14
Virgil went to bed discouraged. Every time he found something that looked like a lead, it turned out to be a dead end. God didn’t show up that night, so he slipped off to sleep without conversation.
Bell Wood, the Iowa state investigator, called at 9 o’clock the next morning, and said, “We’re going through Humboldt right now, so we’re an hour out of Armstrong. We still on for ten o’clock?”
“Might as well be, I’m not solving any murders,” Virgil said. “And who’s ‘we’?”
“Special Agent Easton, Special Agent Rivers, and myself,” Wood said. “If this thing works out, I might take a day off and come up and solve your Wheatfield problem myself.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Virgil said. “See you in a bit.”
Virgil called Jenkins and Shrake, who were at Mom’s getting breakfast. “I’ll be there in four minutes,” he said. He drove to Mom’s, parked, went inside, and saw Jenkins and Shrake picking at their pancakes.
When they saw Virgil, Shrake pointed at his plate, and asked, “What are these things?”
“I asked the same question,” Virgil said. “Got a tip from Mom’s son: stay away from the meat products.”
“So what are we doing?” Jenkins asked, pushing the pancakes away.
“I’ll pick up Skinner and drive down to Armstrong, where he’ll take us to Ralph Van Den Berg’s place. You two will hide in Jenkins’s piece of shit and wait for Larry Van Den Berg to get back to his house. He’ll be back on the street about now, and it’ll take him twenty minutes to get here. If he heads south for Iowa, we want to know about it. If he doesn’t for an hour or two, we’ll raid Ralph’s place anyway.”
“We gotta find something to eat,” Shrake said.
“Skinner and Holland have chicken potpies that aren’t bad. I’ve had a couple of them,” Virgil said.
Shrake looked at Jenkins, and said, “We gotta hurry.”
Virgil picked up Skinner as Jenkins and Shrake ran into the store.
“They’re in a hurry,” Skinner said, looking after them.
“Breakfast,” Virgil explained. “They were down at Mom’s. They were uncertain about the food.”
They walked by Jenkins’s Crown Vic on the way to Virgil’s Tahoe, and Skinner asked, “What kind of car is that?”
“Crown Victoria—they quit making them before you started driving, even if you started driving when you were twelve,” Virgil said.
“Actually, I started when I was eight. I only started running into that cop when I was twelve.” Skinner stooped to peer through the Crown Vic’s side window. “Looks like a piece of shit.”
“You have naturally good taste,” Virgil said.
They headed south, and Skinner said, “I had a bad thought this morning. If the guy quits shooting right now, we’ll probably never get him. If Father Brice left the church open, we might have another chance.”
“What you mean is, if we let somebody else get murdered, we might be able to ambush him because we’d be waiting for the shooting.”
“The way you say it, it sounds wrong,” Skinner said.
“I apologize.”
“See? Now you’re giving me a hard time.”
They engaged in more pointless speculation all the way to the Iowa line; and Skinner filled in some of his own background. His mother, he said, was a pleasant, intellectual woman who communed with the earth and Buddha, and sometimes went on earth- or Buddha-related trips, and other times on mind-expanding trips, depending on what was coming in from Colorado. “She’s a positive enough person, but ambition to my mom is like kryptonite to Superman,” Skinner said. “She wants nothing to do with it. With the money from the trust fund Grandpa set up for her, it’s not a problem. We’re not rich, but we’re not poor, either.”
He was not curious about the identity of his father. Virgil suggested the red hair might be a tip-off, but Skinner said his mother was tall, red-haired, and freckled, so appearance wouldn’t help.
In Armstrong, Skinner pointed out the high school. “I played a basketball game there in junior high. I can’t remember why.”
A pickup truck with a camper back and a dusty black Mustang pulled into the parking lot ahead of them, moved to one side, and parked. Bell Wood got out of the Mustang, hitched up his pants, and looked around, and, a second later, a woman got out of the other side. Another man got out of the pickup, wearing overalls, a plaid shirt, and a ball cap. Skinner muttered, “Cops.”
“Yeah, what’d you expect?”
