Dark of the Moon

desktop, and pushed them across at Virgil.
    “This is it. Everything we got. There’s also a DVD in there, all the same stuff, if you’d rather use a computer. You need Adobe Reader.”
    “All right,” Virgil said. “But boil it down for me. What’d you get, and what are you looking at now?”
     
    V IRGIL WASN ’ T in Bluestem for Bill Judd, though.
    He was there for the Gleasons.
    Russell Gleason had been a town doctor for fifty years, retired for ten. He and his wife, Anna, lived in an affluent enclave of businessmen and professionals on a hillock above the Stark River reservoir, a mile east of downtown and handy to the Bluestem Country Club. Anna had been a nurse for a while, when she was younger, and then had gotten elected to the county commission, where she served six terms and then retired for good. They had three children, but the children had gone, two to the Twin Cities, one to Sioux Falls.
    Both were in their eighties and in good health. Russell still played nine holes a day at the club, in good weather, and Anna had her women’s groups. They had a housekeeper, a Mexican illegal named Mayahuel Diaz who was well liked by most everyone who knew her, and who came in on weekdays.
    Three weeks and four days before Virgil came to town, Russell had played a round of golf on a Friday afternoon, the round cut short by rain. He had a few drinks with his golfing pals, then hooked up with his wife. They’d gone to the Holiday Inn for dinner. On the way back home, they stopped at a SuperAmerica—a credit card said it was twelve minutes after nine when they paid for the gas.
    At eleven o’clock that rainy night, a neighbor had been sent to town by his wife to get a quart of milk. As he came past the Gleason place, he saw what looked like a strange sculpture, like a dummy or a scarecrow, sitting in the Gleasons’ backyard, bathed in yard lights.
    He got a quart of milk and came back up the hill, drove past the Gleasons’ house, saw the scarecrow or whatever it was, got as far as his driveway, then said, the hell with it, that scarecrow was too strange. He’d just stop and ask if everything was okay.
    It wasn’t.
    The scarecrow was Russell Gleason, propped up with a stick, his eyes shot out.
     
    T HE SHOOTINGS had happened inside the house. Anna had been shot to death as she sat on a couch in the living room; shot once in the heart. Russell had been shot three times, once in the lower back, and once in each eye. Then his body had been dragged outside and propped up, staring gap mouthed and blank eyed into the dark.
    “It looked like he tried to run, but he couldn’t,” Stryker said. “That the sequence was, that he was standing up, and Anna was sitting down. The killer shot her in the heart and Russell turned to run, and the killer shot him in the spine, from the back, just as he got to the dining room.”
    “How far was that? How far did he run?”
    “About three steps. I’ll get you the key to the house, on the way out the door, we’ve got a couple in evidence,” Stryker said. “Anyway, the dining room is connected to the living room, and it looks like he was shot as he started into the dining room. He went down, and rolled on his back, and the killer stood over him and shot him twice, once in each eye. Goddamnedest thing.”
    The slugs were .357 hollow points, and exited the back of Gleason’s head into the floor, and were recovered, though in fragments.
    “The eye thing, propping him up in the yard, in the lights—a ritual of some kind,” Virgil said.
    “Looks like something, but I don’t know what,” Stryker said, shaking his head. “The second shot was a waste of good ammunition, I can tell you that. And the shooter took a risk—the Gleasons’ house is three hundred fifty feet from the nearest neighbor, and it was raining, so the houses were closed up with air-conditioning. Still, a .357 makes a damn loud bang. If somebody had been walking by…the third shot was an extra risk.”
    “Excitement? I’ve seen that,” Virgil said. “Guy starts pulling the trigger and can’t stop.”
    “One in each eye? He had to take his time,” Stryker said. “I mean, he fired from two feet away, straight down, but you still have to take your time to put it right through an eye.”
    “So he’s nuts. A ritual, a revenge thing…Maybe a warning?”
    Stryker sighed. “What the whole situation hints at, when you boil it down, is that it’s somebody from here, that we all know. Somebody who