Dark of the Moon

the Ford dealership and two used-car lots. There were also a half-dozen farm and truck service shops, with worn tires stacked outside and muddy-yellow driveway puddles from the overnight rain.
    The old town was prettier. The residential areas were dominated by early-twentieth-century homes, each one different than the next, and big, with porches and yards with swings. The shopping district, on Main Street, was four blocks long, yellow-brick two-and three-story buildings, including a prewar movie theater that still showed movies, and all the businesses left over after you took out a Wal-Mart: law firms, insurance agencies, too many gift shops and antique stores, a couple of small clothing stores, four restaurants, a drugstore.
    The courthouse was built two blocks back from Main, and was still used as a courthouse. In most small towns, the old courthouses had been retired, to be replaced by anonymous county government buildings and law-enforcement centers built outside town.
     
    V IRGIL PARKED in the courthouse lot, walked past the war memorial—thirteen Stark County boys lost in World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq—and inside, down the long hall to the sheriff’s office.
    Stryker’s secretary was a heavyset fiftyish woman with an elaborate pearly-blond hairdo, accented and bias-cut with a couple of tentative spikes sticking out the back like porcupine quills. She squinted at Virgil, took in the sunglasses and the Sheryl Crow T-shirt with the carp on the front, and asked, abruptly, “Who’re you?”
    “Virgil Flowers. BCA.”
    She looked him over again: “Really?”
    “Yup.”
    “Sheriff said for you to go on back.” She half turned and gestured toward the back wall, which had a frosted-glass window set in a door that said SHERIFF JAMES J. STRYKER . Virgil nodded, and started past, and she asked, “How many times did you shoot at that man in Fairmont?”
    Virgil paused. “Fourteen,” he said.
    She looked pleased: “That’s what I heard. You never hit him?”
    “Wasn’t particularly trying to,” Virgil said, though he’d just about given up on this argument.
    “They say he was shooting at you,” she said.
    “Ah, he didn’t want to hurt me,” Virgil said. “He was letting off some hot air, because he was pissed about being caught. Wasn’t really a bad guy, except for the fact that he held up gas stations. Had eight kids and a wife to feed.”
    “Sort of his job, huh?”
    “That was about it,” Virgil said. “Now he’s gonna be making snowplow blades for six years.”
    “Huh,” she said. “Well, I think most of the boys around here would have shot him.”
    “Must be pretty goddamn hard-hearted boys,” Virgil said, not liking her; and he went on back to Stryker’s office.
     
    S TRYKER WAS on the phone. Virgil knocked and Stryker called, “Come in,” and he waved Virgil to a chair and said into the phone, “I gotta go, but the first minute you find a toenail, I want to hear about it.” He rang off and shook his head and said, “Can’t find him. Judd.”
    Virgil eased into the chair. “Nothing in the house?”
    “I’ll tell you something. When most people build houses, there’s a whole bunch of stuff in it that just don’t burn too well,” Stryker said. He tapped his fingers on his desktop; anxiety. “Judd’s house was all wood—floors, paneling, bookcases—and a good amount of it was pine. Dry as a broom straw. There was nothing left up there this morning but the basement and a few pieces of metal and rock—refrigerator, stove, furnace, and even those are melted down into lumps. We think he was in there. But we haven’t found a thing.”
    “Huh.”
    “I’ll tell you, Virgil. If we don’t find something, this is gonna plague me,” Stryker said. “And everybody in the county, for that matter. We won’t know if he went up in smoke, or if he’s down on some French island someplace. We won’t know if that truck last night didn’t have Bill Judd in it, heading for the West Indies.”
    “Jesus, Jimmy, the guy’s what? Eighty?” Virgil said. “They were saying down at the Holiday that he’d been pretty sick. In and out of the hospital. Why in the hell would he sit here for eighty years, and then with six months to live, take off for the West Indies?”
    “Probably because he’d think it was funny, fuckin’ everybody up one last time,” Stryker said. He was unsettled, mumbled, “Sonofabitch,” then sighed, looked at two fat file folders on his