“Cops. They look like cops. They dress like farmers and they still look like cops. The stink hangs on them. Even the chick,” Skinner said.
“Careful with that ‘chick.’ She’s probably armed.”
“See, the thing you don’t know is, lots of women cops want you to think of them as chicks,” Skinner said “Because the alternative is, they’re like Nazi prison guards, all waxy-faced and carrying billy clubs. You gotta think about their self-image, not some kind of artificial construct in your own head. And they think they’re ‘chicks.’”
Virgil couldn’t think of an immediate rebuttal—“artificial construct”?—and let it go.
Bell Wood was a big, square man with a brush mustache and gold-rimmed glasses that made him look a little like Teddy Roosevelt, which he knew. He was a major in the Iowa National Guard and had done a tour in Iraq. His subordinates, relishing the double entendre, called him Major Wood behind his back and occasionally to his face.
The woman with him was slender and square-chinned, had pale brown hair and amber eyes—possibly the best-looking woman in Iowa and all adjacent states. The man who’d driven the pickup truck was narrow-faced, with shoulder-length brown hair and a three-day beard; he would have looked at home on a bench in a bus station. Skinner was right: despite the surface patina of a farmer, he was giving off a distinct law enforcement vibe.
Skinner, in the meantime, had introduced himself to the woman, whom he then introduced to Virgil as Katie Easton. Virgil shook her hand, and he shook hands with the bus bench guy, Joe Rivers, and Wood asked Skinner, “You’re the kid who found the trailer?”
“Yeah. It’s a couple of miles back north.”
Virgil pulled an aerial view up on his iPad, and they gathered around the hood of his Tahoe and looked at it. “Can’t see the trailer,” Wood said.
“Can’t see it from off the property, either,” Skinner said. “It’s right . . . here.” He put his index finger on the center of the farmstead’s woodlot.
“All right. Well, we’ve got a warrant on the basis of the video Virgil sent me, so we can go in. We’ll move as soon as this Larry Van Den Berg shows up with his truck. If he doesn’t show, we’ll go in at noon, or thereabouts.” Wood said. “You guys better hang back. We’ll wave you in.”
“If you run into trouble?”
“Then we’ll wave you in faster,” Wood said.
Virgil and Skinner waited while Wood, Easton, and Rivers armored up. They didn’t look at Easton, because she was so pretty that they didn’t want to be seen staring. When the Iowans were ready to go, Wood handed Virgil a police handset, and said, “You know how these work. Turn up the volume and leave it on your passenger seat.”
Virgil took the radio, and, two seconds later, his cell phone beeped: Jenkins.
“Van Den Berg showed up, ran inside his house, came back out two minutes later, jumped in his truck, and he’s headed your way. In a hurry.”
“Excellent. Stay way back, don’t let him spot you,” Virgil advised.
“You mean, like experienced cops?”
“Exactly. You’ve got a half hour ride.”
Virgil relayed the word to Wood, who said, “Then we gotta go. I want to cruise the place. I’ll get off at a crossroad as far down as I can get and still see the truck coming in. And I want to take Mr. Skinner with me while we make the pass at the house. I’ll drop him off before we go in, and you can pick him up while we wait.”
Virgil nodded. “I’ll follow from way back. There’s not much time . . .”
Wood’s Mustang, with Easton and Skinner riding along, was a black dot on the horizon when Virgil saw it take the left turn past Ralph Van Den Berg’s place. Rivers, in the pickup, continued on the highway past Van Den Berg’s and, before Virgil got to the turn, pulled into a field access track and parked, so conspicuous in the pickup that he was inconspicuous.
Virgil took the left past Van Den Berg’s, following Wood. The house was a blue-painted rambler with faded white shutters, and sat a bit lower than the road, with a detached garage to one side and a red metal barn in back. A sprawling woodlot sat west of the house along a fence line. Virgil saw no hint of a trailer. Janet Fischer had referred to the place as “an acreage,” and Virgil estimated there were six, surrounded by bean fields that didn’t seem attached to Van Den Berg’s place.
