“Surprised it lasted that long,” Skinner said.
“Yeah, well—he was actually up, like, fifteen thousand dollars for a week,” Fischer said. “Then he got a letter from the brokerage he was using that said he owed a bunch of taxes. So, you know, he put it all on red and lost. He was getting letters from the IRS for three years.”
“That sounds like the Larry we know and love,” Skinner said. He was probing around the homemade desk. “He might have figured out how to day-trade, but he didn’t know anything about security.”
He reached out and tapped a piece of paper taped to the wall behind the desk.
“What’s that?” Fischer asked.
“All his passwords.” Skinner peered at them, and said, “Mostly porn sites. Plus, eBay.”
“Porn?”
“Let me get this thing up . . .” Skinner brought the computer up, dug through it, and brought up Van Den Berg’s emails. He spent fifteen minutes scanning through them. Fischer got him a beer, and one for herself, and finally she said, “I’m going upstairs to mess up the bed, but I want to see this so-called porn when I get back.”
When she came back, Van Den Berg’s cheap printer was grunting out a stack of paper. Skinner asked, “Who is Ralph Van Den Berg?”
“Larry’s brother. He lives down by Armstrong. Why?”
“Because Larry’s taking orders for something, which I think are Legos, and he talks to Ralph about shipping them out through UPS. Larry keeps telling Ralph to go to different UPS stores to make the shipments. Ralph’s running all over southern Minnesota and northern Iowa.”
“I bet that’s where the Legos are, down at Ralph’s,” Fischer said. “Those brothers are tight. Ralph lives on this acreage down there; he’s got a woodlot, which would be like the perfect place to hide a trailer. It’s already full of junked farm machinery and cars.”
“I’ll go over and take a look tomorrow,” Skinner said. “In the meantime . . . this printer is gonna take an hour to print out all these emails. I’d put them on a thumb drive, but I can’t find one. I mean, everybody’s got a thumb drive.”
“Show me one of these porn channels he’s signed up for,” Fischer said. “That jerk. He told me once that he never looks at porn because it’s tacky. I thought I was his main sexual connection. I tell you, Skinner, this explains a lot about his attitudes.”
“You actually don’t need to go out to the porn sites. He’s got his own collection on the machine, and it’s hooked up to the TV.” He pointed to a cable snaking along the wall and up behind the TV. “That’s an HDMI cable.”
“Then let me see one.”
Fischer settled on a video called Last Tango in Chatsworth, and Skinner fired it up for her, then began sorting through the paper chugging out of what must have been a fifteen-year-old dot matrix printer. “Got a fuckin’ parallel port,” he muttered, as he worked. “I didn’t even know you could find parallel ports anymore . . .”
Behind him, Fischer said, “Oh my God. OH MY GOD!”
Skinner turned to look, said, “Well, that’s not something you see every day. Wonder how they did that? You’d think they’d get stuck.”
The printer and the video ended simultaneously, and Skinner stacked up the paper, and said, “We gotta get out of here before it gets light.”
“You gotta get out of here. I’m going to look at every one of these filthy things. I want to know what kind of man I’ve been engaged to,” Fischer said. “Show me how that computer thingy works.”
“Okay, but I don’t want to walk all the way home. How about if I crash at your place?”
“Whatever,” she said, waving a hand at him, as The Gang Goes Bang! came up on the TV.
Skinner kissed her good-bye, left her on the couch, and crept out the back door. Dark as a coal sack outside, except for the stars, which were bright and plentiful. With the incriminating pack of paper under his arm, he went back to Fischer’s house, snuck in again, and lay in her bed until dawn, reading the emails.
By first light, he was convinced that the Van Den Bergs were up to something illegal, sending shipments of illegal somethings all over the country. Had to be the Legos. Could have been drugs, the way they talked in code, but they weren’t making enough money to be drug dealers.
It occurred to him that if a legitimate seller of Lego kits could find an off-the-books source that only cost, say, half of the normal wholesale price, he could make a killing. Wouldn’t even have to pay taxes on the profit. The Lego company would supply the advertising, and if you bought even a small number of kits from the company . . . you’d have the perfect cover.
“Sweet,” Skinner said. “Crooked but sweet.”
Shortly after dawn, he heard the back door rattle and was seized by the sudden fear that Larry had come home unexpectedly; but then Fischer called out, “Skinner? You still here?”
“Back in the bedroom,” he called.
She appeared in the bedroom doorway and posed there, one hand on the jamb. She had, he thought, a weird glow in her eyes.
7
Three people shot, one of them dead, all possibly tied to the Marian apparitions.
As Skinner and Fischer were sneaking into Van Den Berg’s house, Virgil was in bed; he’d spent a few minutes thinking about God and His religions and wondered why religions were so often tied to violence. When he was in college, years earlier, during the usual late-night weed-fired discussions of sex, politics, and religion, he’d decided that religions and political parties were quite alike, except that religions dealt with morality, primarily, while political parties dealt with economics.
In other words, they were both dealing with people’s deepest feelings about how the world should work. Differences could escalate to physical clashes, as they might have even in the late-night weed-fired college discussions, except, of course, for the weed: “You’re so full of shit, dude. Pass the joint.”
Now, lying in bed all these years later, he still wondered why religions, since they dealt with morality, shouldn’t shun any form of violence to others? Then again, he thought, maybe they did. Maybe the connection between religion and violence was Fake News.
His mind got caught in a loop speculating about it, and he finally got out of bed and opened up his laptop and looked up the most religious states and the most violent states. Turns out the six most religious states, as determined in one major study, were also among the ten states with the highest murder rates. The six least religious states were among the ten with the lowest.
He found that depressing, turned off the computer, and lay awake thinking about other demographic characteristics that could account for the overlap. Perhaps the most religious people lived in the parts of the country that were also the poorest and that accounted for the crime rather than religiosity? But, then, was religiosity related to poverty or were the two unrelated?