12

Virgil woke early but lay in bed, thinking about Sherlock Holmes and that whole Holmes thing—that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, must be the truth. What Holmes never admitted was that there is a vast universe of the possible, and sorting through all the possibilities is often impossible. Holmes would have been better off, Virgil thought, working with the Flowers Maxims:

Having established that the criminal was most likely dumb—with exceptions—the question became, how was he avoiding detection? A rifle shot actually makes two loud noises: the boom or bang caused by the exploding gunpowder and the loud crack when the bullet breaks the sound barrier.

When he was in the Army, in Serbia, Virgil had once spent some time in the pits below the targets on a rifle range. He was six hundred yards out from the shooting line and became familiar with the difference between a muzzle blast and a supersonic crack. The two sounds were separate and distinct. The passing bullet produced a crack—some people described it as ZINGGGG! or WHIZZZZ!—that was quite loud, followed by the hollow boom of the muzzle blast. On the other hand, the ZINGGGG! didn’t sound like what most people thought of as a gunshot.

Other than Bram Smit, the old man with the shotgun, nobody had reported either one, and Smit had said the noise he heard sounded like a muffled thud—somebody dropping a shoe overhead. The muzzle blast would be attenuated by the suppressor, but it would still be loud. There must be other ways to muffle a shot, though—and that might be the thud that Smit had reported.

Maybe, Virgil thought, other witnesses actually had heard the shots but hadn’t recognized them for what they were.

If they had heard them at all . . .

If the bullet was subsonic and didn’t break the sound barrier, that would be far more interesting. There were a few commercial loaders of subsonic .223, but the energy levels of subsonic bullets were far lower than ordinary bullets, and the shooter would probably have to be much closer than they’d thought—likely not more than a hundred yards out, and possibly closer than that.

The arcing ballistics of the bullet might explain the two lower body shots. At a hundred yards, a subsonic bullet could drop a foot, so the shooter, not aware of that, might have been aiming at the victim’s heart and hitting too low. And then by the Osborne murder, might have fully compensated for that.

A combination subsonic ammunition and suppressor would mean that the shot would be silent at the point of impact with the victim. As far as he knew, nobody had looked for the shooter at only fifty to a hundred yards out . . .

But all that subsonic stuff sounded crazy smart and didn’t explain the two thuds heard by Smit. Nope. The shooter was probably using standard ammo, and the witnesses simply hadn’t identified the sonic boom as a rifle shot. Sonic booms, as far as Virgil knew, might be reduced by the frontal area of the bullet, and .223s were small, sleek slugs.

But Smit . . . Smit created a problem. Was it possible that he hadn’t heard the muzzle blast, the bang, but instead heard only the sonic boom, as the bullet passed close to his house?

---

Virgil was shaving when another thought occurred to him. He’d had an appointment the day before to meet Bud Dexter at Skinner & Holland at 4 o’clock. Virgil’d run a few minutes late, and they’d been talking for a while, but not too long, when Osborne got shot. She’d been shot, he’d bet, at 4:15, at almost exactly the time the other two were shot.

Why 4:15, or within a couple of minutes of 4:15? The obvious answer was that 4:15 was the time when you got the biggest crowds on the street corner across from the church. The first service was at 4:30, and if the Virgin Mary were planning to pop up, you’d want to be there a bit early to get a good seat.

But exactly 4:15? There’d be people on the corner at 4:10 and 4:25, as well. Maybe the shooter was coming from a job that ended at 3:30 or 4, and after going through whatever preparations he had to perform, it simply worked out to 4:15?

Nope. That wasn’t right.

Another little mystery.

---

When he was cleaned up and dressed, Virgil thought about walking out to Mom’s Cafe but decided he couldn’t face a Mom’s pancake. There wasn’t much to eat at Skinner & Holland, either, but even a nuked chicken potpie would be better than Mom’s.

Holland was hauling in more edible crap when Virgil walked into the store. The crowd was noticeably thinner than it had been the other times Virgil had been there, and he overheard two people who looked like townies complaining about the toll the shootings had taken on the tourist trade. “If I catch that rat, I’ll pop his head like a fuckin’ pimple,” one guy said to the other, who replied, “Shhhh. That’s the cop.”

Virgil nodded, and said, “How ya doin’, boys. If you catch the guy, let me know. I’ll come over and shoot him for you all legal-like.”

“Nice thought, but that’s not what I heard about you,” the pimple popper said.

Hung up deciding between a turkey potpie or a chicken, Virgil took a chicken, then put it back and took a turkey, then put that back, and one of the guys said, “Take the chicken. The turkey gives you bad gas.”

