"I don't think so. In fact…"
"What?"
"We're looking for Bill Judd Junior. Got watches out for him, but he seems to be gone. The thing is, I think he might be dead."
She rolled up on her elbow. "You still think Williamson?"
"The Williamson thing freaks me out. When we braced him…I sort of bought it. He seemed as freaked out as I was, when I figured it out. He was screaming at us."
"So…?"
"So I don't know. If you pointed a gun at my head and told me to spit out a name, I'd spit out his. You think a guy, he's in the Cities, he's a newspaperman, wouldn't he know who his real mother was? Just do a search? He says he didn't, he didn't care who she was. And I guess even if he did, he wouldn't necessarily know that Judd was his father."
"If he'd ever gone for a birth certificate, to get a passport or something…"
Virgil rolled over on his back, felt the skin pulling around the cuts on his scalp and face. "I got to think about him…What was he talking to Jesse about? I saw you guys together in the back of the room."
"Well, he started out by shaking her hand, saying 'long-lost sister,' and then he started pushing her around. Where was she last week? When did she really find out she was Judd's daughter? Where was her mother?"
"Like he thought she might be involved?"
"He was unpleasant," Joan said, "But he's never been a real pleasant man."
"I keep trying to think, who else?"
SLEEP PULLED HIM UNDER. He woke up at two o'clock, and Joan was gone. Went to the bathroom, and then back to the bed, went under again, thinking…Who else? Nobody had said a thing about the.357…
Of course, Jesse wouldn't; but he didn't think that Jesse was the killer, because that would be aesthetically incongruent. She was just too good-looking.
He smiled, and mentally wrote his little story, in which the best-looking woman would never be the guilty one:
Homer shook his head. The shoot-out with Feur, the death of Feur, had blocked up a lot of potential information.
Brilliant, though, the way Stryker had picked up that seam in the hillside. Homer would never have seen it. And thank God for Stryker's reflexes: he cut Feur down before he had a chance to open up on Homer himself.
Mmmm…
Anyway:
ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND of Austria got his ass shot in Sarajevo in 1914, touching off World War I. His wife was killed at the same time. A little less than ninety years later, a bunch of guys in Scotland formed a band called Franz Ferdinand, which was why Virgil was pulling a Franz Ferdinand T-shirt over his head the next morning at seven o'clock.
Find out what happened to the DEA guys. He stopped at a gas station across the street from the motel and bought a MoonPie and a Coke: sugar, fat, and caffeine, the breakfast of champions.
Pirelli was awake in a standard room, Gomez asleep on a couch under a window. Virgil asked, "How're you doing?"
Pirelli said, "I'm hurting. Ah, God."
"How're your guys?"
"Both still alive." Pirelli reached out his good hand, and knocked on the wood-grained plastic of the bedside table. "I think, I hope…"
"What about Harmon?"
"I talked to his wife last night," Pirelli said. "She's coming out today."
"I don't want to be there," Virgil said.
"Neither do I."
They both looked into a corner for a moment, and then Virgil asked, "Was it worth it? If you'd had a good idea somebody was going to be killed…?"
"Fuck no, it wasn't worth it." Pirelli shook his head. "Don't tell anybody I said that. If I'd known what was going to happen, I'd have set up five hundred yards away and hosed down Franks and his trucks and the house and killed the whole bunch of them. But I didn't know."
"So what's next? For you?"
Pirelli shrugged: "Media, today. Docs say I'm gonna be out of work for six months or so. Then back to Chicago. Try to figure out why we're all of a sudden rolling in heroin down in Gary…same ol' same ol'."
"Nobody's pissed at you?"
Pirelli shook his head. "DEA guys get killed. It's not like the FBI."
STRYKER CAME IN. "Morning, bright eyes," he said to Pirelli. Gomez sat up on the couch, shaking his head, smacking his lips. Stryker said, "Talked to the doc one minute ago: things aren't looking too bad, but they're gonna move you all to Rochester today. Mayo."
"I don't think I need the Mayo…" Pirelli started.
"They say you're gonna need some reconstruction on that shoulder," Stryker said. "A couple of pins. Might as well get the best."
THEY TALKED FOR A WHILE. A DEA team was flying in from Washington to reconstruct the fight, and the house, and do an after-action report. The South Dakota ethanol plant had been taken down without a fight; most of the plant was legit. The lab was not: it was a clean, efficient, meth production line. There was a national stop-and-hold on Bill Judd Jr.
They were talking about that when Stryker took a call, listened for a minute, then said, "Five minutes."
And to Pirelli, Gomez, and Virgiclass="underline" "Bill Judd. He's dead. Up at his old man's place."
STRYKER AND VIRGIL went together in a county truck. Gomez and another agent followed in one of the blacked-out DEA trucks, out to the main drag, out of town and up the hill to the Buffalo Ridge park entrance, through the park gate, and up the driveway to Judd's.
Four sheriff's cars were parked by the burned-out basement, one deputy leaning on his car, talking on his radio, four more deputies standing in the high grass, north of the house, near the crest of the hill. Virgil and Stryker hopped out of the truck and Stryker raised a hand to the deputy at the car, and then they led Gomez and the other agent through the grass up the hill.
"Hell of a thing," Big Curly said, as they came up.
"What happened to him?"
"The crows were here…but it looks like something cracked his skull open. His brains…take a look."
Judd was on his back, wearing a suit and dress shoes. He didn't have sightless eyes staring at the sun, because he no longer had any eyes. Crows. The top of his head was misshapen. Not as though he were shot, but more as though his skull had been crushed. Flattened.
"Piece of rebar over here," one of the deputies said. "We're waiting for Margo to come up, but it's got blood on it, and some hair."
Virgil and Stryker went over and looked: a piece of rusty steel that might have been picked out of the burned house. "That would have done it."
No gunshot wounds. "We know one thing," Little Curly said. "It wasn't suicide."
GOMEZ ASKED, "What do you think? Feur?"
"We need a time of death, but I don't think so. It's my other guy," Virgil said.
Gomez grimaced, did a slow three-sixty, looking at the prairie lands stretched out around him forever, said, "Interesting little culture you got going here."
"Gotta be Feur," Stryker said. "Gleasons, Schmidts, the Judds-it's a Feur cleanup operation. They were gonna get out, they weren't gonna leave anything behind."
"I don't know," Virgil said.
Another deputy's car pulled in below them, and Margo Carr got out, took a gear bag out of the trunk, and trudged up the hill. "Another one," she said, heavily.
"Last one, but maybe one," Virgil said.
"What does that mean?" Stryker asked.
Virgil shrugged.
Down the hill, another truck pulled in, and Todd Williamson got out. The deputy at the truck put out a hand to him, but Williamson jogged straight past him, beat the deputy to the edge of the heavy grass, and pulled away, the deputy still yelling at him.
Big Curly blocked him: "You can't be here."
"Screw that," Williamson said. He poked a finger at Virgil. "If the genius here is right, I'm next of kin. So what happened to my brother?"
VIRGIL HEADED BACK to the motel, with one stop at the accountant's office. Olafson had just gotten up. She raised the shade on her office door, cocked an eyebrow at Virgil, and opened the door.