The bank had a color Xerox machine. He made two Xeroxes of the photo, rented a new box, got a new key, and locked up everything but the Xeroxes. He'd asked the bank manager if he could use the Xerox privately, without anyone looking over his shoulder; when he was done, and the Schmidt paper was locked up again, the manager asked, "A clue?"
"You wouldn't believe it if I told you," Virgil said. "I think we're finally making some headway."
The manager was openmouthed: Virgil thought, Spread it around.
NEXT HE WENT to the safe-deposit box where they put the Judd Sr. papers after drilling out the original box. With the banker looking over his shoulder as a witness, he took out the money, removed all the paper, put the money back, and locked the box again. The paper he took to a carrel, where he began working through it. There was nothing at all about the Schmidts or the Gleasons.
In fact, in all the business papers, the only thing that was clear was that Judd Sr. had given his son at least two million dollars over the years-copies of gift tax reports had been carefully clipped together with other tax papers-and had loaned him another million.
The kid was deeply in debt to his old man…but the old man was already dying, so it seemed unlikely that Junior would take the risk of hustling him along, when the estate was about to fall to him anyway.
WHEN VIRGIL had finished with the boxes, the manager moved him to a computer terminal in a vice-president's office, and signed him onto a bank service that kept computer images of checks. "There are images going back to 1959. The early ones can be a little obscure, because they were on microfilm, and got blown up and computerized later…"
He looked first at Roman Schmidt's account, and a light went on in his head: from 1970 through 1985, when Schmidt was supposedly paying off a mortgage on his home, he found not a single check that appeared to be a mortgage payment.
That, he thought, was something.
Looking through a half-dozen Judd accounts, he found more than thirty thousand checks, so many that he simply didn't have time to work through them. But there were no incoming checks for $547 between 1970 and 1985; no sign that Roman Schmidt had ever written a check to Judd. Just as interesting, during the whole period of the Jerusalem artichoke scam, he found little variation in Judd's income or outgo. There had to be other accounts that he didn't know about. He'd talk to Sandy, Davenport's research assistant, and see what she could find in the state's corporate filings…
AGAIN, the Gleasons were a dry hole.
WHEN VIRGIL WALKED out the door, it was one o'clock in the afternoon, one of the best of the year: very warm, with a touch of breeze, and the smell of August coming up. He got on his cell phone, and called Joanie: "I thought you might be the tiniest bit irritated with me when I dropped you off," he said. "Were you?"
"Somewhat. But I'm over it," she said. "I was surprised, more than anything. After I thought about it, I wasn't surprised anymore."
"Mmm. Would you be interested in going out to the farm this evening? Explore the pond and the waterfall?"
"Maybe, if you play your cards right," she said.
"What cards would those be?"
"Stop at Ernhardt's and buy us a box lunch and a six-pack. Or box dinner. Picnic. Then I won't have to cook anything."
"Deal," Virgil said. "I've got a question. Is there a funeral home in Bluestem?"
"Sure. Johnstone's. Over on the west side, by the cemetery. Go out on Fifth Street, you'll run right into it."
"Do you think they might have records going back to the seventies?"
"Well, Gerald Johnstone's still alive. He must go back to the fifties. His son, Oliver, runs the place now. But Gerald's sharp as a tack, he lives up by the Gleasons. About six houses down the way, on the left. Right on the edge of the coulee. Wife's name is Carol."
"Hmm." Virgil thought: Betsy Carlson, the old woman in the nursing home, said that "Jerry" had been there the night of the man in the moon.
"He sure as heck didn't do it," Joan said. "He's sharp, but I doubt that he could pick up a gallon of milk, much less a body."
"All right…What kind of sandwiches?"
VIRGIL WALKED OVER to Ernhardt's Cafe, ordered a box lunch, roast beef sandwiches on sourdough, with mustard and mild onions, a pound-sized carton of blue-cheese potato salad, a six-pack of Amstel, two plastic plates, and two sets of plastic silverware. The woman behind the counter said he could have it in ten minutes, or he could pick it up anytime before six o'clock. He told her he'd be back at five, borrowed her phone book, and looked up Gerald Johnstone's address.
JOHNSTONE LIVED in a redwood-sided ranch-style house with a walkout basement on the coulee side, a deck looking out at the town, and a three-car garage. A sprinkler system was watering the unnaturally green lawn when Virgil pulled into the drive. He dodged the overlapping wet spots along the drive and the walk to the front door, ducked under a wind chime, and rang the bell.
A moment later, an elderly man, gray-faced and wary, spoke through a screened window to the side of the porch. "Who are you?"
Virgil held up his ID. "Virgil Flowers, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Like to talk to you for a couple of minutes, Mr. Johnstone."
Johnstone unlocked the inner door, pushed open the screen door. He was well into his eighties, Virgil thought, tall, too thin, with shaky hands and blue eyes that seemed to be fading. He was bald on top, with a few strands of silvery white hair combed over the bald spot. "Don't usually have everything all locked up," he said. "My wife is pretty nervous about all these killings. Old people like us."
As he said it, a woman called from the back, "Jerry? Who is it?"
"Police," he called back.
As Virgil stepped across the threshold, she came out of the back of the house holding a stack of neatly folded towels. She was a pink, round, busy woman, fifteen years younger than her husband. She asked, "Are you the Flowers gentleman?"
"Yes, I am," he said. "Pleased to meet you."
THEY TALKED in the living room. The Johnstones didn't know anything about anything, but they were scared to death and were willing to admit it. "He's killing my friends, whoever it is," Johnstone said. "Bill Judd wasn't much of a friend, especially in later years, but I knew him pretty well. Roman and Gloria and Russell and Anna were my friends. I'm afraid that…you know…he might be coming for us."
"Any idea why he might be? What he's doing?" Virgil asked.
"No idea at all. We've been wracking our brains," Johnstone said.
Carol Johnstone said, "In a town like this, everybody has a little spot of trouble with everybody else, sooner or later-we're all too close together. But you get over it, and you're friends again. But who could hate this much…" Her voice trailed off. Then, "I'd like to say something, but I wouldn't like it getting around."
"Absolutely," Virgil said.
"George Feur was working on Bill Judd," Carol Johnstone said. "Talking to him about his soul, trying to get some money out of him-and he did get some money out of him, I think. Feur deals in hate, and the people around him are attracted by it. I think that's where the problem might be, but why they would kill old people, I don't know."
"'Cause they're nutcases," Gerald Johnstone said.
Virgil said to Gerald Johnstone, "I'm looking at Reverend Feur. But there's also a possibility-because the victims are somewhat elderly-that something happened way back when," Virgil said. "I'd like you to look at a photograph of a body and tell me if it was in your funeral home."
And to Carol Johnstone: "It's not a pleasant picture, ma'am…"
"Pictures of bodies never bothered me," she said. "I worked in the funeral home for thirty years and saw everything you can see."