"I'd appreciate it if you'd check," Virgil said.
THE MISSING BOX intrigued him. The librarian showed him how to thread the film they had, and he looked at four months around Schmidt's mortgage loan, and in the quick review, saw nothing that struck him. No strange women in automobile accidents…
Not enough to work with; not yet. And it was possible that Judd had simply bought Schmidt, to be used as necessary.
VIRGIL WAS OUT the library door at twenty minutes to three. By ten minutes of three, he'd changed into a pale blue shirt with a necktie, khaki slacks, and a navy blue sport coat. Looking at himself in a mirror, he decided he looked like a greeter at a minor Indian casino.
He got back to the courthouse at one minute to three. Twenty people were standing outside the courthouse door, mostly older, mostly men, mostly deep in conversation. Two television remote trucks were parked on the lawn, cables snaking through the doors of the courthouse.
Inside was chaos. The courtroom might take a hundred people if nobody breathed too hard. In addition to two TV cameramen, who'd rigged lights over an attorney's table that had been dragged in front of the judge's bench, there were two on-camera people, both women; four tired-looking men and two tired-looking women who were probably from newspapers; two guys with tape recorders who might be from radio stations; and about a hundred locals who weren't going anywhere.
Virgil stuck his head inside, took it all in, then headed down the hall to Stryker's office before he attracted any attention. His phone went off, and he pulled it out of his pocket: Stryker. He buzzed past the secretary, stuck his head into Stryker's office and said, "Yo."
Stryker hung up the phone. "Where'n the hell have you been?"
"Running around," Virgil said. "Do you know what you're going to say?"
"Well." Stryker shrugged. "Tell the truth, I guess."
"Jesus, Jim, you can't do that." Virgil looked around, saw the secretary watching, and closed the office door on her. "It'd stop us in our tracks."
"Maybe if you'd been here an hour ago, we could have cooked something up."
"There's no cooking," Virgil said. "You go out there, you give them the gory details of the three scenes-Gleason, Judd, and Schmidt. Everybody local already knows about them, so you're not giving anything away. Talk about them being shot in the eyes. Talk about Judd being burned right down to the anklebones. TV people will like that. Tell them that we've developed information that would suggest that the killer is local, and that we've come up with a number of leads that we can't talk about, but that…if they come back in a week or ten days, we believe that we'll have a lot more. That we're rolling."
"Are we?" Stryker asked.
"Kind of."
"Virgil…"
"You don't tell them what it is, dummy," Virgil said. "That's the confidential part. We're rolling, but we can't talk about it."
"If I do that, and if I don't come up with something in ten days, I am truly screwed."
"If you go out there and say we ain't got jack-shit, you're truly screwed anyway," Virgil said. "If you go out and say the hounds of hell are on the killer's heels, maybe he'll make a move that we can see."
"Mother of God."
"She ain't here, Jim. It's just you and me."
STRYKER STRAIGHTENED himself out, and as they were about to go out, asked, "How much detail?"
"More than you think you should. The eyes, and the fact that it seems to be a ritual. The stick that propped up Schmidt, facing toward the east. That Gleason was propped up, facing the east. That nothing was left of Judd but his ankle and wrist bones, and the wire from his heart. They'll eat that up…"
"I'm gonna need some heart work," Stryker said. "Honest to God, I'm gonna need some heart work."
At the last minute, walking down the hall, Virgil whispered, "You're the grim sheriff of a rural county. You're an honest, upright, tight-jawed, God-fearing cowboy. You don't want to talk about it, but you think you should, because we're in a democracy. You're grim. You don't smile, because the dead people are friends. This guy is killing your people."
"Grim," Stryker said.
HE WAS, and he pulled it off, barely moving his jaws.
Virgil said thirty-two words: "We're working on it hard, and like the sheriff says, we're rolling. But the BCA's position is that the sheriff runs the operation, and we let him do the talking for us."
A woman from a television station in Sioux Falls liked Stryker a lot, got tight with him, pushed him a little: "What're you gonna do when you catch this guy?" she asked.
"Gonna hope that the sonofabitch fights back," Stryker said, his face like a rock. "Save the state some trial money."
They didn't even cut the sonofabitch.
AFTERWARD, in Stryker's office, Virgil told him the truth: "I think you did it."
"So we got ten days or two weeks." He took a turn around his office. "What'd you think about the chick from Sioux Falls?"
"If Jesse doesn't work out, give her a call," Virgil said.
"She had a nice…bodice."
Made Virgil laugh.
THE TV PEOPLE were packed up and gone by four-thirty, leaving behind a crowd of locals who were dissipating like the fizz on a hot Coke. Virgil picked up the box lunch at Ernhardt's, and called Joan: "You ready?"
"Not until after the news."
Virgil went back to the motel, peed, put on a cowboy shirt and running shoes, let the shirt hang outside his pants to cover the pistol. On the way to Joan's house, he dialed Sandy, Davenport's research assistant. "How are we doing with the tax returns?"
"I've got them stacked up to my elbows," she said. "I talked to Lucas, and I'm sending them down there with a messenger. He'll leave here tomorrow at eight, you should have them by noon."
"Terrific. Get me one more set of records, if you can: Carol and Gerald Johnstone, both of Bluestem, owners or former owners of the Johnstone Funeral Home."
"They'll be in the package," she said.
"Also: check with the state historical society, and see if they have copies of the Bluestem Record newspaper for the months of May through September, 1969."
"I couldn't do that today-they'll be closed," Sandy said. "Tomorrow I won't be here-and then there's the weekend. I could see if I could find somebody else…"
"Ah, boy…" Virgil said. "Okay. Monday, first thing?"
"First thing."
He described the dead woman on the table, told her she might have been an auto-accident victim. "If I find anything, I'll fax it to the motel," she said.
"No, no-call me on my cell. You can read it to me. I don't want to give this away."
11
THE NEWS WAS just coming up when Virgil knocked on Joan's front door. She shouted, "Come on in," and he went through into her living room. "Did you see me at the press conference?"
"No…"
"I got crushed," Joan said. "I was in the back and this fat guy from the Firestone store, I got welded to his butt. Here we go…"
THE PRESS CONFERENCE was the lead story and sucked up four or five minutes of the broadcast. Virgil had been right about the details: they loved it. And the cameras loved Stryker's face, and the tight jaws. "That's my brother," Joan said, delighted, when it was over. "He looked like a movie star."
"He was good," Virgil said.
"You've been holding out on me, too," Joan said. She'd stacked a duffel bag near the front door, and picked it up on the way out. "You never told me that you guys were rolling, you've been all downbeat."
"Yeah, well…" he mumbled.
"What?"
"Nothing," Virgil said.
"What'd you say?" They'd just gotten into the truck. "You said something."