Dark of the Moon

of the truck and looked at the tracks made by the shooter’s vehicle. There were enough weeds and grass that any tread marks were hidden. He followed one of the tracks back down the hill, and never saw a clear print. Followed the other one back up, found nothing.
    From the car park, looking up the hill, with the sun still at his back, he could see disturbed grass where the shooter had been. He got the shotgun out of the back of the truck, loaded it alternately with buckshot and solid slugs, jacked a shell into the chamber, and followed the trail to the top of the hill. A hundred yards over the crest, he could see the front lip of the pool, and the farther down the hill he went, the more of the pool he could see. The trail wasn’t straight at this point. It moved between clumps of shrubs, which meant that he and Joan must’ve already been at the pool.
    Another hundred yards, and he found the shooter’s stand: a circle of crushed grass next to the broken-off and rotted stump of a small tree. If he’d rested the rifle on the stump, he’d have been able to see two-thirds of the pool. To see more, he would have had to go right up to the lip of the dell, without cover.
    He checked around the nest: no brass. The guy had cleaned up after himself.
     
    F ROM V IRGIL ’ S VIEWPOINT , the dell, down below, didn’t look like much: a crack in the landscape, with a wider spot, and a pool, near the bottom. He walked down, and when he got right on top of it, the character changed. Down here, the ground seemed to have been hit with a mammoth cleaver, carving a sharp trench right through the quartzite down to the pool.
    If the shooter had been cooler, or braver, he could have waited until they were fooling around under the spring, out of sight, and then walked or crawled up to the back wall. From there he would have had them at sixty or seventy yards, and there would have been no place for Virgil and Joan to hide.
    On the other hand, if they’d seen him sneaking down, and had gotten back to Virgil’s gun and down the canyon, he’d have been screwed. In the folded, broken rocks of the canyon, a guy with a pistol could hold off a small army.
    On that thought, Virgil took out his cell phone: he had a signal. You might not down in the dell, but you wouldn’t know unless you were down there. Maybe the shooter had taken that into account. He could not allow somebody to see him, and walk away…
     
    L OT TO THINK ABOUT. The day would be hot again. Another good day for the pool, but he wouldn’t be swimming again until the killer was caught, or dead.
    Virgil went back to the truck, shucked the shells out of the shotgun and put it away, and headed back to Roman Schmidt’s place. Larry Jensen, Stryker’s investigator, was there, with the crime-scene people. Virgil took Jensen aside.
    “Where’s Jim?”
    “At the office. He said you’d probably show up and want to get in. We’re just about done. Let me go talk to Margo.”
    “Okay. I got a note in the mail today, I was wondering if you could check it for fingerprints.”
    He explained, and gave Jensen the note and envelope, folded into a piece of hotel writing paper. Jensen read it, frowned. “Shoot. That’s not a direction we’ve gone.”
    “Hardly had time,” Virgil said. “Anyway, I’m on it. I’ve got a researcher up in St. Paul who can pull the corporate information, and I’ve got some income-tax forms coming in. If you could check this letter…”
    “Wonder who uses a typewriter?”
    “Somebody Roman’s age,” Virgil said.
     
    M ARGO C ARR, the crime-scene specialist, showed him Schmidt’s home office, a table made out of a wooden door, set across two filing cabinets. A computer, no typewriter. “Everything in here has been worked,” she said.
    “You think the killer was in here?”
    “No. I think the killer shot Roman, shot Gloria, then came and shot Roman twice more, then dragged him outside and propped him up with a stick he’d already cut. I don’t think he went anywhere in the house, off the line of the bedroom.”
    “Do you think he knew the inside of the house?” Virgil asked.
    “Maybe. Or maybe Roman turned on a light in the bedroom and gave it all away.”
    “Find anything at all?”
    “One thing,” she said. She went back to a plastic trunk, opened it, and brought back a Ziploc bag with a cigarette filter in it. “Found this right by the back steps. Cigarette butt. I can figure out what kind, I’m sure, but I know it’s a