15
After Larry Van Den Berg and his brother were arrested, they were taken to the Lewis County Sheriff’s Department and processed. Bell Wood came by later with Katie Easton, but Ralph Van Den Berg had called a local lawyer, who’d told them not to make any statement at all until he could talk to them the next morning, so they didn’t.
The Van Den Bergs were put in separate cells at the county jail, far enough apart that they couldn’t talk. There’d be a bond hearing the next morning, the lawyer told them, and they’d need to put up either cash or something of serious value if they wanted to get out. Ralph could put up his house; Larry could put up either his house or his truck, or, if he needed to, both.
The real problem was, cash to pay the lawyer.
Larry lay on his bunk and thought about that. They needed cash and they needed it in a hurry. He had four thousand dollars in his checking account, and something like another four in savings, but that wouldn’t cut it. If he hadn’t punched Fischer, she might have been a source of a few thousand more, but that was gone now. Couldn’t sell the house, because he’d probably need it for bail; even if he did sell it, it’d go so cheap that he’d never find a comparable place that he could afford.
He was jammed up, due to that fuckin’ Flowers.
The jail turned out to be a good place to think: there weren’t many customers, and so the place was fairly quiet.
And as evening shaded into night, Van Den Berg began thinking about the Wheatfield shootings. As Fischer had said, he wasn’t stupid. He knew more about Wheatfield money, and who had it, than anyone. There was only one good reason to kill somebody, he thought, and that was money. Shortly after midnight, having thought about several dozen possibilities of who the shooter might be, and with his mind going round and round, he thought he’d identified his man.
The guy was superficially mellow enough, but Van Den Berg had known him since he was a child and had always been wary of him. His own parents were heavy boozers and brawlers, and he’d been regularly whacked on the side of the head and occasionally beaten with a leather belt, but even as a child he’d recognized that the shooter was something a bit different. Not so much an active threat; but when he looked at you, he looked at you like you were a bug ready to be stepped on.
Since the Lego heist wasn’t related, and wasn’t even under Minnesota jurisdiction, giving the identity of the shooter to Flowers wouldn’t raise a nickel or buy him a break. On the other hand, the shooter had a few bucks . . .
He thought about that for the rest of the night. When the sun came up, he was sixty-seven percent sure he was correct in his identification of the killer; and thirty-three percent possibly wrong.
The next morning was tedious, going back and forth from the cell like a trolley car, talking to the lawyer, signing papers for the cops and finally for his release. The local prosecutor stood in for the state at the bail hearing and agreed to release the brothers if they both wore GPS ankle monitors and put up their major assets—their houses—as bond for their later appearances in court.
In Larry Van Den Berg’s case, the judge agreed that he could continue to drive his tractor-trailer cross-country if he agreed to sign a waiver of extradition processes from whatever state he tried to hide in, if he did that. “I don’t want to deprive you of your source of income before you’re found guilty of a crime, but if you abuse this agreement in any way, I can assure you that I’ll put you in jail, and leave you there,” the judge said.
Van Den Berg agreed, and after his attorney gave him a forceful nudge, thanked the judge for his consideration.
Outside, the lawyer was up-front. “If we go to trial, I’ll need twenty thousand dollars. I’ll need a down payment of ten thousand, to cover expenses and all, and I’ll need it in the next couple of weeks. We can work out a schedule on the rest, but I’ll need the ten right away. If there’s no way you can get it, well, the public defender here is . . . okay.”
“Oh, fuck that,” Ralph Van Den Berg said. “I know that guy.”
Larry Van Den Berg said, “I’ll get the money. I got some of it now.”
He had to get back to Wheatfield. He had eight thousand dollars that he could get at, but it was hard-earned, and he was loathe to spend it if there was any alternative.
Which he now thought he had.
The Lewis County sheriff released his tractor unit, and Van Den Berg said good-bye to his brother and headed home, the GPS monitor already chafing his ankle. He had an hour on the road to indulge in fantasies in which he shot that fuckin’ Flowers and that fuckin’ Skinner, and even that fuckin’ Janet, who, if she’d kept her fuckin’ mouth shut after the accident—he was now thinking of the beating as an accident that was, basically, Fischer’s fault—nothing would have happened, and he’d be a free man.
