Dark of the Moon

was that about?” Joan demanded, as they rolled down toward her house.
    “About eliminating Strykers, as suspects.”
    “What?”
    Virgil sighed. “She was telling me that she didn’t have an affair with old man Judd, and, as a corollary, that that’s not why your father killed himself, and so there’s no reason for any Stryker, and in particular, Jim, to have killed him. Or the others.”
    She stared, aghast. “My God, Virgil. What have you been up to?”
    Virgil said, “I’ve been listening to talk. There’s talk that your mother and Judd were involved back around the time of your father’s death. She worked in an insurance office that Judd owned. If she says she was not involved, I believe her. I don’t think she’d lie, when we’ve got all these killings on our hands, not if she thought it might make a difference.”
    “Of course she wouldn’t,” Joan said, angry now.
    Virgil shook his head. “You can’t tell what people will do, when their reputations are on the line. But: she didn’t. I believe her.”
    “It’s hard to believe that you suspected,” Joan said.
    “I didn’t, really,” Virgil said, again, without much contrition. “I’m just investigating.”

10
    J OAN DIDN ’ T INVITE him in, when they stopped at her house. Her attitude wasn’t exactly frosty, he decided as he pulled away, but she was thinking about him, about her mother, about Jim, and about her father.
    After he dropped her off, Virgil called Davenport in St. Paul, got the cell-phone number for Sandy, the researcher, and caught her as she was walking back to her apartment from class at the university.
    “I need massive Xeroxes,” he told her. “I need income tax returns for a whole bunch of people. Do you have a pencil? Okay: William Judd Sr., William Judd Jr., a whole family named Stryker”—he spelled it for her—“including Mark, Laura, James, and Joan, also a Roman and Gloria Schmidt, husband and wife, Russell and Anna Gleason, husband and wife, Margaret and Jesse Laymon, mother and daughter. They all live in Stark County, most of them in Bluestem, and the Laymons live in the town of Roche. R-O-C-H-E. Can you do that?”
    “Yes. Want me to run them through the other agencies—department of public safety, corrections, all that?”
    “Everything you can find on them. Put it in a FedEx and see if you can deliver it to the Holiday Inn in Bluestem, tomorrow.”
    “Never happen,” she said. “How far is Bluestem from here?”
    “Four hours.”
    “I’ll get it there, one way or another. I’ll talk to Lucas,” she said.
    While he was talking with Sandy, Virgil pulled into the courthouse parking lot. When he closed the phone, he went inside, found the district court judge, told him what he needed, then drove out to the Schmidt house.
    The day was turning hot, the leaves on the trees turning over, giving them a silvery look in the breeze; and the corn popped and rustled in the fields along the way out.
    Schmidt’s body had been removed, but not until after a photographer from the Sioux Falls paper, with a lens two feet long, and a monopod, had skulked into the cornfield across the street, and had taken several shots before he was noticed, and the sight line blocked with a patrol car.
    Big Curly wanted to seize the photographer at gunpoint, but Stryker contented himself with having a chat with the editor about good taste and the feelings of relatives, along with possible criminal-trespass charges and a future lack of cooperation if the photos got published.
    “A trespass charge wouldn’t hold up in Minnesota,” he told Virgil. “We gotta hope his editors don’t know that.”
    “Ah, newspapers don’t print body shots too often,” Virgil said. “I hope.”
     
    G LORIA S CHMIDT ’ S BODY was still in the bedroom, but it would be moved as soon as the people from the funeral home got back. Processing of the house was still under way: “Probably won’t be done until tomorrow morning,” Stryker said.
    “I’m itchy to get in there and look at their paper,” Virgil said.
    “We gotta process. I’m trying to stay out of there myself,” Stryker said.
    “I know…all right. I’ll go down to the bank and look at records. Did your guys see a bank safe-deposit key in there anywhere?”
    “Not me—I can check,” Stryker said. “C’mon around back.”
    Virgil followed Stryker around the side of the house and in the back door, into a mudroom. “Probably be in the chest of drawers in the