Access to the house was by a wide driveway across a culvert; the ditch along the front was four feet deep and steep-walled. There were four cars; and three men and a woman were standing in the driveway, talking, an air of tension or contention about them. They were dressed for work—canvas jackets, long-sleeved shirts, jeans, and boots. All four cars were pulling trailers.
The people in the yard looked toward Virgil as he went past. But dusty Tahoes were as common as pickups, and Virgil accelerated away and, a mile farther down the road, found Wood parked around a turn on a side road. Wood, Easton, and Skinner got out of the Mustang and walked back to Virgil as he pulled in behind them. Virgil got out, and Wood said, “More of a crowd than I expected.”
“We should get my guys to fall in behind Joe and arrive all at once,” Virgil said. “You guys can lead, but if there’s trouble, we’ll have six cops right on top of them. I’ll come in last and put the Tahoe across the driveway—they won’t make it across the front ditch pulling trailers if somebody decides to run for it.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Wood said. “Talk to your guys. They must be, what, ten minutes out?”
“Something like that,” Virgil said.
He got on his phone to Jenkins and asked where he was. “Got a ways to go yet. Shrake’s iPad says we’re still ten miles north of the Iowa line. We’re staying way back.”
Virgil told them to look for Joe Rivers and follow him in. “There are a bunch of people there, at least four, and maybe more that I didn’t see. We’re all going in at once.”
They waited. It was a clear, cool, damp day in northern Iowa, ankle-high beans and corn as far as they could see. Blue metal silos were sticking up here and there, marking farmsteads. A cock pheasant sprinted across the road a hundred yards down. Easton leaned her well-toned butt against the Mustang and thumb-typed on her cell phone while Skinner ambled back and forth between the vehicles, hands in his pockets, occasionally glancing at Easton. Waiting.
Easton asked nobody in particular, “Anybody take the train from Paris to London?”
“I haven’t, but my old man has,” Virgil said. “Goes through the Chunnel. I think he said it took two hours, or something.”
“So you could make the round-trip in a day?”
“My dad did,” Virgil said. “Took an early train, spent the whole day in London, rode back that night. Never had to change hotels.”
“Cool,” she said without looking up, still thumb-typing. “I’m going in June.”
“Where in the fuck are they?” Wood asked.
“Been six minutes since you last asked,” Skinner said.
“Shut up, punk,” Wood said.
“Fuckin’ cops,” Skinner said.
Nerves.
Virgil’s phone beeped. Shrake said, “We crossed the line ten seconds ago. We’re three minutes out.”
“Saddle up,” Virgil said to the others. “Three minutes.”
Wood called Rivers as he and Easton walked up to the corner, where they could look down the road toward Van Den Berg’s acreage. Virgil pointed Skinner to the passenger seat of the Tahoe and then he got in himself and started the engine. Skinner said, “I can’t believe Katie could stand there and text when we’re going on a raid. I don’t even know why they’d allow a woman to go on a raid.”
“So here’s something you don’t know, Skinner,” Virgil said. “You never say that about a woman cop. Never. Not unless you’re ready to run for it, ’cause they will flat kick your ass.”
Skinner considered, then said, “You’re right. I was being stupid.”
He really was smarter than he looked, Virgil thought. As he thought that, Wood and Easton turned and jogged back to the Mustang, and Easton called, “He’s here,” and, a moment later, they were all rolling.
Rivers’s pickup turned the corner as Wood’s Mustang approached Van Den Berg’s driveway, and the pickup was right on Wood’s tail as they pulled into the yard. Shrake and Jenkins were fifty feet behind the pickup and went down the driveway, and Virgil pulled into the entrance of the driveway and then turned so the Tahoe blocked it. He said to Skinner, “You sit tight.”
Skinner said, “Bullshit, I want to see this,” and he was out and walking to the middle of the yard, where Larry Van Den Berg’s truck was pooping out diesel smoke, and the cops had surrounded Van Den Berg and the three men in work clothes. Virgil saw the woman running toward the woodlot, with Easton and Shrake close behind, and Virgil could hear Easton’s soprano voice as she shouted, “Down on the ground. On the ground . . .”