But mostly he thought about money and about the Wheatfield shooter. He might not be absolutely sure he had the right guy, but he was fairly sure. While the guy was definitely a psycho—he had to be to do what he’d done—he was also a weenie: Van Den Berg would put the guy up against the wall and squeeze him. How much? The lawyer had said he’d need twenty thousand through the course of the trial, and the shooter could get that much, for sure, with a new mortgage on his house.
Maybe. If he really was the shooter.
Back in Wheatfield, he parked his truck in the yard, and as he turned to get out he saw a curtain move in a side window.
What?
He got a tire iron out of a door pocket and carried it with him to the front door, used his key to get in, and pushed through . . . and found Janet Fischer, staring at him from the hallway. Her arms were full of clothes and a pillow. “I’m leaving right now. I came to get my stuff.”
Van Den Berg’s eyes narrowed. He tossed the tire iron aside, and asked, “How’d you get in? You gave back the key.”
“The back door was open.”
“Bullshit. I locked up tight before I left, and I got good locks.” He stalked toward her, pushed the pile of clothing—hard—forced her back. Pushed her again, and again, until she was in the kitchen. He looked at the back door, which had little, diamond-shaped windows set at eye height, so he could see out to the porch. One of the diamonds had been broken in, and there was glass on the floor. “You fuckin’ broke in.”
“I wanted to get my stuff while you were away . . .”
Her black eye had started to turn purple, her lip was still swollen, but Van Den Berg didn’t even think about that. What he did was, he hit her in the other eye, and she screamed and dropped the clothes and put her hands up, and he hit her again, high in the stomach, knocking the breath out of her, and she sagged against the kitchen counter, and pleaded, “Larry, don’t . . . Larry, don’t . . .”
He hit her in the mouth again, and she went down, and he kicked her in the thigh once, twice, and finally thought, now what? And, I’m out on bail . . .
He looked at her, cowering on the kitchen floor, and backed away and took his cell phone from his pocket and dialed 911. When the county officer answered, he said, “I found somebody broke into my house and I’m holding her until a cop gets here. She attacked me . . .”
Virgil had talked to Frankie the night before, and she’d said he better come out to the farm. “I’m kinda hung up here.”
“By what?”
“You’ll see when you get here,” she said.
When he got there, he found a strange car, a new Chevrolet, parked in the driveway; and when he went inside, he found Frankie sitting in the kitchen with her sister, Sparkle, who was apparently the hang-up. Sparkle was a thin, pretty blonde of suspect morality with a freshly minted Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
She said to Virgil, “How ya doin’, good-lookin’?”
“Sparkle was going by on her way back to the Cities. She dropped in to see how I was,” Frankie said.
“So how are you?” Virgil asked, taking a chair.
“Today wasn’t bad, until Sparkle got here,” Frankie said. The sisters loved each other—maybe—but had a thorny relationship; Sparkle deliberately exacerbated the thorniness by flirting with Virgil.
Frankie asked him how the investigation was going, and Virgil said, “We might finally be seeing some movement,” and then had to explain it to Sparkle, and Sparkle asked, “Listen, if you were to arrest me for some reason . . . would you put handcuffs on me?”
“Probably around your ankles,” Frankie said. “Then you wouldn’t be able to spread your legs apart.”
Sparkle: “Says the woman who has five children with five different men and has a bat in the cave with a sixth guy.”
“Maybe I ought to go home and mow the lawn,” Virgil said.
Sparkle left a half hour later, after some further snarling and spitting, promising to return as soon as she could. Virgil and Frankie got Frankie’s youngest kid off to bed—the others could take care of themselves—and then they sat in the farmhouse living room and talked about the case. Frankie suggested they get a pad of paper and think up and list all the possible reasons for the murders in Wheatfield.
“There’s greed,” she said. “Money—that’s number one. Always is.”
“Or a religious kink in a crazy guy,” Virgil suggested.
“Outright love or hate,” Frankie said.
