“What!”
“Yeah. Holland’s with me, and we think it’s the same guy who shot the others,” Virgil said. “We need some of your people out here, and I’ll get the crime scene crew moving again.”
* * *
—
Virgil called Bell Wood in Des Moines and told him what had happened. “I had a bad feeling about it,” Wood said. “Listen, I talked to the monitoring service, and they peg the time that he left his house at eleven-nineteen, and he got out to the pasture at eleven twenty-eight. He was probably killed right around eleven, unless he was shot at the pasture.”
“Nah,” Virgil said, looking down toward the fence. “The killer would have had to march him across a swampy ditch, and over a fence, in the dark. It would have been too awkward. Besides, he’s got that Saran Wrap all over him. No point in doing that if he was killed here.”
“Sorry about that, Virgil. I doubt that it has anything to do with Van Den Berg getting killed, but it probably kills our case against his brother, too. Ralph can claim he had no idea that the Legos were stolen. Since we’d have to prosecute Larry to nail down what happened with the Legos, where they came from, and he’d have to have a chance to respond, but he can’t now . . . we’re sorta out of luck. What I’m saying is . . .”
“You’re saying Ralph has a motive.”
“Or his wife. Or some associate that we don’t know about.”
Virgil thought about it, then said, “Nope. The two brothers were working on what was, basically, an impulse theft. I doubt there are any associates.”
“I would tend to agree, but, uh, better to bring it up now than to find out later.”
* * *
—
An hour later, a line of a dozen deputies was slow-walking the pasture and the roadside, looking for anything that might relate to the murder. Holland had called Skinner, who left school to drive out, and who told Virgil that nobody was going to find anything. “The killer drove him out here, threw him in the pasture, and drove back home. Period. What’s to find?”
“Thanks for that.”
Zimmer came by, said that he’d parked a deputy outside Van Den Berg’s house. “You’ll want to go in there, so I thought it’d be best to keep an eye on the place.”
A deputy gave a loud whistle from the roadside ditch, and they all looked toward him, and he followed with a “come here” gesture. “There goes your genius badge,” Virgil said to Skinner. “He found something.”
The deputy had spotted a scuff mark in the dirt by the fence, and some fuzzy gray threads on one of the fence’s barbs. “If he parked here, crossed the ditch, and went up the hill . . . it’s almost a straight line,” the deputy said. “And we’ve had enough rain that those threads shouldn’t be all puffy like that. Unless you and Holland left them there.”
“No, we crossed the fence down a ways,” Virgil said. “You’ve found something. The guy was probably operating in the dark and got hooked on the fence. Leave it for the crime scene crew. Keep people away from here.”
* * *
—
Holland and Skinner left, while Virgil waited for the deputies to finish their search. They did, without finding anything more, and Zimmer left four deputies to keep watch until the crime scene crew arrived from St. Paul. Virgil wanted to check the body for house keys but knew the crew investigators would have a fit if he did, so he drove back to Wheatfield, to Van Den Berg’s house.
The front and back doors were locked, but Van Den Berg hadn’t repaired the window that Fischer had knocked in the back’s. Instead, he’d taped a piece of cardboard over the hole. Virgil put on a pair of vinyl gloves, pushed the cardboard in, unlocked the door, went inside, and walked through the house. A silver .357 was lying in the front hallway. He left it. He could see no sign of any disturbance; but when he went down the stairs, he saw LED power lights on Van Den Berg’s computer and the computer speakers, and when he touched the “Return” key, a pornographic image popped up on the screen.
Would Van Den Berg have left that image on-screen when he left the house? Virgil doubted that he would but didn’t know Van Den Berg well enough to be sure either way.
Van Den Berg: Fischer had insisted that the man wasn’t stupid. He’d figured out why no gunshots were heard, before Virgil or anyone else. She said he knew more about who had what, in Wheatfield, than anyone else in town. He’d once tried to make a living as a day trader, which, even if unlikely, did require an interest in finance and some basic ability with numbers.
Had he figured out who the killer was? Had the killer found that out?
* * *
—
Virgil walked through the house one more time, and as he hesitated before going out the kitchen door into the garage, he saw a bullet hole in the steel hood over the gas range. Until he went over and checked, he wasn’t absolutely sure it was a bullet—it could have been a rivet or the head of a screw—but when he looked closely, there was no question. The rim on the other side of the range was dented; the remnants of a bullet would be around somewhere, but probably so damaged they wouldn’t get any good information from them. The hole had been made by a .22 caliber bullet—like the .223 everyone so far had been killed with.
From the two holes, he could tell where the shot had come from. He turned and looked down the hallway to the front door, where the .357 still lay, and a sequence of events offered itself: Van Den Berg had been in his man cave, looking at porn. Somebody had rung the doorbell. Van Den Berg, not expecting a late visitor—and 11 o’clock was very late in Wheatfield—took his .357 up the stairs with him, had looked out the front door, and had recognized the visitor, not knowing he was also the killer. When he opened the door, the killer had shot him in the heart.
Virgil went back outside and, from the yard, called the crime scene crew. Bea Sawyer picked up, and said, “We’re still a half hour away. You gotta be patient.”
“I am patient, but I’ve got a second place for you to check. I think I found the actual murder scene—he was dumped in the cow pasture, but he was murdered in town.”
He got Van Den Berg’s house number off the mailbox and walked a hundred feet down to the corner and read the street sign—Harley Street—and Sawyer said they’d stop there first.
“He was shot from the front door, I believe, with that same .223 he used in the other shootings. It’s possible that the killer rang the bell.”
“You’ve been messing around in my crime scene, haven’t you?”
“I’ll see you when you get here,” Virgil answered. “I’ll be talking to the neighbors.”