"So it was a good bust."
"Yup. It was, and still is."
VIRGIL SAID, "Another thing-if this all somehow involves Judd's money, then your friend Jesse might be in trouble, could be a target for somebody."
"You think?"
"Maybe. Or maybe not." Virgil scratched his ear. "If she's got one of those ramblin' gamblin' guys around, who figured she might become a millionairess, under the right circumstances…"
"Man, that hadn't occurred to me," Stryker said. He sat back in his chair, rocking.
"Could Jesse or Margaret set something up?" Virgil asked.
Stryker rubbed his chin. "Not Margaret. Don't see that. Jesse wouldn't do it on purpose. I could see her sitting around, suckin' a little smoke, bullshitting with somebody, dreaming about all the money…and she wakes up in a world of hurt, when her pal goes off and does something about it."
"A concept to consider," Virgil said.
"I will," Stryker said.
"And if she doesn't have anything to do with it, hell, maybe she'll need her body guarded."
Stryker stood up. "I'm heading out there. You want to look at her, or go see Feur?"
"I'll go after Feur," Virgil said. Stryker had been looking for an excuse to go out. "You can tell me what you get from Jesse and maybe I'll talk to her later in the day."
"Good enough," Stryker said. "You take care."
THE DAY LOOKED like the day before, sunny, a touch of wind, about as nice a July day that you could hope for; four kids, two boys and two girls, were dancing along the sidewalk ahead of him, boys in dropped-crotch pants, the girls with pierced ears and noses, but there was a small-town innocence about it; testing their chops, and sometimes, forgetting, they'd hold hands. They all looked back at him a couple of times, knowing him for a cop.
Nice a day as it was, there was too much humidity hanging around, and thunderstorms would be popping by late afternoon. If it got hot enough, some of them could be bad. Nothing to do about it.
Virgil walked down to the Record, stopping at the drugstore for a sleeve of popcorn, and at the newspaper, found Williamson putting the last bit of the next day's newspaper together.
Williamson lit up as soon as Virgil walked through the front door. "I was hoping I'd see you this morning. I called down to the motel and they said you were gone already."
Virgil nodded. "I was hoping to poke through your library, if you've got one. Clippings, and such."
"We can do that. But it'd be pretty damn ungrateful of you, if you didn't answer a couple of questions."
"You can ask," Virgil said.
"You took a different attitude yesterday…"
"Well, I was in public. I'll talk to you, but the deal is this: I talk off-the-record, and you write it like it came from God," he said. "I might not tell you everything, but I won't lie to you."
"Deal," Williamson said. He punched a couple of keys on his computer, switched out of his compositing program into a word processor, and asked, "Do you think the.357 used in the murders was one of the guns issued to the sheriff's office years ago?"
"I have no idea," Virgil said. Williamson opened his mouth to object, but Virgil held up a hand. "I'm not avoiding the question. I really don't have any idea. They're not a commonly bought weapon anymore. Most people go for automatics, because they're on TV, and if you're looking for hunting power in a revolver, you might go for a.44 mag or a.454 Casul. The.357s were a cop's gun, at one time, and that's the only reason anybody ever talked about the idea. There were a bunch of them in the sheriff's office, and they all went away, and maybe…who knows?"
"All right," Williamson said. "Second question: Do you think the killer is local?"
"Yes," Virgil said.
"You want to expand on that?" Williamson asked.
"No."
"Any suspects?"
"Not at the moment."
Williamson said, "I'm not getting much for my clips."
Virgiclass="underline" "What time do you have to finish putting the paper together? It's out tomorrow morning, right?"
"Can't push it past three o'clock. I download it to the printing plant-it's over in Sioux Falls-and pick it up at eleven," he said. "If I push it one minute past three, they won't give it to me until midnight or one o'clock, just to fuck with me."
"All right. At two o'clock, you call me on my cell phone," Virgil said. "You might have the story by then, but maybe not. But it would be…your lead story."
Williamson's eyebrows went up. "The Judd fire is the lead story."
"Two days old. Everybody knows it," Virgil said. "This other story is known by damn few, and you'd sure as hell wake up the town tomorrow morning, if you printed it. But if you give me up as the source, you'll never get a word from me for the rest of the investigation."
"Another story from God, huh?" Williamson's tongue touched his lower lip: he wanted the story. "Let me show you the morgue. We still call it that, here."
THE MORGUE was the size of a suburban bedroom, painted a color that was a combination of dirt green and dirt brown. The walls were lined with oak library chests, with hundreds of six-inch-high, six-inch-wide, two-foot-deep drawers, surrounding a desk with an aging Dell computer. Williamson knocked on one of the cabinets. "We file by name and subject. Before 1999, if the subject is something with a hundred names in it, we file the five most important names to the story, and cross-reference to the subject. So if you're showing a goat at FFA, and you're thirty-third on the list, somebody would have to look under FFA to find your name, because we didn't put it in the name file. After 1999, we stopped clipping, and put everything on CDs, cross-referenced by a reference service. You'll find all names and subjects after 1999."
"Even if you're thirty-third on the list?"
"With a goat," Williamson said. "I'd sit here and show you how to use the computer, but you can figure it out in five minutes and I'm on deadline. Instructions are Scotch-taped on the desk on the left side. Have at it."
HE STEPPED AWAY, but lingered, like he had another question, so Virgil asked, "Another question?"
"How're you getting along with Jim Stryker?"
"Good. We've known each other for a while," Virgil said.
"Yeah…the baseball. But the word out of the sheriff's shop is that they really had to stuff you down his throat," Williamson said.
"Is that right?"
Williamson nodded: "Could just be office politics, but the word was, you could show off the sheriff's…inadequacies."
"I work on eight or ten murders a year," Virgil said. "You guys go decades without one. I'm a specialist. No harm in calling in a specialist."
Williamson chuckled. "That wasn't how they were skinning the cat at the courthouse."
WHEN WILLIAMSON was gone, Virgil wandered around, looking at yellowed labels on the drawers, figured out the system, names over here, subjects over there. The tall files were photos, mostly eight-by-ten originals, which stopped entirely in 2002; must have bought a digital camera, Virgil thought. The photos still smelled of developer and stop bath; the clips smelled of old cigarette smoke and pulp paper gone sour.
The Judd photo files showed Judd in every decade starting in the 1940s, as a young man in a pale suit, but even then with bleak, black eyes.
The pre-1999 Judd clipping files took up four drawers, hundreds of crumbling clippings entangled in small gray envelopes. Judd Jr. had several packets of his own, but they occupied only half a drawer. The measure of a couple of lives, Virgil thought.
The file envelopes had an average of eight to ten articles each, and the bulk of the Judd Sr. clips, amounting to several stories a week, came in the 1980s, during the Jerusalem artichoke controversy.
Judd was eventually accused of thirty-two counts of fraud by the Minnesota attorney general, based on evidence partly local and partly developed out of St. Paul. The assistant AG who prosecuted, and who apparently didn't understand his own evidence, was torn to pieces by Judd's defense attorneys in a trial in St. Paul. The local county attorney and the local sheriff were both defeated in the next election, by pissed-off voters.