“Does somebody benefit if the town is ruined? Or was somebody damaged when it started doing well?”
“That should be under ‘Money,’” Frankie said.
“I’m not making that kind of a list, where there are subtopics,” Virgil said. “Besides, the benefit or damage wouldn’t have to be financial, it could be psychological.”
Frankie was skeptical. “Somebody got hurt when the Virgin Mary showed up? How?”
“Don’t know.”
“Something else you have to rethink,” she said. “You’re stuck on the idea that this whole thing goes back to the church and the apparitions and the change in the town. Maybe it has nothing to do with the town or the church or the Virgin Mary. Maybe it’s totally personal. Something completely off the wall.”
“That’s a thought,” Virgil said. “Maybe those people got shot because, you know, they were standing where the shooter could see them.”
No fooling around that night.
Virgil hadn’t been gone long enough for reunion sex, and Frankie’s stomach was still unsettled. Still, it was nice to be back in a familiar bed, and one that was long enough for him. The Vissers’ bed was too short, and he couldn’t stretch out his toes.
He was so comfortable that he wound up sleeping late, and then lingered over breakfast with Frankie, and it was 10 o’clock when he headed south again, Honus the yellow dog and the youngest kid, Sam, standing in the driveway to watch him go. When he crossed I-90, he called Jenkins, who said that he and Shrake had driven to Fairmont to get breakfast. “We can be back in twenty minutes, if there’s a problem.”
“Take your time,” Virgil said. “I don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”
Five minutes later, Zimmer called.
“We got a situation,” Zimmer said. “Are you in Wheatfield?”
“I’m a mile north, in my truck.”
“I got a deputy heading your way, but she’s ten minutes out.”
“What happened?” Virgil asked, thinking, another one?
“It’s that damned Van Den Berg. The way I understand it, Janet Fischer went over to his house to get some clothes, and other personal stuff, and he caught her. He says there was a fight. He beat her up again, but he’s saying he caught her in the house, that she broke in, and that he wants her charged with breaking and entering.”
“I’m on my way,” Virgil said.
When he got to Van Den Berg’s house, the front door was standing open, and Virgil stuck his head inside. He could see straight through to the kitchen, where Fischer was sitting on the floor with her knees pulled up to her chin, weeping, and Van Den Berg was hovering over her, his fists balled up.
Virgil knocked once and pushed inside. “Did you hit her again?” he asked.
Van Den Berg pointed off to his side. “Look at my door. She trashed my door, getting in, and was stealing stuff.”
“It’s my stuff,” Fischer cried. “It’s my clothes.”
“She broke in!” Van Den Berg shouted.
Virgil, stepping into the kitchen, looked at the door and saw the broken glass. He asked, “Did she break it or did you break it so you could blame her?”
“She broke it! Of course she broke it,” Van Den Berg screeched. “What the fuck?”
“He broke it,” Fischer muttered, “so he could beat me up.”
Virgil squatted to take a close look at her. Now her other eye was closed and going purple, and her lip was twice as large as it had been the last time he’d seen her.
Virgil stood up, and Van Den Berg barked, “Get the cuffs on her. I’m charging her with breaking and entering and . . . stealing stuff.”
Virgil said, quietly, “I think what we have here is a standard he said, she said domestic. Without outside witnesses, I can’t arrest her for breaking and entering.”
“Bullshit,” Van Den Berg said, pointing a finger at her. “She . . .”
“Larry, let me tell you something,” Virgil said. “There’s no way I’m going to arrest her. If you want to file charges, go down to the sheriff’s office and do it. And she can go down and file assault charges against you. And since you weigh, what, two hundred pounds, and she weights a hundred and twenty, guess what’s going to happen? They’re gonna yank your assault bail, and you’ll be sitting in jail until your trial. Then I’ll call Bell Wood and tell him that you committed a crime up here, and they’ll be waiting for you to get out of jail so they can hook you up in Iowa, and you’ll be sitting down there without bail . . . What’s it gonna be?”
Van Den Berg gave it ten seconds, then said, “Get her the fuck out of here.”
