Dark of the Moon

think Gerald’s going anywhere. Gimme the address. The daughter’s name is, what, Jones?”
    “Cornelia Jones, that’s correct. DOB six eighteen forty-seven. We’re at her house in Apple Valley, get off at Cliff Road…”
     
    V IRGIL HAD grille-mounted LED flashers on the 4Runner, and a removable roof-mount flasher that plugged into his cigarette lighter. He’d never used them for criminal inquiries, but occasionally did use them when he felt like driving fast.
    He called the highway patrol district office in Marshall, told them that he was making an emergency run back to the Cities east on I-90 and north on I-35, as part of a murder investigation, and asked them to advise the other districts; and told them that he’d be using the flashers.
    He got Joanie as he left town. “I didn’t think you’d be up yet…” she began.
    “I’m heading for the Cities in a hurry,” Virgil said. “Back tomorrow, I hope.”
    “What happened?”
    “Got the Johnstones and they know some shit. Tell Jim when he gets up—he’ll be getting up in an hour or so.”
    “I will. Be safe, Virgil.”
     
    T HE 4 R UNNER would do an honest ninety, but at one hundred, it was breathing hard, and starting to move around the road. Virgil backed off to ninety-eight, put it on cruise control, turned on some music, and made it into the south end of the Cities in two and a half hours, got off at the main Apple Valley exit, drove in circles for a while, finally cut Roan Stallion Lane, which was half a block long, and pulled up in the driveway of Cornelia Jones.
    The house was suburban-comfortable; its distinguishing characteristic was that the lawn was essentially a field of hosta plants. Thousands of them, like a midget army from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
     
    V IRGIL DRAGGED a rocking chair halfway across the living room so that he could plant his face a foot from Gerald Johnstone’s, and said, “Gerald, you are a bad man. You are covering up for a guy who’s murdered at least five people. You were lying to me the other day and I knew it and now you’ve dragged your wife and daughter into it. This is a criminal conspiracy.”
    Gerald started to blubber, which wasn’t attractive in an elderly man. Carol Johnstone patted his thigh and said, “Tell him, Jerry, tell him, and it’ll be all right.”
    The daughter, a stolid woman with a skeptical look on her face, said, “Maybe we ought to get a lawyer. We don’t know what we’re doing here.”
    Virgil didn’t want any of that, and said to her: “You can call a lawyer. Then we’ll all go down to jail, and I’ll have them booked for obstruction of justice and abetting a murder after the fact, and you can put up your house as bail, to get them out. Now: I need the information. I’ll get it one way or another, but if we screw around for three days and somebody else is murdered while Jerry sits on the information I need to catch the killer, then I’ll put his aging ass in prison, and your mother’s too, and they’ll stay there until they die. All right?”
    That got Gerald going again, and Virgil hardened his face, and when Gerald got it under control, he said, “It was the man-on-the-moon party…”
    Virgil closed his eyes, feeling like he’d just crossed a mountaintop, and said, “Ah, shit. A party, not a man.”
     
    O N J ULY 20, 1969 , the day that Apollo 11 landed the first men on the moon, Johnstone said, Bill Judd Sr. had a party at his house on Buffalo Ridge, to watch the crescent moon come up. The state park had not yet gone in, and the road up to the house was nothing more than a long gravel driveway, coming over the back of the hill, to the back of the house.
    The party was right in the heart of the Bill Judd tomcatting days, seven or eight women and four or five men, some of the women local, two or three of them “entertainers” from the Cities.
    “I honest to God don’t know what happened up there,” Johnstone said. “All I know is what I heard through the back door. They supposedly had some cocaine, maybe, and plenty of liquor, of course, and were generally up there raising hell. They also had a cookout going.
    “So late that night, one of the girls—but maybe not one of the girls, this is what’s crazy, because you’re not going to get a bunch of guys, you know, having sex relations with a woman who’s nine months pregnant. I don’t even know if she could… ”
    He looked at his wife who said, “It’d be uncomfortable.”
    Johnstone