An hour out of town, he could see the clouds bunching up in the west, lightning jumping around the horizon, while a new crescent moon still showed in his rearview mirror. He hit Windom as the wind front from the first squall line skittered through town, throwing up scrap paper and dead leaves. July was the second-best time on the prairie, right after August; the world began to smell of grain and the harvest to come.
He stopped at a convenience store for coffee. The long-haired clerk said, "Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock," and Virgil said, "You betcha." He took a leak himself, got back in the truck as the first fat drops of rain hit the windshield, still moving southwest. He cut I-90 at Worthington, got another cup of coffee, and headed west.
Into the Old West, he thought.
The real Old West. The Old West of the Sioux, of the high, dry prairie, of the range, of horse and buffalo country, got started somewhere between Worthington and Bluestem. By the time he got there, to the Old West, the rain was thrashing the 4Runner; another deluge in what was already a record-wet summer.
There weren't many lights this far out, but with the storm, I-90 closed down to a tunnel, nothing ahead, only a dim set of headlights behind him, and an occasional car or truck in the eastbound lane. He kept one eye on the white line on the right, aimed the car into his headlights, and hoped he didn't run off the road.
Listening to satellite radio, Outlaw Country. Switched over to jazz, rotated into hard rock, and then back to country.
THINKING ABOUT IT LATER, he didn't really know when he first became aware of the spark.
The spark started as a mote in his eye, above the right headlight, deep in the rain. Then it took on a more graphic quality, and he noticed it, and noticed at the same time that it had been out there for a while. The spark was a bright, golden hue, and unmoving. Another three miles and he identified it: a fire. A big one. He'd seen a few of them at night, but this was up in the sky.
How could it be up in the sky, and not move?
He flashed by an overpass, then caught, a half mile to his right, the red lights of the Jesus Christ radio station: a five-hundred-foot tower-they build them low on the prairie-with red lights that blinked Jesus, then went black, then Christ, and then black, and then quickly, JesusChrist-JesusChrist-JesusChrist.
If he was at Jesus Christ radio, Virgil thought, the spark wasn't in the sky-it was six miles ahead, north of Bluestem on Buffalo Ridge. There was only one thing that could make a spark that big, from this far away, on Buffalo Ridge: Bill Judd's house. The most expensive house for a hundred and fifty miles around, and it was burning like a barn full of hay.
"That's not something you see every night," he said to Marta Gomez, who was singing "The Circle" on the satellite radio.
He got off at the Highway 75 exit, the rain still pounding down, and went straight past the Holiday Inn, following the line of the highway toward the fire up on the ridge.
BUFFALO RIDGE was a geological curiosity, a rock-strewn quartzite plateau rising three hundred feet above the surrounding landscape. Too rocky to farm, the mound had kept its mantle of virgin prairie, the last wild ground in Stark County.
Sometime in the early sixties, Virgil had been told, Judd built his house on the eastern slope of the mound, most of which later became a state park. Judd was all by himself out there, after his wife died, and his son moved out.
He was sexually predatory, if not a sexual predator. There were rumors of local women making a little on the side, rumors of strange women from big cities, and of races not normally encountered in the countryside; rumors of midnight orgies and screams in the dark-rumors of a Dracula's castle amid the big bluestem.
They were the rumors that might follow any rich man who stayed to himself, Virgil thought, and who at the same time was thoroughly hated.
JUDD HAD STARTED as a civil lawyer, representing the big grain dealers in local lawsuits. Then he'd branched into commodities trading, real estate development, and banking. He'd made his first million before he was thirty.
In the early eighties, already rich, when most men would have been thinking of retirement, he'd been a promoter of the Jerusalem artichoke. Not actually an artichoke, but a variety of sunflower, the plant was hustled to desperate farmers as an endless wonder: a food stock like a potato, a source of ethanol as a biofuel, and best of all, a weedlike plant that would grow anywhere.
It might have been all of that, but the early-eighties fad, promoted by Judd and others, basically had been an intricate pyramid scheme, leveraged through the commodities markets. Farmers would grow seed tubers and sell them to other farmers, who'd grow seed tubers and sell them to more farmers, and eventually somebody, somewhere, would make them into fuel.
They ran out of farmers before they got to the fuel makers; and it turned out that oil would have to cost more than $50 a barrel for fuel makers to break even, and in the early eighties, oil was running at half that. The people who'd staked their futures on the Jerusalem artichoke lost their futures.
Judd was more prosperous than ever.
BUT HATED.
Hated enough, even, to be murdered. Nobody knew where the Jerusalem artichoke money had gone-Judd said it all went for lobbying, for getting bills passed in St. Paul and Washington, for preliminary planning and architectural work on an ethanol plant, and loan service-but most people thought that it went into speculative stocks, and then a bank account somewhere, probably with a number on it, rather than a name.
The Stark County sheriff at the time, a man named Russell Copes, had been elected on a ticket of putting Judd in jail. He hadn't gotten the job done, and had shortly thereafter moved to Montana. The state attorney general took a halfhearted run at Judd, on the evidence developed by Copes, and there'd been a trial in St. Paul. Judd had been acquitted by a confused jury, and had moved back to his house on Buffalo Ridge.
That was a greater mystery than even the Jerusalem artichoke business: why did he stay?
Stark County was a raw, windy corner of the Great Plains that had been losing population for half a century, bitterly cold in winter, hot and dry in the summer, with nothing much in the way of diversion for a rich man.
Now his mansion was burning down.
Everybody in town would know about the fire; even with the thunderstorm coming through, a half-hundred souls had come out to take a look at it.
When Buffalo Ridge became a state park, Judd had donated two hundred acres of prairie, which had been expansively appraised and provided a nice tax deduction. As part of the deal, the state built an approach road to the top of the hill, where an observation platform was built, so tourists could look at the park's buffalo herd. Judd's driveway came off the road. The way the locals figured it, he not only got a tax deduction for donating two hundred acres of unfarmable rock, he also got the state to maintain his driveway, and plow it in the winter.
Virgil had been to the park a dozen times, and knew his way in, threading past a line of cars and trucks pulled to the edge of County Road 8. A sheriff's squad car blocked the park road up the hill, and a crowd of gawkers stood just below it. Even from a half mile away, the fire looked enormous. He eased the truck past the rubberneckers and up to the squad. A cop in a slicker walked up and Virgil rolled down the window and said, "Virgil Flowers, BCA. Is Stryker up there?"
"Hey, heard you were coming," the cop said. "I'm Little Curly. Yeah, he's up there. Let me get my car out of the way."
"What about Judd?"
Little Curly shook his head: "From what I hear, they can't find him. His housekeeper says he was up there this afternoon. He's senile and don't drive himself anymore…so he might still be in there."