there was too much humidity hanging around, and thunderstorms would be popping by late afternoon. If it got hot enough, some of them could be bad. Nothing to do about it.
    Virgil walked down to the Record , stopping at the drugstore for a sleeve of popcorn, and at the newspaper, found Williamson putting the last bit of the next day’s newspaper together.
    Williamson lit up as soon as Virgil walked through the front door. “I was hoping I’d see you this morning. I called down to the motel and they said you were gone already.”
    Virgil nodded. “I was hoping to poke through your library, if you’ve got one. Clippings, and such.”
    “We can do that. But it’d be pretty damn ungrateful of you, if you didn’t answer a couple of questions.”
    “You can ask,” Virgil said.
    “You took a different attitude yesterday…”
    “Well, I was in public. I’ll talk to you, but the deal is this: I talk off-the-record, and you write it like it came from God,” he said. “I might not tell you everything, but I won’t lie to you.”
    “Deal,” Williamson said. He punched a couple of keys on his computer, switched out of his compositing program into a word processor, and asked, “Do you think the .357 used in the murders was one of the guns issued to the sheriff’s office years ago?”
    “I have no idea,” Virgil said. Williamson opened his mouth to object, but Virgil held up a hand. “I’m not avoiding the question. I really don’t have any idea. They’re not a commonly bought weapon anymore. Most people go for automatics, because they’re on TV, and if you’re looking for hunting power in a revolver, you might go for a .44 mag or a .454 Casul. The .357s were a cop’s gun, at one time, and that’s the only reason anybody ever talked about the idea. There were a bunch of them in the sheriff’s office, and they all went away, and maybe…who knows?”
    “All right,” Williamson said. “Second question: Do you think the killer is local?”
    “Yes,” Virgil said.
    “You want to expand on that?” Williamson asked.
    “No.”
    “Any