Virgil took the chicken, walked it into the back room, and shoved it in the microwave. Holland came through with a box full of blue corn chips, and said, “Hope I can sell this stuff.”

“I ought to bust you for trying,” Virgil said.

“That’s how Communism got started,” Holland said, as he disappeared through the curtain into the store. He was back a minute later, and said, “You know what goes with a chicken potpie?”

“A water glass full of Everclear?”

“Well, yeah, but I was thinking of Zingers. I got a gross of Zingers coming through in a minute.”

Virgil waved off the Zingers, when they came through, and poked holes through the potpie cover with a plastic fork. Holland took the Zingers into the store. He was back a couple of minutes later, pushing through the door curtain with the empty box, when Virgil heard Skinner’s voice call, “Wardell! Wardell!”

Wardell turned, halfway through the curtain. “Yeah?”

Virgil couldn’t see Skinner but clearly heard him say, “That fuckin’ Larry beat up Jennie, man, real bad. She’s got—”

He suddenly stopped talking, and Virgil knew that Holland had cut him off and was making some finger gestures that meant “Flowers is in the back.”

Virgil swallowed some potpie, and called, “Come on back and tell me about it, Skinner. Janet getting beat up and all.”

Skinner poked his head past the curtain. “You don’t know Janet.”

“Come in here. I want to hear about it, and I want to know why Janet got beat up,” Virgil said.

Holland came through with Skinner a step behind him, both obviously uneasy, shuffling their feet. Holland said, “This has nothing to do with the shootings. This is something else.”

Virgil kept eating, and, between swallows of molten chicken grease, said, “Tell me about it anyway.”

“Ah, man,” Skinner said. Then, to Holland: “I think we ought to tell him. We can’t let it go.”

Holland bowed his head, gripped his skull with one hand, then said, “This fuckin’ apparition is gonna be the end of us. We already got two dead and two wounded. It’s like we’re back in the ’Stan.”

Skinner: “We don’t even know that the apparition has anything to do with it. The guy’s obviously a nutcase. He was gonna go off sooner or later. What does that have to do with Larry?”

“Maybe . . .”

“Fuck it, I’m gonna tell him,” Skinner said.

“Go ahead,” Holland said. “I’ve got more boxes to unload.” He started toward the back door, stopped, turned, came back, and sank into a chair facing Virgil. “I’ll tell it.”

“I’m listening,” Virgil said.

Holland told the story, folding in a few carefully selected lies. Larry Van Den Berg was a truck driver engaged to Skinner & Holland’s afternoon cashier, Janet Fischer, who they called Jennie. Fischer had done some bragging on how well the store was doing, and Van Den Berg, after thinking it over, had decided he wanted a cut. He’d told Fischer that if he didn’t get one, that he’d tell everybody that the apparition was faked by Skinner and Holland, and that Fischer had posed as the Virgin Mary.

“He made it all up. It’s complete bullshit. But if he started talking it around—well, he could mess up the whole town. Jennie told us what he wanted, and we went over to her house to have a talk with him.”

Skinner said, “Tell him the rest of it. Tell him about Ralph.”

Virgil said, “Yeah, tell me about Ralph.”

Holland said, “Well, we were desperate to keep Larry from starting this kind of talk. Jennie had seen some . . . emails . . . on Larry’s computer, about some Lego sales . . .”

“Lego sales?”

---

When it had all come out, Virgil said, “We had Iowa cops up here last year, looking around. They called me to let me know. Lot of Legos involved, I guess.”

“Thirty-eight hundred cubic feet, worth between a half million and a million bucks, depending on what they were,” Skinner said. “Looked to me like more than half of them were still in the trailer.”

“I’ll have to tell somebody about this,” Virgil said. “If he beat up your cashier, I don’t feel too bad about it.”

Holland and Skinner looked at each other, and Skinner nodded.

“But what’s the right thing to do?” Holland said. “I mean, I know what the legal thing is, but we’ve known Larry a long time, and he had a really awful, mean childhood. I went to school with him, so I know. We want him to go to prison? We could get a couple of Jennie’s friends and have a chat with him.”

Virgil asked, “Would that chat involve a pool cue?”

“I don’t know where we’d get a pool cue,” Holland said, “but something like that. Jennie has quite a few friends in town. Larry doesn’t.”

Virgil shook his head, and said, “I’ll handle it, Wardell. You? Stay out of it.”

