Dark of the Moon

back and forth, going over the possibilities.”
    Stryker rubbed his chin with his forefinger: “Doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “What’d Roman have to say?”
    “He suggested that they don’t do anything until they get closer to the election, see which way the wind is blowing. Didn’t say no.”
     
    V IRGIL WAS WALKING back to his car when a tall, older man in a white straw hat yelled at him. “Hey! Mr. Flowers…”
    Virgil waited by his truck as the man cut across the street and came up to him. He was gray haired, weathered, wiry, in jeans and a golf shirt. “I’m Andy Clay, I live up by the Johnstones? And, you know, where the Gleasons used to live?”
    “Yeah, how are you?”
    “Fine. Well, maybe not,” Clay said. “I want to tell you something, just between you and me, and maybe ask a question.”
    “No problem.”
    “I saw you at the Johnstones’ yesterday. Everybody in town knows who you are, now,” Clay said. “Anyway, later on, I was down at the gas station, getting gas for my mower, and Carol pulls up in their Lexus truck. She doesn’t even say ‘hi,’ she just starts filling it up and washing the windshield and she looks like she’s in a hurry. So I went on back up the hill, and I’m gassing up the mower and here comes Carol in the Lexus. She parks in the driveway instead of the garage, and then here comes Gerald out the front door with a big bag, and he throws it in the truck. Then they both go back inside and then they come out with a couple more bags—I’m mowing the lawn by this time—and then she locks the door, and they take off.”
    “Take off?” Virgil asked. “You mean, like getting out of town?”
    “Unless they were donating a bunch of suitcases to the Goodwill,” Clay said. “The thing is, they’ve got these timer lights, that turn the lights on and off when they’re gone? Well, everybody up there knows about them, and they were going last night. One comes on here, another goes off there. Then the first one goes off, and the second one comes on. You know. It’s almost like a signal: The Johnstones are gone .”
    “Huh,” Virgil said. He thought about it for a moment, then said, “So what’s the question?”
    “We were talking about it last night, up on the hill,” Clay said. “Should we all get out?”
     
    T HE FUCKIN ’ J OHNSTONES, Virgil thought as he went back to the motel.
    Too late to get the highway patrol to drag them back. Gerald Johnstone knew something about the picture of the dead woman, and Virgil needed to know what it was.
    Time for threats, now—if he could find them. Didn’t they say something about visiting a daughter in Minneapolis?
    He called Davenport. “I got a couple of people who may be running. Not the killers, but they know something. If Jenkins and Shrake are sitting on their asses…”
    He explained and told Davenport that he didn’t know the daughter’s name. “We can probably find it in the vital records,” Davenport said. “I’ll get the guys on it. They’ve been restless.”
    “Well, Jesus, don’t let them beat these people up,” Virgil said. “These are old people.”
    “You mean, we should only beat up young people?” Davenport asked. “There are as many old assholes as there are young ones. Especially since the boomers got old.”
    “Yeah, well…I’d just as soon my witnesses didn’t die of a heart attack. Tell them to take it easy. No kicking.”
    “I thought you wanted them scared,” Davenport said.
    “A little scared,” Virgil said. “Not too scared.”
     
    A T THE MOTEL, the desk clerk had three cardboard boxes, sealed with tape, stashed behind the counter: “A guy brought them in a half hour ago. He said they were from St. Paul.”
    They felt like boxes of bricks. Virgil hauled them to his room and unloaded the stacks of paper. Too much stuff, but it had to be looked at. Some of it, anyway.
    Before he started on it, he called Davenport again, got a name, called a guy at the secretary of state’s office, and found that he could look at all current corporate records, online, including the confidential files, if he had a password. “I’ll set you up with a temporary password: chuzzlewit,” said the guy, whose name was Martin. He spelled the password. “That’ll be good through next Wednesday. If you need another one, call me up again.”
    “What’s a chuzzlewit?”
    “It’s a word unlikely to be figured out by some little hacker-geek between now and Wednesday,” Martin