Эд Горман - Blood Moon

After an hour or so, I took a break, ambling down the hall to the restroom and then to a small room where a coffee vending machine stood next to a Frigidaire from the early 1960s, on the face of which was a sign that read PEPSI 25 cents. Who could pass up a bargain like that? The room had three small folding tables with a few chairs designated to each table. It was a room for sack lunches and lazy lunch-hour gossip.

While I was sitting there drinking my bottle of pop, a white-haired elderly woman wearing a flowered summery dress and a cute little straw hat bought a Pepsi of her own and sat at the table next to mine.

We smiled at each other in the way of polite strangers, and then I decided that if she was a long-time citizen here, she just might be able to help me.

After introducing myself, I said, “Have you lived here a long time?”

“Oh, my, yes,” she smiled. “Nearly seventy-five years.”

“It’s a wonderful little town.”

She laughed. “You must be from the city.”

“These days I am.”

“People my age who grew up in towns like these have a lot of great memories but not everything was so wonderful.”

“Oh?”

“Well, we didn’t have a hospital here until 1932, for one thing. A lot of people died by the time somebody could get them to Cedar Rapids. And for another thing, if you lived on a farm, the way my folks did, you didn’t have running water and electricity until about the same time the hospital was built. And the state didn’t get around to building good roads until well into World War Two. But the worst of it were the outhouses. There’re a lot of jokes about them these days but believe me, back when you were a young girl trying to be a proper lady, outhouses were no fun at all, especially on winter mornings.”

I laughed. “You make it sound pretty bad.”

“No. I just make it sound realistic. It was a much better world back then, but you sure had a lot of inconveniences.”

I coughed. Getting drenched while ducking bullets was probably going to net me a nice strong head cold.

“Did you ever know a man named Brindle around here?”

“Stan Brindle?”

“Why, yes. Stan Brindle.”

“Sure I knew him. Most folks did. He was a pretty prosperous farmer up until the late eighties,” she said, sipping her Pepsi.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Oh?”

“What put him out of business, I mean. So suddenly.”

“Well, it’s no secret. The same thing that put a lot of other farmers around here out of business. He came out of the seventies looking very good on paper but owing the bank a lot of money. In the old days, a farmer could always borrow against the next year’s harvest if he needed to. But credit was drying up everywhere.”

“So he went bankrupt?”

She nodded. “That and some trouble.”

Which is what I had been looking for in the newspaper stacks — the trouble Stan Brindle had gotten into.

“Drugs,” she said.

“Selling them, you mean?”

She shook her head, looking old-lady elegant as she did so.

“Not selling them. But letting drug dealers use his farm to store their drugs and have some of their meetings. Cousin of his from Davenport, I believe, he was the one actually running the drugs.”

“They got caught?”

“Yes, they did.”

“Did Brindle go to prison?”

She frowned. “He made it as far as county jail. He was in there two nights and he hanged himself with a belt he wasn’t supposed to have. It was pretty sad. I knew Stan ever since he’d been a little boy. He was a big dreamer, and sometimes he could be a braggart, but he wasn’t really a bad boy. Not really. In fact, he was pretty much straight until he met Reverend Roberts.”

“The same Reverend Roberts who’s in town now?”

She smirked. “The one and only. After he started getting into so much financial trouble, Stan and his wife decided that they needed to start going to church again. You know how people do when they’re desperate. ‘I don’t want to hear a peep out of you, God, unless I get in trouble.’ That sort of attitude. Well, anyway, they started going to church there and then they started socializing with the reverend and his wife. And the reverend started spending a lot of his spare time out at the farm, hunting and things like that. That was what he said, anyway. But what really happened was that he started having an affair with Stan’s wife, who was one of those very pretty, shy little women who always wound up getting dominated by their men. Rachael, her name was. Anyway, one night things got so bad — apparently he’d caught them in bed — that Stan went over to the reverend’s house with a shotgun. Took a couple of shots, too, but missed. Law got called in and everybody in town pretty much knew what happened and Rachael moved away, went back to Springfield, Illinois, which was where she was from originally. It was after that that Stan got caught up in the drug thing with his cousin from Davenport.”

“But you say that the reverend used to spend a lot of time at the farm?”

She nodded. “A lot.”

If that was the case, the good reverend would know a good place to bury bodies he needed to get rid of, bodies belonging to young girls he’d molested while filming them performing illegal sex acts. Then, for the first time, I thought of Mike Peary’s letter to Nora, in which Mike detailed how several girls who’d visited New Hope had later been murdered. Traveling around the countryside and killing young girls would be no trouble for a man who was already traveling anyway.

She looked at her watch. “Oh, heck.”

“What?”

“I wanted to be home in time to watch Oprah. She’s the only one of those talk-show people I can stand. She seems genuinely sincere.” She looked out the gray window at the dripping rain. “But I’ll never make it in time.”

“Tell me where you live. I’ll give you a ride.”

“But don’t you want to go back to your newspaper stacks?”

“Thanks to you, I won’t need to. You told me everything.”

She beamed. “Well, it’s nice to know that somebody finds me useful at my age.”

“You lucked out, Robert,” my FBI buddy said on the phone ten minutes after I left the library.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Brooklyn, 1956.”

“All right.”

“Guy was into disemboweling women, but he got so bloody doing it he was afraid somebody’d spot him with blood all over his clothes. Killed four women that way.”

“And then?”

“Then he decided that, rather than kill them in parks or alleys as he’d been doing, he’d knock them out, put them in his car trunk, and take them back to his garage.”

“All right.”

“First of all, he became a much more efficient butcher. He started using a power saw. And second of all, he bought himself a butcher’s rubber apron and gloves, and he started disposing of the bodies by chopping them up in pieces and burying them all over his neighborhood. There was only one problem.”

“Oh?”

“Dogs. He was all right in the winter, burying the meat in the snow, but when he buried it under plain dirt — the neighborhood dogs found it.”

“Wow.”

“But, to answer your question, there are forty-three cases where the killer suddenly changed body-disposal patterns.”

“How often did burying them show up?”

“In twenty-six of the forty-three.”

“So it’s a popular method.”

“It’s popular until they get caught.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“Just send me a new Mercedes.”

“Thanks.”

He didn’t want the man at the pet store getting suspicious, so he bought most of the puppies in Cedar Rapids or Iowa City.