Dark of the Moon

fresh, but they weren’t fifteen minutes old. They didn’t develop between the time she died and the time she went off Buffalo Jump. They were hours old. But the doctor said she died in the accident, the sheriff…”
    “What happened to the miracle baby?” Virgil asked.
    “Adopted out,” Johnstone said. “I don’t know the details to that. But, the baby was adopted out. Baby boy.”
     
    V IRGIL LEFT THEM SCARED: “You stay here. You’re at risk, but if it took Shrake and Jenkins a whole day to track you down, I don’t think the killer will get you. If you decide you don’t want to stay here, if it starts to feel hinky, get out to a motel. You don’t have to go far, to be completely lost. If you do that, you let me know. I’ll give you my cell phone…”
     
    O UT IN HIS CAR, he went through the name file on his computer, called Dr. Joe Klein.
    “It’s that fuckin’ Flowers,” Klein said, when he came up. “What do you want?”
    “You going out?”
    “No. I’m reading Proust, fifty pages a night, all summer,” Klein said. “I’m forty-two pages in, on tonight’s quota.”
    “Sounds like a great read, you gotta have a quota,” Virgil said. “That’s how I read a chemistry book one time.”
    “Great chatting with you, Virgil,” Klein said.
    “Just being sociable,” Virgil said. “How’s the old lady?”
    “What do you want?”
    “I want to come over to your house and have you look at a photograph,” Virgil said.
    “Will this be billable?”
    “Hell, I don’t know. I doubt it.”
     
    K LEIN WAS the Hennepin County medical examiner. He gave Virgil directions to his home in Edina, north and west across town, from Apple Valley. Virgil was at his front door in twenty minutes.
    Klein’s wife, Kate, met him at the door. She was tall, thin, with a sharp nose and gold-rimmed glasses. “Gimme a hug, you big lug,” she said.
    He did; and she felt kinda good…
    Klein said, “That’s enough of that. What’s the picture?”
    They took it into his home office. Kate, a pediatrician, looked over their shoulders as Klein inspected it with a magnifying glass. Klein hemmed and hawed a bit, and finally his wife said, “My, God, Joseph, you’re not in federal court. Spit it out.”
    Klein tapped the photo, the woman’s rib cage. “Your undertaker is right. If she died in fifteen or twenty minutes, these bruises didn’t come from the accident. Besides, I’ve seen bruises like this before—this is what you get when somebody dies after a bar fight. When somebody gets beat bad with a pool cue, you see this striping effect, if it has time to develop. Say, there’s a bar fight, a guy gets beat bad, dies the next day. This is what you see. If he dies right at the scene, you don’t see it.”
     
    V IRGIL CALLED J OHNSTONE: “Gerald, did you ever go up to Judd’s house?”
    “Oh, yeah. Several times. I wasn’t real popular with him, because I was the mortician and he was sort of superstitious. But I did go a few times.”
    “Did he have a pool table?”
    “Oh, sure. He had everything. Swimming pool, pool room, hot tub…he had all that stuff. The joke was, his decorator was Playboy magazine.”
     
    K ATE K LEIN SAID, “Pool room?”
    “Yup.”
    “God, you lead such a neat life,” she said. “If only you were a rich doctor, I might have married you.”
    “You woulda had to get in line,” Klein said. “This boy’s been married so often he’s got rice burns on his face.”

16
    V IRGIL LEFT THE K LEINS’.
    Saturday night, nowhere to go.
    He thought about calling Davenport, but he’d been leaning on Davenport too hard, and decided to let it go. Instead, he checked into the St. Paul Hotel, put on a fresh pair of jeans, a Flaming Lips T-shirt, buffed up his boots, and headed over to the Minnesota Music Café for a couple of beers.
    Bumped into Shrake, who was there with a big-haired secretary from the Department of Agriculture; she said she dated him because he had a big gun. Then Shrake wanted to know what happened with the Johnstones, and a couple of St. Paul cops came over, and Virgil danced with a woman who had a butterfly tattoo around her navel. He’d gone back for a third beer when a woman’s hand slipped into his back jeans pocket and a familiar voice said, “I’d know that little butt anywhere.”
    He turned and said, “Goddamn, Jeanie. How’ve you been?”
    She said, “Okay,” and to a girlfriend, she said, “This is my first ex-husband, Virgil Flowers.