---

At that moment, Fischer pushed through the door. She was wearing a pleated skirt, a white blouse, and a faded high school letter jacket with a Greek harp where the letter would normally go, the insignia of a marching band letter. She had a purple ring under one eye, and a badly swollen lip where her teeth had cut into it. She said, “Whoops!” and started to back out, but Virgil said, “Janet? Come in here.”

She stepped inside.

Virgil asked, “Are you still engaged?”

She asked Skinner and Holland, “You tell him about it?”

Skinner said, “We couldn’t let it go.”

She said to Virgil, “The engagement’s over. I thought about shooting him, and I would have, but I don’t have a gun.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Virgil said. “I’ll put his ass in jail.”

Fischer said, “Fuckin’ A,” and tears began rolling down her cheeks.

“You can’t count on him being inside for long,” Virgil told her. “When he makes bail, you gotta stay away from him. We’ll get a court order that says he has to stay away from you, too.”

“Be tough, in a town like this, with one store and one cafe,” Skinner said.

“So what? You can’t go around beating up women,” Holland said.

“What a dummy,” Skinner said.

Fischer put her fists on her hips. “You keep calling him that. He might not be as smart as you, but he’s thinking all the time. About money, unfortunately . . .”

Skinner jumped in. “And porn.”

Fischer continued. “Money. That’s what that day-trading thing was all about. And remember when he was going to start that Jimmy John’s? And when he was going to be a landscaper? All he thinks about is money. He’s smart. I bet he knows more about money than anybody in town. Who’s got it, who doesn’t; how they got it, why they didn’t.”

“Then why’s he driving a truck?” Virgil asked.

“Because that’s what he can do,” Fischer said. “His folks were pure white trash. Larry started from zero and worked like a dog, and now he owns his own house and truck.”

“I don’t like to hear you defending him,” Skinner said. “Not after he beat you up, the way he did. Show them your hip. Go on.”

“No, I’m not going to do that . . . I don’t know . . .”

Skinner said to Virgil, “She looks like she’s been in a car accident. I tried to get her to go to the hospital, but she won’t do it. Now she’s saying how smart he is and what a hard worker he is.”

Fischer said, “It’s a bad habit. I’ll break it.”

---

Virgil called the sheriff’s office to get a deputy to stand by while he was busting Van Den Berg. Zimmer told him that because of the shootings, he’d kept at least two deputies in the immediate area and he could have one at Skinner & Holland in a few minutes. Virgil reheated what was left of the chicken potpie while he waited for the deputy, and told Skinner, Holland, and Fischer that he was struggling with the problem of why nobody had heard the supersonic crack of the rifle bullet and the apparently nonrelated question of the timing of the shootings.

“There’s something important going on there,” Virgil told the other three. “I can’t figure out what it is.”

They hadn’t figured it out when the deputy arrived, a woman named Lucy Banning. She pushed through the curtain, saw Fischer, did a double take, and said, “Oh my God, Janet, it’s you? Did Larry do that?”

Fischer started to cry. “Yeah.”

The deputy looked at Virgil. “I’ll take the complaint.”

---

She did that, and when Fischer finished a short statement, with Banning taking notes, Banning tipped her head toward the door, and said to Virgil, “Let’s go get him.”

Outside, she said, “I want to do this. I’d appreciate backup, but I want to haul his ass in myself.”

“You know him?”

“We all went to high school together,” Banning said. “I could never figure out what Janet saw in him. He was a jerk then, he’s a jerk now.”

“But he’s not the dumbest guy in the world . . . at least, that’s what Janet thinks,” Virgil said.

“Oh, he’s not dumb. Did real good in math and accounting. I mean, I’ll tell you, Larry had a rough time growing up. Everybody knows it. It’s his folks who made him a jerk, but a jerk is still a jerk wherever it came from. And you don’t go around beating up your fiancée.”

“Ex-fiancée,” Virgil said.

“I hope. I’ve seen a lot of them go back.”

---

Nothing in Wheatfield was very far from anything else. Virgil followed Banning over to Van Den Berg’s house. Van Den Berg was in his side yard when they pulled up, washing his tractor unit. When he saw them coming, he said, “What do you want, Lucy?”

“Janet Fischer said you beat her up last night. That right?”

“We had a fight, but she was into it, too.”

“Not what she says,” Banning said. “Doesn’t look like she messed you up much.”

“Look. Let me talk to her, we’ll straighten it out,” Van Den Berg said.

“Too late for that. I’m going to have to take you in,” Banning said. She unhooked handcuffs from a belt case, and Virgil moved off to one side, where he’d have a clear run at Van Den Berg. The other man looked at him and then back at Banning. “You always wanted to do this, you bitch.” He threw the hose he was holding on the ground, and it snaked around, pumping water.

