Dark of the Moon

said.
     
    S O V IRGIL, reluctant to start on the pile of paper, pulled out his laptop, stared at it for a moment. A problem had been pecking at the back of his mind for a day or so, and he put in the disk that Stryker had given him on the first day, the one with the paperwork on the Gleason killing. Included with everything else were a couple of hundred jpg photographs of the crime scene. He combed over them for a half hour, then, satisfied, said, “Huh.”
    No Revelation, as far as he could see.
     
    T HEN HE WENT online with the secretary of state’s office and searched for Florence Mills, Inc.
    Florence Mills, according to the information in the original filing, had been created three years earlier to “build, buy, or lease facilities for the production of corn-based and switchgrass-based ethanol as a renewable fuel,” a joint venture between Arno Partners, a limited liability company registered in Delaware, and St. John Ventures, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
    Not much there. He had a feeling that the Delaware company would be hard to check. Delaware was an easy place to set up a corporation, requiring minimal information, and a stickler for legal procedures when you wanted to mine their corporate records.
    Idaho, he thought, might be easier, and it was: called the Idaho secretary of state’s office, was told how to look at online public records, and with a certain sense of what he’d find, looked up St. John Ventures: George Feur, chief executive officer and chairman.
    He called Stryker: “What happened with Judd Sr.’s office? Did you seal it up, or what?”
    “Yup. Couldn’t say for sure that Junior didn’t get in there, though. They’re right next to each other. If there was a big pot of cash or something…”
    “I need to get in,” Virgil said. “Right now.”
    “I’ll walk down. Meet you there in ten.”
     
    J UDD ’ S OFFICE included a small outer waiting room with a secretary’s desk, a side room with a Xerox machine, a printer and a half-dozen file cabinets, and a large inner office with leather chairs, dark-wood paneling, and a new wide-screen television sitting on top of a bar. The newspaper office was on one side, and Judd Jr.’s office on the other; they hadn’t seen either the newspaper editor or Junior when they unlocked Judd Sr.’s office.
    Stryker locked the door behind them and Virgil said, “Not too much light. Just the inner office and the file room. I’d just as soon that not everybody in town knows that we’re here.”
    “Probably know anyway,” Stryker said, gloomily. He was discouraged by the results of the Schmidt investigation: “Nothing’s coming up, man. What about you? Anything working?”
    “The letter this morning implied that Bill Judd Jr. has money problems, and mentioned Florence Mills,” Virgil said. “It supposedly was set up to make ethanol out of corn and switchgrass—and it’s half owned by George Feur.”
    “Feur?”
    “Yeah. I can’t find out who owns the other half, because that half is owned by a Delaware corporation. We could probably find out next week, but it’s too late today. We’re gonna need some papers, and it’s already two o’clock on the East Coast. I’m thinking that if the Judds are involved with Feur, and…I don’t know. There’s something going on there.”
    “Ethanol? Shoot, it could be another goddamn Jerusalem artichoke scam. There’s the same kind of gold-rush thing going on…the people who got killed weren’t only old, they were mostly pretty well-off. Could have been investors in another scam.”
    “Yeah. Even the Schmidts. They had half a million in Vanguard.” Virgil thought for a second, and then asked, “Is Larry Jensen still out there?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Get him to check the Vanguard statements. There should be monthly statements, like with a checking account. See if there’ve been any big withdrawals in the past three years. Not like for a car…bigger than that.”
    “I’ll call now.”
    While he went to call, Virgil began going through Judd’s files, looking for anything involving Arno Partners or Florence Mills. Stryker came back: “Larry’ll check. What are we looking for?”
    “Arno Partners, A-R-N-O, or Florence Mills. If you could crack open his computer, run a search on either name…”
    “Why don’t I do the files, you do the computer. You gotta be better at computers than I am…”
     
    J UDD ’ S COMPUTER wasn’t password-protected and had almost nothing on it other