Larry Van Den Berg saw Virgil and pointed his finger, and said, “You motherfucker. You motherfucker,” and one of the other men asked, “For Christ’s sakes, what the hell is going on? Why are the cops here?”
Shrake and Easton caught up with the woman, put her on the ground, cuffed her, Easton patting her down, and they brought her back. Shrake said, “Skinner nailed it. There’s a trailer back there.”
Rivers had cuffed Larry Van Den Berg, and Wood asked the woman, “Are you Jill Van Den Berg?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation,” he said. “Where’s Ralph?”
She said, “In the house.” And, “This isn’t fair.”
“Does he have a gun in there?” Shrake asked.
“Yes, but he’d never shoot anyone,” Jill Van Den Berg said. She said her daughter, Billie, was in the house with her father.
Wood made Larry Van Den Berg and Jill Van Den Berg sit on a trailer, told Rivers and Jenkins to keep an eye on them, told the other three men to sit, uncuffed, on another trailer, “Until we have a chance to talk.” Then he, Easton, Virgil, and Shrake walked to the house, with Skinner trailing despite Virgil telling him repeatedly not to.
The screen door was closed but the inner door was open, and Wood pulled the screen open and shouted, “Ralph! Ralph, come on out here.” A man’s voice answered. “Don’t scare my little girl.”
“You’re fine, Ralph. We’ll give her to her mom.”
Ralph Van Den Berg, a thin man with a scruffy dishwater-blond beard and shoulder-length hair, poked his head around a corner, and said, “We’re coming. Don’t do nothing.”
He was leading a little girl by the hand. When they were outside, Easton told him to face the house while she cuffed him and patted him down. Wood took the little girl’s hand, and said, “C’mon, Billie, we’ll go see your mom.”
The girl started to cry, but Wood had Rivers uncuff Jill Van Den Berg, and told her, “Why don’t you take Billie back in the house. Don’t do anything weird. We’ll be in to talk to you in a while . . .”
The semitrailer was still stacked with Legos. The three men who’d been in the yard, with their trailers, told Wood that they’d been hired by Ralph Van Den Berg to unload the semi and haul the Legos to a self-storage unit in Emmetsburg. They said Van Den Berg told them the big trailer had to be returned to its owner. The Iowa cops got their names and addresses and, after recording their individual statements, sent them on their way.
A couple of sheriff’s cars showed up and hauled away the male Van Den Bergs. Jill Van Den Berg was told that she might be charged in connection with the theft but, for the time being, would be left with her daughter.
By 4 o’clock, it was all done, and Wood said to Virgil, “I owe you one.”
“At least one,” Virgil said.
“No goddamn excitement at all,” Jenkins said. “I expected more.”
“This is Iowa,” Shrake said. “Your expectations were grossly misplaced.”
“We got a big meth bust coming in a day or two,” Easton said. “The cookers have lots of guns, from what we hear.”
Jenkins regarded her for a moment, then said, “Now you’re teasing me.”
She said, “I don’t tease, pal. I deliver.”
That killed conversation for a few seconds, then Jenkins asked, “You ever think of moving to the Cities and the big time?”
That made her laugh.
As the Minnesota cops and Skinner were packing up, Virgil quietly asked Wood, “So what exactly is your relationship with cupcakes?”
“Shhhh . . . Don’t even ask that question, and for God’s sakes don’t use words like ‘cupcakes.’ Or ‘peaches.’ Or any small, round objects at all,” Wood muttered.
Virgil said, “Or any members of the melon family?”
“Oh, Jesus, no,” Wood said, glancing sideways at Easton, who was thirty feet away, talking with Skinner. “Tell you the truth, I’m almost afraid to work with her. She’s an excellent cop, but she’s too good-looking, and that ain’t good, if you know what I mean. I don’t joke with her. I don’t walk too close. I won’t even buy her a cup of fuckin’ coffee. Or even non–fuckin’ coffee.”
“Very strange,” Virgil said.
“It is, and she doesn’t like it any more than us guys. But it’s not up to her. Somebody else could say I was walking too close to her, and, the next thing you know, there’d be an inquiry and we could both have career problems,” Wood said. “The world is getting goofier by the minute, Virgie.”
