Dark of the Moon Read Online Free PDF

from? I mean, that’s an artwork. That’s the Venus de Milo , and you’re a bunch of goddamned Germans.”
    “Yeah,” Stryker said, a noncommittal note in his voice.
    Virgil looked at him: “What? She’s married to the mayor? You don’t even look at her ass?”
    “No, I don’t, really,” Stryker said. “And she’s not married. She’s been divorced since February. Folks figure she’s about ripe for the pluckin’.”
    “Have you asked her out?”
    “Nope,” Stryker said.
    They both looked after her as she crossed the street and went on down the sidewalk toward Main. Virgil said, “You’re divorced, Jimmy. I know you’re not hung up on your ex, because she’s in Chicago and you hate her. I mean, I hate her, and I only met her once. So here’s the woman with the fourth-best ass in the state of Minnesota, right in your hometown, and not a bad set of cupcakes, either, from what I could see…I mean, pardon me for asking, and not that it matters at all, but you’re not queer, or something?”
    Stryker grinned. “Nope.”
    The woman tossed her white-blond hair as she stepped up on the far curb, and might have glanced back at them—as all women would, she knew they were talking about her—and then Virgil turned to Stryker, about to continue his analysis of her better points, and noticed that Stryker had precisely the same white-blond hair as the woman; and Stryker had those jade-green eyes.
    A thought crossed Virgil’s mind.
    He said, “That’s your sister, isn’t it?”
    “Yup.”
    They both looked down the street, but the woman had disappeared behind a hedge, at a crooked place in the sidewalk. Virgil said, “Listen, Jimmy, that whole thing about her ass and all…”
    “Never mind about that,” Stryker said. “Joanie can take care of herself. You just take care of this cocksucker who’s killing my people.”

4
    A T THE H OLIDAY I NN, Virgil spread the Gleason murder files across the bed and the small desk, isolating names and scratching out a time line on a yellow legal pad.
    The sheriff himself had served as the case manager, with a deputy named Larry Jensen as lead investigator. A woman named Margo Carr was the crime-scene tech, and a variety of other deputies provided backup. The medical examiner was based in Worthington and covered an eight-county area of southwest Minnesota. The pathology looked competent, but didn’t reveal much more than the first cop figured out when he got to the scene: four shots, two dead.
    Carr, the crime-scene tech, had recovered all four slugs, but they were so distorted that their use in identifying the weapon would be problematic. The .357 was almost certainly a revolver—Desert Eagle semiautos, made in Israel, were chambered for .357, but that would be a rare specimen out on the prairie. The fact that no brass was found at the scene also suggested a revolver, or a very careful killer.
    A heavy-load .357 was not a particularly pleasant gun to shoot, because of recoil. A lot of samples passed through the hands of lawmen, who were more interested in effect than in pleasant shooting. A .357 would reliably penetrate a door panel on a car, which made them popular with highway patrolmen and sheriffs’ deputies, who were often working in car-related crime.
    Something to think about.
     
    J ENSEN AND C ARR both mentioned in their reports the possibility that the break-in had been drug related, an attempt to find prescription drugs in the doctor’s house. Two aspects militated against the possibility: Gleason had been retired for years, and anybody who had known where to find him would have known that; and Carr had found several tabs of OxyContin in a prescription bottle in a medicine cabinet, left over from a knee-replacement operation on Anna. A junkie would not have missed them.
    Russell Gleason still had a hundred and forty-three dollars in his wallet. Anna had seventy-six dollars in her purse. Junkies wouldn’t have missed that, either. The money hadn’t been