Dark of the Moon

flat-roofed one-car garage had been attached, later, to the left side of the house, giving it a lopsided look; but better lopsided, in a Minnesota winter, than no garage at all.
    Garber, Margaret Laymon had said, was divorced. And yes, Virgil could use Margaret’s name when he introduced himself.
     
    G ARBER ’ S HOUSE felt empty. Virgil parked in front, knocked on the door, got no answer, and looked at his watch. Hoped she wasn’t in France. The house next door had a bicycle parked off the front step, so he went there, knocked. A sleepy teenaged boy came to the door, scratching his ribs. “Yeah?”
    “Hi. Do you know if Miz Garber, next door, is she around? I mean, there’s nobody home, but she’s not on vacation?”
    “Naw. She teaches summer school.” The kid turned, leaned back into his house, apparently looking at a clock, turned back and said, “She oughta be coming down the sidewalk in ten or twenty minutes. She walks.”
    Virgil went back to the truck, brought up the computer to see if he might link into an open network somewhere, got nothing, fished his camera bag out of the back, and started working through the Nikon handbook.
    The damn things were computers with lenses; but the ability to take decent photographs was a selling point with his articles. An even bigger selling point would have been drawings, or paintings. Painted illustrations were hot with the tonier hook-and-bullet rags. He’d taken a course in botanical illustration in college, and had thought about signing up for art classes in Mankato, thinking he might learn something valuable. Even if he didn’t, he’d get to look at naked women a couple of times a week.
    His mind drifted off the Nikon handbook to Joan Carson. That could turn into something, even if it didn’t last long…
    He was getting himself a little flustered when he saw Garber turn the corner at the end of the street. She wore black pants and a white blouse with a round collar, and carried a canvas shoulder bag. With short dark hair and narrow shoulders, she didn’t look like an orgy queen.
    “Hell,” Virgil asked himself out loud, “what’s an orgy queen look like?”
     
    G ARBER WAS LOOKING at him as she came down the street and he put the camera on the floor of the passenger side of the truck and got out to meet her. “Miz Garber? I’m Virgil Flowers. I’m an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to speak with you for a few moments.”
    She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk: “About what?”
    “About Bill Judd. You’ve probably heard that he died in a fire a couple of days ago.”
    “I heard that,” she said.
    “We believe he was murdered,” Virgil said. “And because of a couple of other murders…”
    “The Gleasons…”
    “Yes. Because of those, we’re beginning to wonder if the…genesis…of the whole situation might lie in Judd’s past,” Virgil said. “They’re all older people, so we’re checking with old friends of Judd.”
    She looked at him for a moment, the sharp skeptical eyes of a sparrow, then asked, “Where’d you get my name?”
    “Margaret Laymon. She said I could use her name.”
    Garber showed an unhappy smile, then said, “Well. You better come in. Would you like some coffee? All I’ve got is instant…”
    Virgil declined: “I just had a big cup and I’ve been sitting in my truck. In fact, if I could use your bathroom for a moment…”
     
    C OP TRICK, Virgil thought as he stood in the bathroom. He didn’t really need to go that bad, but once somebody’d let you pee in her bathroom, she’d talk to you.
     
    T HEY SAT in the living room, dim light behind linen-colored drapes, Virgil on the couch, Garber in an easy chair that faced the television. She looked at him a bit sideways, and said, “If you got here through Margaret, I guess you know about us running around with Bill.”
    “Yeah, she was pretty specific,” Virgil said. “I’m not taking notes on it—the specifics. I don’t want anybody to get hurt. But I’ve got to know if anything happened back then, that might surface all this time later. Violence, sexual activity, blackmail, money, power issues…something that could go underground for years and pop up later. It’d have to be something corrosive, something that involved both Judd and the Gleasons.”
    “How many names did she give you?” Garber asked.
    “Only yours, but she said she knew one more—she wouldn’t give it to me, because she said