ALMOST STOPPED HIS HEART.
He put the Coke down and headed back down the hall; saw her damp face and hair at the end of it, and then she pulled back inside the bathroom. And by the time he'd gotten to the bathroom, she was back inside the shower.
He opened the shower door, and there she was, her back to him, as well as the third-greatest-he gave her an instant promotion-ass in Minnesota, and maybe on the entire Great Plains. "Oh, my God," he said.
"Just the back."
"Just the back, my sweet…"
"Just the back," she said. "You offered, I'm accepting."
"If you…"
"Don't you get in this shower, Virgil Flowers," she said. "You'll get all wet and we have to be at my mom's in fifteen minutes and she'll know that we've been up here fooling around."
"Gimme the soap and back up," he said.
He washed her water-slick back, and the third-greatest ass, and then, squatting, her legs, one at a time, working upward, and by the time he was getting done, she was hanging on to the faucet handles, and when he was done, he snatched her out of the shower and turned her around and kissed her and said, "Fuck your mama."
"Not my mama," she said. "Not my mama."
THEY WERE twenty minutes late getting to Laura Stryker's, driving over with all the truck windows down. Joan wanted to get the smell of sex off them, she said.
"Not as late as I might have hoped," Joan said.
"You weren't complaining twelve minutes ago," Virgil said, "unless that was your way of screaming for help."
"Don't be too proud of yourself," she said. "I'd been waiting for a long time. Bill Judd Junior could have gotten to me after all that time."
Virgil leaned close to her: "The fact of the matter is, you've gotten hold of something far beyond your simple country experience."
That made her laugh, and she pushed him away and said, "Next time, though, we're going for the slow hand."
WHEN THEY GOT out of the truck, Joan said, "Stay here, but leave the doors open. Mom might smell something if we don't air it out a little more."
"Jesus, Joanie, you're an adult…"
"It's my mom."
So he left the doors open and the engine running, and stood out in the sunlight and worked up a little sweat while Joan collected Laura. In two or three minutes they were on the front porch, Laura carefully locking the door behind her.
Laura was a handsome woman for her age, slender as her daughter, with carefully cut and tinted hair. If you were checking out mothers to see what a daughter would look like in twenty-five years, you would have taken the daughter. She got into the backseat, said, "Pleased to meet you, Virgil," and Joan hopped into the front passenger seat and said, "That's the first time I ever saw you lock the front door."
"Everybody's locking doors now. If Janet came over after dark, and knocked, I might hide out and not answer, not until this killer's caught," she said.
Joan to Virgiclass="underline" "Janet's her best friend," and to Laura: "I don't think you have to worry about Janet."
"The word is, the murdered people probably knew the killer. What do you think, Virgil?"
Virgil nodded. "I think that's right."
THEY RAN DOWN to I-90, and up the ramp, heading west, and talked over the murders. Virgil filled them in on the Roman Schmidt killing, the killer's tendency toward display.
"So what are they looking at?" Laura asked. "They must be looking at something."
"Gleason was looking at his backyard and up the hill, Schmidt was looking straight down his driveway at the road. Nothing in particular," Virgil said.
A minute later, Laura asked, "What direction were they facing? If he was facing down his driveway, Roman was facing east, and if Russell was looking up the hill, he was facing east. Would that be right?"
Virgil thought for a moment, orienting himself, and then said, "Yeah, that's right."
"They were killed at night-so maybe toward the sunrise," Laura said.
Joan asked, "But what would that tell you? That you're dealing with a religious nut?"
"That Feur person," Laura said. "Jesus was resurrected at sunrise. Maybe that has something to do with it. And in the Bible, east is the most important direction."
Virgil said, "Huh. Well, Judd was burned to death. What does that mean? Hellfire?"
"We're talking about a crazy person," Joan said. "I don't think you're gonna figure out anything from that kind of stuff. He's doing it because he's crazy."
"Interesting to talk about, though," Laura said.
They talked about the Laymons. The story was all over town five minutes after the first person picked up a newspaper. "Margaret Laymon. I didn't know it was Bill that did it, but it doesn't surprise me," Laura said. "Margaret was a hell-raiser when she was young. Somebody was going to do it, sooner or later."
"They didn't have the pill yet?"
"Yes, but…I don't know. Maybe she wanted to have a baby, and wanted Bill to be the daddy. Women get strange, sometimes."
"You being one, I'll take your word for it," Virgil said. "I hadn't noticed, myself."
CROSSING THE BORDER into South Dakota, Virgil asked, "Was Betsy Carlson prominent in any way? I mean, before she came here?"
"Oh, lord, yes. Her parents were very well-off early settlers, owned a good chunk of land along the railroad, one of the banks, at least for a while. Betsy was the life of the party when she was young," Laura said. "Everybody was a little surprised when Bill Judd married her sister, instead of her."
"There were rumors that he didn't actually have to marry her, to get what he wanted," Virgil said. "The old 'Why buy the cow if you're getting the milk for free?'"
"Could be some truth to that," Laura said. "Back then, people tended to look the other way…Have you been talking to other people…mmm…related to Bill Judd?"
"A couple," Virgil said. "Margaret Laymon, of course. A woman who now lives somewhere else-I've got a list I'm working down."
"Well, cough up the names," Joan said.
"Ah, you don't want to know," Virgil said. "Besides, I couldn't tell you if I wanted. I scrawled them all down in my notebook, and it's back at the motel. He apparently got around town, though."
His eyes caught Laura's in the rearview mirror. She was watching him with just a hint of a smile on her face.
Virgil added, "The question I was working up to, was, why wouldn't there be any press clippings about Betsy Carlson? I was looking in the newspaper files today, and there's not a single one."
After a moment of silence, Laura said, "Well, that's ridiculous. She was in every club in town, she was president of most of them, at one time or another. There should have been a hundred stories about her."
THE FLOOR NURSE at Grunewald rest home was not happy to see Virgil again, and got in his face. "Betsy was very agitated after you left. She still hasn't recovered. She tries to walk, but she's too weak. We're here to protect our clients, and you could be hurting her."
"I'm sorry about that," Virgil said, with not much contrition. "But we've got a fairly desperate situation over in Bluestem. There were two more people killed this morning, and we believe they involve something that started in Betsy's time. So: we've got to talk to her."
The nurse let her disapproval show, but when she took them to see Carlson, the old woman showed no sign of recognizing Virgil. Instead she squinted at Laura Stryker and when Laura said, "Hello, Betsy," she quavered, "Laura?"
"Yup, it's me," Laura said.
The three of them pulled up chairs, and with the nurse hovering in the background, Laura started talking to Carlson about the old days in Bluestem, about playing up on Buffalo Ridge. Carlson was older than Laura, so they hadn't run with the same groups, but they'd all known each other.
Carlson's memories wandered, sometimes were sharp, other times, vague. At one point, she blurted, "I remember when Mark died. That was an awful day."
"Most awful day in my life," Laura said. She glanced at Joan. "I was afraid for the kids. Jim was bad, but Joanie…I was afraid she might die. Or go crazy…" She bit off the sentence, realizing that it might not be the most diplomatic thing to say, given whom they were visiting.