Dark of the Moon

has extra money coming in. Quite a bit of it. I’m going to bed. Call me when you get back.”
    “Be careful. Keep your mouth shut,” Virgil told her.
     
    T HE GUY from Chicago was Ronald Pirelli, who’d called that morning. He was a short, dark man wearing a black linen jacket, black slacks, a French-blue shirt, and six-hundred-dollar sunglasses. He had three other agents with him, all casually dressed, and all with the wary look of the DEA.
    FBI agents, Virgil thought, usually looked sleek. DEA guys usually looked like they’d just driven a Jeep back from Nogales, with the windows down.
    Pirelli had arrived a couple of minutes before Virgil and Stryker. They followed him down to the room rented by another of the agents, and they all introduced themselves and Pirelli asked Virgil, “What’s with the T-shirt?”
    Virgil said, “I thought my Sheryl Crow shirt might piss you off.”
    “Hey…”
    Pirelli was affable, the other agents skeptical, watching Stryker carefully, and Virgil even more carefully: One of them said, “You’ve got kind of a weird reputation, dude. Everybody in Minneapolis calls you ‘that fuckin’ Flowers.’”
    Stryker laughed and said, “You wanna know something? He’s been seeing my sister, and just the other night, honest to God—she’s a farmer; she’s got no contact with Minneapolis—I asked her what she was doing, and she said, ‘Goin’ out with that fuckin’ Flowers.’”
    The agents all laughed, and the skepticism receded a little, and Pirelli said, “Give us what you’ve got.”
     
    W HAT THEY HAD was mostly conjecture, with a few names and background. They sketched in the story of the Jerusalem artichoke scam, and the general belief that Bill Judd Sr. had a hidden account somewhere. That Judd Jr. was in desperate financial straits, and the death of his father would make them worse, not better. That Junior might be embezzling from the hidden fund.
    “Why didn’t he just keep that money, instead of doing this ethanol thing?” Pirelli asked.
    “Maybe a couple of reasons,” Virgil said. “First, there might not have been enough money left in the account—not enough to take care of all his debts and provide him with some security. He’s getting to be an older guy. Second, it’s coming out of a bank account, somewhere. There’ll be a paper trail. It’s not that easy to do things in cash anymore…people want checks and wire transfers and financial controls. The way they did it, it looks like old man Judd put up some starter cash for an ethanol plant. They actually make some ethanol, and sell it, probably, but we think they’re also running this little chemical factory on the side.”
    “I wouldn’t be surprised if they own some land around the plant, to grow corn for processing,” Stryker said. “Then they’d be on the up-and-up ordering all the chemicals they’d need. The smell of the meth processing could be passed off as just another stink from the ethanol plant.”
    “But basically, there’s no indication whatsoever that this ethanol plant has anything to do with meth,” one of the agents said.
    “I suppose that depends on how imaginative you are,” Virgil said. “We’ve got a bunch of dead people. We’ve got a nutcase preacher who’s tied to the Corps. We’ve got a guy desperate for cash. We’ve got them buying anhydrous ammonia by the tanker truck, and they’re making alcohol by the tanker truck, and we’ve got hard guys coming and going in the night, with five-gallon cans of gas. These are the same guys who could act as a collecting system for the hard-to-get chemicals. You get one dumb-ass driving around a metro area buying a package of diet pills at every possible store, and you can get pounds of the stuff every day. You get ten dumb-asses driving around doing it, in ten different metro areas, and you can get a ton of it in a week. We know that they’re connected into a distribution system, through the Corps. That could also be a collection system for the other stuff they need. I mean, maybe they’re selling the ethanol as moonshine at five dollars a quart; but I doubt it.”
    “So if these are small-town guys, how does he afford an ethanol plant?” another agent asked.
    “You ever seen one?” Stryker asked. “Ethanol plant?”
    The DEA guy shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
    “There are some ethanol plants that look like grain elevators. In fact, most of them do. And the newest ones look like little refineries.