But he didn’t resist. Banning put on the cuffs and led him to the car. Virgil walked over to the house and turned off the faucet, and asked Banning, “You want me to follow you in?”

“Naw. He’ll be okay in the back of the car. You getting anywhere on the shootings?”

“Trying to figure out why nobody can hear the gunshots. They were from a .223, so . . . they had to be loud. And we’re wondering why they’re all exactly at four-fifteen.”

Banning scratched her ear, frowning, then shook her head, and said, “Beats me.”

They loaded Van Den Berg into the backseat of the patrol car, Banning said, “See ya,” and drove away. Virgil got in his truck and started back to Skinner & Holland. He was halfway there when the patrol car pulled up behind him, and the flashers came on.

Virgil pulled over, and Banning hopped out, and when Virgil rolled down his window she said, “Larry says he has something to tell you.”

“Okay.” Virgil followed her back to the patrol car, and Banning opened the back door, and Van Den Berg leaned out, and said, “I know why nobody heard the gunshots and why everybody got shot at four-fifteen. You let me go, and I’ll tell you.”

Virgil said, “Larry, if you know something, you have to tell us. It’s murder we’re talking about now. You beating up Janet, that’s a whole different thing.”

“You’re not going to let me go? Then you know what? You can go fuck yourself.” He looked at Banning. “Shut the door.”

Virgil said, “Larry . . .”

“Fuck you.” He laughed. “Fuck you.”

Van Den Berg sat in the center of the backseat, staring at the screen separating him from the front seat, and wouldn’t say anything else. Virgil tried again, but Van Den Berg turned away.

Virgil said to Banning, “Take him.”

She slammed the back door, and Virgil said, quietly, “See if he’ll talk to you. Maybe he does know something.”

“I will,” Banning said. “Sorry about that language.”

“Lot of people have been telling me to go fuck myself,” Virgil said. “It’s starting to wear on me.”

---

At the store, Virgil found Skinner and Fischer still in the back room, and Fischer asked, anxiously, if they’d made the arrest.

“He’s on his way to jail,” Virgil said.

Holland came in and asked the same question as Fischer.

Virgil answered the same way, but added, “You know what? He says he knows why nobody heard those shots. And why all those people got shot at the same time. He said he’d tell me if I’d let him off the hook on the assault. I wouldn’t do that. But he figured it out in five minutes, and I kinda believed him.”

The other three looked at one another, all frowning, then Skinner said, “If that dumbass figured it out . . .”

Fischer said, “I keep telling you, he’s not a dumbass. He probably did figure it out. If he did, then I say let him out. That’s more important than—”

Holland shook his head. “No. He’s going down.”

“What we gotta do here is crowdsource it. Ask around,” Skinner said. “If he figured it out in five minutes, somebody else will even if we can’t. We could get Danny Visser to put it up on the town blog.”

Virgil said, “We can do that. We need to find that out. Our real problem is, right now we don’t have anything to work with. We know where the killer got the gun and the suppressor and the ammunition, and none of that helps. The crime scene people aren’t giving us any help, because they’re like us—they got nothing to work with. If we knew why he was always shooting at four-fifteen, if we knew why we can’t hear the shots . . . then we’d know something serious.”

---

The priest, George Brice, stuck his head into the room, saw Virgil, and stepped inside. “I heard you were back here, and I wondered if you’re getting anywhere? People are unhappy that we’ve closed the church. I won’t reopen it until we have a handle on what’s happening . . .”

Virgil: “We don’t know enough yet.”

He explained about the gunshot problem and the 4:15 shootings, and Brice looked from one to the other, and then said, “I can tell you why that is—though I didn’t think of it until this second.”

“What?” Virgil asked.

“We’ve got these big speakers up in the bell tower,” Brice said. “Recordings of the bells of Notre-Dame. We start playing the bells at four-fifteen, for three minutes. The call for the four-thirty Mass.”

They all stared at him, then Virgil slapped himself on the forehead, and said, “Duh.”

Holland said, “We should have thought of it. But we’ve been playing the bells every day since Christmas. They’re louder than heck, but I don’t even hear them anymore.”

“Same with me,” Skinner said, and Fischer nodded.

“The bells would cover the gunshots for anyone near the church, and he wouldn’t fire until he heard them. The bells determined the time. I thought I’d figured out something important, but I hadn’t,” Virgil said. “We really are back to square one.”