“She had a headache, and they thought she might be concussed, though . . . not badly. They also want a specialist to take a look at her eye. He wasn’t there today, so he’ll look in the morning.”
“Worse than I thought,” Virgil said.
She shrugged, and said, “We did the only thing we could—we took her to the hospital. Next, we get all over Larry’s ass. Sheriff Zimmer came by and took a look at Jennie, and said Larry’s used up all his rope. If he drives twenty-six in a twenty-five zone, he’ll regret it.”
Virgil drove back to Wheatfield, parked next to the Vissers’ house, lay on his bed for a while. An hour after dark, when everything was quiet, he went back out for a walk. Fischer’s tiny house was set back from the street; he checked around for obvious eyes, saw not much, tried the screen door, which opened up. The blade of his butter knife slipped the old lock, and he was inside.
He had a simple excuse, if anybody asked: he’d been walking by the house when he noticed the screen door standing open, and, when he tried the door, it was unlocked. He knew Fischer was in the hospital, but, given her history with Van Den Berg, he thought he’d better check the house.
Not search it, simply check it. He turned on the lights—nothing attracts the eye like a flashlight in a dark house—and checked it thoroughly, made sure that nobody was hiding in her closet or her bureau drawers or even under her unmade bed.
There was nothing under her bed, but a stamp-sized patch of blue cloth was sticking out from between the mattress and the box springs. When he lifted the mattress, he found a thoroughly flattened garment. He shook it out, and thought, by golly, it looked a lot like the gown that the Virgin Mary had been wearing in the church photograph.
Holland, Skinner, and Fischer: the Wheatfield Trinity.
He put everything back, turned off the lights, locked the door, and ambled back to the Vissers’ place. Danielle Visser knocked on the connecting door when she heard him stirring around and, when he opened it, asked, “Roy and I couldn’t stand it anymore: did you find out anything interesting today?”
“Not a thing,” he said. “This is a very opaque little town.”
“I never thought that,” she said. “I always thought that everybody knew everything about everybody.”
“Then why doesn’t anybody know who the killer is?”
“Now, that,” she said, “is an interesting topic for a column. I’ll start writing it up right now. I’ll call it . . . mmm . . .”
“‘Who did it?’”
She ticked a finger at him. “You oughta be a writer.”
* * *
—
Virgil had a bad night, stressed by the sense that he was getting nowhere, until at 8 o’clock the next morning, as he was shaving, Bell Wood called from Iowa. Virgil put the phone on speaker, and asked, “What’s up?”
“You know we put that ankle monitor on Van Den Berg?”
“Yeah. He cut it off?”
“We don’t know what he did. What we do know is, the monitoring service called this morning and said that he spent all night in what appears to be a cow pasture about six miles outside of Wheatfield.”
“A cow pasture?”
“That’s what it looks like on a satellite photo. The monitoring service has a time line on him: he was home until around eleven o’clock, and then he drove out to the cow pasture and stayed there. He’s still there.”
“Kinda chilly last night.”
“Not hunting season, so that’s not it . . . I was hoping you might go out and take a look. If we keep getting a signal, and you don’t find a body, we’ll have to figure he cut the monitor off, threw it into the pasture, and now he’s in the wind.”
“Doesn’t sound like Larry,” Virgil said. “Email me directions on how to get out there.”
“Five minutes. I’ll send you a bunch of screen grabs of Google Maps.”
Virgil couldn’t look at another potpie, but he stopped at Skinner & Holland and bought a bag of potato chips. When he told Holland about the ankle monitor and the cow pasture, Holland volunteered to come with him. As they drove out, Holland looked at Wood’s maps on Virgil’s iPad, and said, “If the monitor signal is accurate, looks like he’s about halfway down the pasture and halfway up the hill.”
“In other words, about dead center.”
“Yup.”
They left the car on the side of the road. Holland went prosthesis-deep in the roadside marsh, while Virgil managed to jump over the soggiest bit. They clambered over a sagging barbed-wire fence and walked slightly uphill, across a pasture spotted with last year’s dried cow pies, and found Van Den Berg’s body wrapped head to foot in semitransparent plastic. He looked like a luna moth’s cocoon.
Holland said, “There’s a lot of blood at the bottom of the plastic . . . Bet he was shot.”
Virgil looked around the pasture, the sprouting corn in an adjacent field, the top of a red barn, an actual television aerial on the top of the house next to it, the blue skies, the puffy clouds, and said, “We can’t catch a break. We can’t.”
17
Never actually found a dead body before,” Holland said, “though I’ve seen a lot of them.”
“I gotta know where you were last night, and where Skinner was,” Virgil said. “I know where Janet was, in the hospital. But you three had big problems with this guy.”
Holland wasn’t surprised. He said, “I was on a date, actually. You heard me set it up with the bank girl. Sara McDonald. She came back to my trailer and left about midnight.”
“What about Skinner?”
“I don’t know where Skinner was. But sometimes I just sit in my trailer, shootin’ flies with a pellet gun . . .”
“Shootin’ flies?”
“Yeah, and Skinner doesn’t like it because he feels sorry for the flies. The chances that he killed Larry are slim to none. Besides, whoever killed Larry”—Holland squatted and looked at the body again—“probably shot him with a small-caliber, high-powered bullet. There’s no blood on his back, that I can see, but a lot on his chest. He was killed by the same guy who shot the other people, and we know Skinner didn’t do that because he actually witnessed one of the shootings.”
“Yeah . . . I pretty much knew all that,” Virgil said. He pulled out his phone and called Zimmer.
Zimmer: “You’re calling to tell me you found the shooter?”
“Well, I found somebody. Larry Van Den Berg. Lying dead in a cow pasture. Probably shot.”