“I will be talking to you,” Virgil said. And to Skinner: “We’re outta here.”
Skinner was silent for the first ten minutes of the ride back, but shortly after they crossed the Minnesota line, heading north, he said, “I kinda liked that.”
“What? Being a cop?”
“It’s embarrassing,” Skinner said. “All I ever knew about cops was that they’d hassle you for having a beer.”
“When you were twelve,” Virgil said.
“Minnesota and Wisconsin are to beer what wine is to France, and, in France, kids can drink a little wine,” Skinner said.
“Okay. Now, let me tell you about cops,” Virgil said. “There are a lot of good ones, but I couldn’t claim that they’re in the majority. Maybe a third of them are pretty good, another third are just getting through life, and the last third are bad. They’re poorly trained or burned-out, not too bright, have problems handling their authority. You got cops who’ll hassle women for sex, use drugs, steal stuff . . . basically, criminals. But you get a job like mine, it’s interesting. And you’re doing some good.”
“I don’t know if I could handle making people feel bad, like Jill and Billie,” Skinner said. “Of course, there’s the money thing. Cops don’t make any.”
“There are some downsides,” Virgil said. “The money thing, and, then, crooks are human. They cry. They get sad, they apologize. But you know what? All that comes after they fuck somebody over. You gotta keep that in mind. The money thing . . . I have a hard time worrying too much. I got enough.”
“Stealin’ Legos? Is that really fuckin’ somebody over? Bet it all got covered by insurance.”
“Probably. But people who steal and don’t get caught, they don’t stop until they do get caught. They do all kinds of damage along the way. If Van Den Berg hadn’t gotten caught, and if he’d gotten rid of all those Legos, he’d be looking for another score,” Virgil said.
They rode along in silence for a minute, then Virgil added, “A few weeks ago I busted a guy about five years older than you, over in Owatonna. He was burglarizing houses. He’d stalk housewives, who’d leave their house to pick up their kids at school. He knew when they’d be gone, and he knew what their husbands did and that they wouldn’t be home. He’d ransack the house, looking for anything small and valuable. Wasn’t all that much money involved, and most of it was covered by insurance, but some of those women? They didn’t want to live in their houses anymore. There’d been a criminal inside, somebody had been watching them, and it scared them. That guy’s going away for a while, but he did a hell of a lot of damage before I got him. The damage won’t go away, because the damage was done to those women’s heads.”
Skinner said, “Huh.”
Virgil said, “A smart guy like you, Skinner, you could do four years at the U and maybe get a graduate degree in something. From there, you could get a job with the cops, do two or three years on the street, which is fascinating in itself, and then move into investigations. It’s an interesting life, if you’re the kind of guy who likes to think.”
“You know I do.”
“That’s why I said it,” Virgil said.
Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake rendezvoused in Skinner & Holland’s back room to try to rekindle the investigation into the shootings. With the church still closed, there wasn’t much movement around town.
Jenkins said to Virgil, “We can’t operate on the theory that the shooter’s a nut, because if he is, we can’t do anything but wait until he gives himself away. If he quits now and throws that rifle into a river, we’ll never get him. We’ve got to assume there’s a motive.”
“If he’s got a motive, it’d almost have to involve Miz Osborne,” Virgil said. “The other two victims weren’t from here, didn’t know each other, didn’t have anything in common that we know of, other than they were both shot.”
Skinner, who was sitting in, said, “What if the real target in this thing was Glen Andorra, and this guy’s done these other shootings to divert attention away from Glen?”
They all thought about that for a while, then Shrake shook his head. “It’s possible, but I don’t think so. The three shootings here in town were too carefully thought out. He planned all this before he went after Andorra.”
“We have to go back to Andorra, though—and Osborne, too,” Virgil said. “We’re getting late in the day. Let’s think about it and pick it up tomorrow.”
Jenkins and Shrake wanted to get something decent to eat, which meant going out to a larger town. They invited Virgil to go along, but he decided to drive back to Mankato and spend the night with Frankie.
“I’ll be back by nine o’clock. We’ll go back on Osborne and Andorra. Something has to be there, with one of them.”