Dark of the Moon

in the dirt, with the fork under his ears. “Isn’t this the most fucked-up thing you’ve ever seen?”
    “When I get this cocksucker, I’m gonna kill him,” Stryker said.
    “Atta boy,” Virgil said. “Feel the burn.”
     
    A WHILE LATER, Virgil said, “I’m going back to town. As soon as your crime-scene people will let me inside, I want to know. Something in there might tell us what’s going on. It’ll be on paper, if there’s anything. I don’t think this guy is leaving any DNA behind.”
    “What’s in town?”
    “Historical research,” Virgil said.
    He drove back to town, parked, got his briefcase out of the car with his laptop, went to the newspaper office, and found a scrawled note Scotch-taped to the window: “Out on story, back later.” The note looked like it had been written in a rush. He’d probably passed Williamson as the newspaperman headed to Schmidts’, and he was coming in.
    Frustrated, he rattled the doorknob, and to his surprise, it turned under his hand. He had a quick snapshot vision of Williamson lying on the floor, with two black holes where his eyes should be. He pushed in: the place was empty. He really needed to look at the files…
    He reached back, pulled the taped note off the window, and let it fall to the floor. Hey, he never saw it, and the door was open. On the counter inside was a fresh stack of papers, with a coin box. The lead story was headlined NEW CLAIM FOR JUDD FORTUNE.
    That would sell a couple papers, he thought.
    Back in the morgue, he pulled clip files on every name he had in town: the Judds, the Gleasons, the Schmidts, the Stryker family, the Laymons, George Feur.
    Judd’s wife had been named Linda—and when she died, in 1966, the story must’ve been the biggest one in the paper that week, with a seventy-two-point headline. She’d been rushed to the hospital, the story said, but had been declared dead on arrival by a doctor named Long. An autopsy had been done, and found the cause of death to be an aortic aneurysm. The clip on the autopsy said that the coroner, Thomas McNally, declared that “once the aneurysm tore open, there was no possibility of survival. She bled to death within a minute or two.”
    Judd was characterized as “distraught.”
    That was not quite the story he’d gotten from Margaret Laymon, who remembered it as a heart attack, but it was close enough.
     
    H E READ FORWARD in the Judd files, but after Linda Judd’s death, it appeared to be mostly business news, and then the Jerusalem artichoke scandal.
    He went back, looking through the huge collection of clips on Roman Schmidt, who had even more than Judd Sr., and found a few intersections with Russell Gleason. Gleason was occasionally cited as the coroner, apparently alternating with Thomas McNally. That hadn’t been uncommon in country towns, Virgil knew, where local doctors took turns doing an unpaid extra duty.
    Roman Schmidt and Gleason were cited together in fifteen or twenty highway accidents, an accidental gunshot death during deer season, a man who was killed by a deer, old people found dead at home, several drownings and infant deaths, one “miracle baby,” a kid who’d stuck his arm in a corn picker and had bled to death, and several more gruesome farm accidents, including a man who’d been cut in half by an in-gear tractor tire, after the tractor rolled on him.
    But Virgil couldn’t find Judd’s name in any of them.
    The Laymon files he’d already seen, but there was nothing to indicate that Margaret Laymon had had a romance with Judd. Garber, the alcoholic schoolteacher, had no file at all; to his surprise, neither did Betsy Carlson, Judd’s sister-in-law. Shouldn’t there be a story at the time of the sister-in-law’s death, since she was the witness? Or maybe, like Williamson had said, they only filed the most important names, and she just wasn’t important enough. Have to ask, but it seemed strange.
    The Stryker files were large: Mark Stryker’s suicide was covered extensively, but most of the story detailed the family history before Mark. Laura Stryker was mentioned as working as an office manager at State Farm. Virgil checked files under “State Farm Insurance,” and found that the local agency was owned by Bill Judd Sr.
    Huh. Nobody had mentioned that. No way to tell from the clips when she began working there, or when she left…
     
    T HE ROOM WAS close and warm, and after a while, Virgil leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.