Dark of the Moon

with,” Joan said. “Being scared, being worried, being lonely. A lot of things changed in the past couple of weeks.” She looked up at him: “You’re brooding.”
    “Sorry.”
     
    D AVENPORT HAD CALLED the morning after the shooting and the first thing he’d asked was, “How are you ?”
    “He never touched me,” Virgil said.
    “That’s not what I meant,” Davenport said. “I meant, ‘How’s your head?’”
    “Don’t know.”
    “Keep me up on it,” Davenport said. “You’ve always been the sensitive type. It worries me.”
    “Okay.”
    Davenport pushed: “Virgil: the guy was like a drunk driver, and you were the wall. It’s not the wall’s fault when the drunk gets killed.”
    “Okay.”
    “When are you coming back? No rush, you’re on leave until we have the board.”
    “I’ll be back. Couple of things to pick up here,” Virgil said.
    “Take it easy. If it really gets on top of you, there are pills,” Davenport said. “Believe me: they can help. I know.”
    “Thanks, man. Talk to ya.”
     
    S O V IRGIL AND J OAN looked at the clouds and picked out an elephant and a burning bush and a fat man’s ass, complete with a tiny blue anus with a streak of sunshine showing through it, and Joan asked, “How did you get so focused on Todd?”
    “The Revelation,” Virgil said. “The book of Revelation at the Gleason’s. It was planted. It was not in the crime-scene photos. There are at least a couple of hundred photographs inside the Gleason place, and there was no Revelation. The house was sealed up tight—not even family was allowed inside. So it had to be a cop or somebody with a cop. When Big Curly confessed that he’d taken Williamson through, that did it. Although…I still considered the possibility that it was one of the Curlys. Or another cop.”
    After a minute, he added, “Ah, man.”
    Joan said, “I know you’re upset, but I say, thank God it’s over.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, look: the alternative would have been a heck of a lot worse—if it’d been you who got shot.”
    “On the other hand, Margo Carr did get shot,” Virgil said. “She’s gonna have six different surgeries before she’s back. Hospital for a month, physical therapy, gonna have to take some skin off her thigh to make her neck right, never gonna be right…”
     
    S HE LOOKED HIM over carefully: “You’re really frozen up, Virgil. The guy was crazy.”
    Virgil, lying on his back, his head cupped in the palms of his hands, said, “I had a chance to talk with him before he died. Isn’t that just like a cop? Interrogating a dying man?”
    “You didn’t know he was dying,” she said.
    “I knew I’d shot him with a .30-06, which wouldn’t do him a hell of a lot of good.”
    “Well…”
     
    T HEY PICKED OUT a watermelon, which was just an oval cloud, and a three-legged dog, or maybe a three-legged chicken, after the wind blew a beak on it, and Joan asked, “What’d you ask him?”
    Virgil wiggled his butt around on the blanket, and said, “I asked him about the woman who called and told him that he was Bill Judd’s son. Asked whether it was an old woman or a young woman.”
    Long silence. Then, “Oh, shit.”
    “Yeah. He said young.”
    They sat in another cloud of silence, until finally she said, “Who was the other candidate?”
    “Your mom. Amy Sweet said she mentioned at her bridge club, three, four years back, that Judd was getting into the ethanol business. I asked her who the members of the club were. Your mom was one of them.”
    “So how did that…?”
    “A whole list of things. I couldn’t figure out how Williamson knew he was Judd’s son. I talked to Maggie Lane’s mother, and she didn’t know. She said Maggie might not have known for sure…though I suspect she did. That might have been what she and Judd were arguing about the night of the man-on-the-moon party: the pregnancy.”
    Virgil yanked a long grass stem out of its envelope, nibbled on the sweet end. “Anyway, if nobody in the Cities knew, then it had to come from here. And who would put Todd Williamson in with the Judds? Had to be somebody with a hard grudge against Judd. Who was that? The Strykers.
    “It seemed too subtle to be Jim. And then you told me directly that you’d been too young to be much affected by your father’s death—but your mother told me the exact opposite, a couple of times. Said your father’s death really tore you up.
    “And you’ve been all those years out here on the