Dark of the Moon

corner of Main Street. Inside, a pale-eyed, blond librarian with the smooth skin of an eighth-grader, took him to a microfilm booth at the back of the stacks. “I’ll show you how to thread the microfilm. It can be a trial,” she said. She went to a wooden file cabinet with dozens of small drawers, muttered, “Nineteen seventy.” She pulled it open, took four boxes of microfilm out, and handed them to Virgil, then went back to the file and said, “Darn it. We’re missing a box. Somebody has misfiled it.”
    He was interested: “Which box?”
    She started sorting through them again, explaining, “We don’t start a new drawer until the last drawer is full, and when I opened it, it was loose—so there’s a box out somewhere. It looks like…” She stood on her tiptoes, pushed her glasses up her nose, looking into the drawer, and finally said, “We stop at the middle of May, and start again in September. So one box is missing. We have four months on each roll…Darn. I tell people to leave the refiling to us, but they don’t listen.”
    “Could it be misfiled?” Virgil asked.
    She pulled open a drawer from the nineties, that was only partially full of microfilm boxes. Checked them, said, “These are right,” and then went through a bunch of empty drawers at the bottom of the case. She said, “I think it’s been taken by somebody. I’ll check these after we close—I have to work the desk—but I think it’s been taken.”
    “I’d appreciate it if you’d check,” Virgil said.
     
    T HE MISSING BOX intrigued him. The librarian showed him how to thread the film they had, and he looked at four months around Schmidt’s mortgage loan, and in the quick review, saw nothing that struck him. No strange women in automobile accidents…
    Not enough to work with; not yet. And it was possible that Judd had simply bought Schmidt, to be used as necessary.
     
    V IRGIL WAS OUT the library door at twenty minutes to three. By ten minutes of three, he’d changed into a pale blue shirt with a necktie, khaki slacks, and a navy blue sport coat. Looking at himself in a mirror, he decided he looked like a greeter at a minor Indian casino.
    He got back to the courthouse at one minute to three. Twenty people were standing outside the courthouse door, mostly older, mostly men, mostly deep in conversation. Two television remote trucks were parked on the lawn, cables snaking through the doors of the courthouse.
    Inside was chaos. The courtroom might take a hundred people if nobody breathed too hard. In addition to two TV cameramen, who’d rigged lights over an attorney’s table that had been dragged in front of the judge’s bench, there were two on-camera people, both women; four tired-looking men and two tired-looking women who were probably from newspapers; two guys with tape recorders who might be from radio stations; and about a hundred locals who weren’t going anywhere.
    Virgil stuck his head inside, took it all in, then headed down the hall to Stryker’s office before he attracted any attention. His phone went off, and he pulled it out of his pocket: Stryker. He buzzed past the secretary, stuck his head into Stryker’s office and said, “Yo.”
    Stryker hung up the phone. “Where’n the hell have you been?”
    “Running around,” Virgil said. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”
    “Well.” Stryker shrugged. “Tell the truth, I guess.”
    “Jesus, Jim, you can’t do that.” Virgil looked around, saw the secretary watching, and closed the office door on her. “It’d stop us in our tracks.”
    “Maybe if you’d been here an hour ago, we could have cooked something up.”
    “There’s no cooking,” Virgil said. “You go out there, you give them the gory details of the three scenes—Gleason, Judd, and Schmidt. Everybody local already knows about them, so you’re not giving anything away. Talk about them being shot in the eyes. Talk about Judd being burned right down to the anklebones. TV people will like that. Tell them that we’ve developed information that would suggest that the killer is local, and that we’ve come up with a number of leads that we can’t talk about, but that…if they come back in a week or ten days, we believe that we’ll have a lot more. That we’re rolling.”
    “Are we?” Stryker asked.
    “Kind of.”
    “Virgil…”
    “You don’t tell them what it is, dummy,” Virgil said. “That’s the confidential part. We’re rolling, but we can’t talk