Dark of the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

missed, Virgil thought. The killer simply wasn’t interested.
     
    T HE COPS HAD INTERVIEWED fifty people in the case, including the housekeeper, and all the neighbors, friends, relatives, business associates, members of the golf club. There were some people who had disliked the Gleasons, but in a small-town way. You might go to a different doctor, or you might have voted against Anna when she was running for the county commission, but you wouldn’t shoot them.
    One question popped out at him: why the lights on the body? The body would have been discovered the next morning, at the latest, sitting, as it was, so close to the street. If the killer had left the body in the dark, he’d have been certain of more time to get away. Was it possible that he didn’t need more time, that he’d come from very close by?
     
    V IRGIL GOT A MAP at the front desk and asked the clerk about the Gleason house. The clerk was happy to put an ink dot on its precise location: “You go up this little rise here, and you come around to the right, I think, or is it left? No, right. Anyways, you’ll see a mailbox down on the street that says Gleason, and the house is reddish-colored and modern-looking.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Folks say you’re with the BCA,” the clerk said. He was young and ginger haired and weathered, and looked a little like Billy the Kid.
    “Yup. We’ve been asked to look in on the Gleason case, bring a new point of view,” Virgil said.
    “Seen anything yet?”
    “Got a couple of things going,” Virgil said. He smiled and wrinkled his nose: “Can’t talk about them, though. You know, though, you could give me a little help…”
    “Me?”
    “I’ve had one too many meals here. They’re fine, but you know what I mean. Could you recommend another restaurant…?”
     
    T HE PRAIRIE LANDS around Bluestem were not exactly flat; more a collection of tilted planes, with small creeks or farm ditches where the planes intersected, the water lines marked by clumps of willow and cottonwood and wild plum. The creeks and ditches eventually collected into larger streams, usually a snaky line of oxbows cut a few dozen feet deep in the soil; and sometimes into marshes or shallow lakes. Sticking out of the planes were isolated ridges and bumps, with outcrops of red rock, much of the rock covered with green lichen.
    The Gleasons lived on one of the bumps.
    Virgil took a left out of the hotel parking lot, drove five or six blocks north into town, took a right on Main Street through the business district, and headed east. He could see the Gleasons’ neighborhood as soon as he turned: straight ahead, a wooded slope, with a hint of glass and shingles. He crossed the murky Stark River and drove up the hill, past a couple of well-kept suburban ranch houses and split-levels, with decks facing west toward the river. Up on top, coming around to the right, he saw the Gleason mailbox right where the motel clerk said it would be.
    The Gleason house was built of redwood and glass, with the requisite deck. He pulled up to the garage door, climbed out, remembered what Davenport told him about going into strange houses without his gun, thought, Fuck it, life is too short , and ambled once around the house, looking at it from the outside.
    Nice house.
    Single living level, with a basement, a dozen maple trees on an acre of land, reasonably healthy-looking lawn, a garden shed in a cluster of lilacs at the back. The deck looked both west and south over the river, toward town, and out toward the interstate, a mile away. It’d be pretty at night, Virgil thought, but the way the house sat up high, it’d be colder’n a bitch in the winter. The northwest wind would blow right up into the garage door.
    He could see how somebody could walk in with near-invisibility, especially in a rainstorm. Park on any of the streets near the edge of town, jog across the bridge and drop down into the Stark River cut, and follow it right around to the Gleason house.