Dark of the Moon

firelight, and the corners of his mouth turned down at Virgil’s question. “Bill Parker, he’s a guy lives up in Lismore, was coming into town on Highway Eight. He saw the fire, mmm, must’ve been a few minutes after it started. He was driving toward it when a truck went by, moving fast. He figures it was going eighty, ninety miles an hour. And it was raining to beat the band. It took the turn on Highway Three, headed down to Ninety.”
    “He see what kind of truck?”
    “Nope. Not even sure it was a pickup. Might’ve been an SUV,” Stryker said. “All he could see was, the lights was set up high.”
    They looked at the fire some more and then Virgil said, “Lot of people hated him.”
    “Yup.” A few locals sidled past, grinning, hiding beer cans, having snuck past the cops below. Small town, you took care of yourself: Stryker told them, “You folks stay back out of the way.”
    They watched for another minute, then Virgil yawned. “Well, good luck to you, Jimmy. I’m heading down to the Holiday Inn.”
    “Why’d you come up?”
    “Just rubbernecking,” Virgil said. “Saw the fire when I was coming down Ninety. Knew what it must be.”
    “Goddamnedest thing,” Stryker said, peering into the flames. “I hope that old sonofabitch was dead before the fire got to him. Nobody needs to be burned to death.”
    “If he did.”
    “If he did.” Stryker frowned suddenly, again turned his green eyes to Virgil. “You don’t think he might’ve faked it? Skipped out to wherever he put that money?”
    “I think the money might be a legend, is what I think,” Virgil said. He slapped Stryker on the shoulder. “You take it easy, Jimmy. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “Not too early. I’ll be out here awhile.” As Virgil walked away, Stryker called, “That money wasn’t no legend, Virgil. He’s burnin’ because of that money.”
    Behind him, up closer to the fire, Bill Judd Jr. was still screaming at the firemen, looking like he was one step from a heart attack.
     
    T HE H OLIDAY I NN was smoke free, and Strictly No Pets, but Virgil’s room smelled of smoke and pets anyway—snuck cigarettes and cats in the night—as well as whatever kind of chemical they sprayed in the air to kill the smell of smoke and cat pee. You got two beds whether you wanted them or not. Virgil tossed his bag on one of them, pulled off the rain suit, and hung it over the showerhead to drip-dry.
    He was a medium-tall man with blond hair and gray eyes, a half inch over six feet, lean, broad shouldered, long armed with big hands; his hair was way too long for a cop’s, but fell short of his shoulders. He’d played the big-three sports in high school, had lettered in all of them, a wide receiver in football, a guard in basketball, a third baseman in baseball. He wasn’t big enough or fast enough for college football, he was too short for basketball, and had the arm for college baseball, but couldn’t hit the pitching.
    He drifted through a degree in ecological science, with a minor in creative writing, because it was easy and interesting and he liked the outdoors, the botany, and the girls in the writing classes. He joined the Army after graduation, got semicoerced into the military police, saw some trouble, but never fired his weapon in anger.
    He came back home, found that there was no huge demand for bachelor-degree ecologists, and went off to the Police Academy. Got married, got divorced, got married, got divorced, got married, got divorced, and at the end of a five-year round of silliness, decided he didn’t want to be a four-time loser, so he stopped getting married.
    He was working for the City of St. Paul as an investigator—eight years on the force, getting bored—when he was borrowed by a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) unit looking into a home-invasion ring. One thing led to another, and he moved to the BCA. There, he fell into the orbit of a political appointee named Lucas Davenport who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: “We’ll only give you the hard stuff.”
     
    H E ’ D BEEN DOING the hard stuff for three years, with a personal side-venture as an outdoor writer. He had credits at most of the magazines that still took freelance stuff, but he wasn’t going to make a living at it; not unless he got a staff job, and magazines weren’t looking real healthy.
    Didn’t know if he wanted to, anyway.
    Davenport had told him that smart crooks were the most interesting game, and Virgil sometimes