Virgil stepped close to him, six inches away, and grabbed Van Den Berg’s throat while pinning his hip with his own, and Van Den Berg’s right arm with his left, and squeezed the man’s throat until his eyes bulged out, and Virgil said, in a near whisper, “If you ever, ever touch her again, I’ll arrest you for assault, and you will resist. Then I’ll beat the hell out of you, and I’ll charge you with resisting arrest with violence and attacking an officer of the law, and you will go to Stillwater prison. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Van Den Berg made a gurgling sound that might have meant “Yes,” and Virgil released him, brushed off the front of Van Den Berg’s shirt—hard—and said, “I’m extremely pissed off. Don’t give me a reason to beat the shit out of you now because I don’t know if I could stop.”
Van Den Berg held his throat with one hand and backed away, and Virgil reached down to take Fischer’s hand and helped her to her feet. “Get your stuff. We need to get you to a doctor.”
When they got out on the street, a sheriff’s car was coming, fast. It was Banning again; she pulled up to the house and climbed out, and said, “Did that fucker do it again?”
“Yeah, but there’s a complication this time,” Virgil said. He told her about the break-in problem and the broken glass above the back door lock. “I’ve spoken to Van Den Berg about it and I don’t think it will happen again.”
“You sure?”
“Fairly sure,” Virgil said. “It’d be nice if somebody could run Janet to a doctor. And while you’re there, take a few photos in case we need them later. “
“I can do that,” Banning said. “I’ll email them to you.”
Van Den Berg came to the door, still holding his throat. He saw Banning, made a strangled sound, turned back inside, and slammed the door. Banning nodded at Virgil, and said, “Thank you,” and, to Fischer, “Come on, honey, let’s go see the doc and get you cleaned up.”
Van Den Berg lay on his couch for a half hour, fantasizing about bringing assault charges against Flowers, but he wasn’t a stupid man and he knew they wouldn’t hold up, not with Fischer looking as though she’d fallen into a lawn mower. Everybody in town was against him . . .
His throat hurt bad, and he thought about finding a doctor, but as he lay on the couch the pain lessened, and he finally got up and got a can of Sanpellegrino Limonata from the refrigerator, and the bubbly water soothed his throat. He carried the can to the front window, and there, a half block away, and getting closer, came the shooter, eating an ice-cream cone.
Van Den Berg opened the door and stepped outside, and the shooter nodded at him, and said, “Larry, how you doing?”
Van Den Berg said, “You’re gonna drip.”
The shooter looked at the side of the cone, saw the liquid ice cream oozing down the far side, and said, “Thanks,” and licked it off the cone.
“If you got a minute, I need to talk to you,” Van Den Berg said. He looked up and down the short street. Nobody in sight. “It’s important.”
“Well, okay, I got a minute,” the shooter said. They weren’t friends. “What’s up?”
“Come on in,” Van Den Berg said.
“Well . . .”
Van Den Berg stepped back, and the shooter followed him inside.
I developed a major problem yesterday,” Van Den Berg said, backing into his living room. “I’d . . . come into possession . . . of a trailer full of Legos that turned out were stolen.”
“I saw it on ‘Wheatfield Talk,’” the shooter said. “Wheatfield Talk” was Danielle Visser’s town blog. “There was a story in the Des Moines Register this morning, and Danny put up a link.”
“You know what happened, then,” Van Den Berg said. “My problem is, I need about ten grand, up front, for the lawyer, and probably another ten later on. I was hoping you could help out, since I’m keeping my mouth shut about you being the Wheatfield shooter.”
“What!”
“Yeah, I figured it out,” Van Den Berg said. “I’m willing to keep my mouth shut. I’m taking a risk, because this might make me an accessory, but I gotta have that cash.”
“I got no idea what you’re talking about,” the shooter blustered. “I don’t know why you’d think . . .”
“Then let me explain,” Van Den Berg said. He did, and when he was finished, the shooter said, “That’s not right. You’re making a horrible mistake. Did you tell anybody else about this? I’m completely innocent, and I don’t need other people looking at me like . . . like . . . I’m some sort of maniac.”
“If you didn’t do it, why are you arguing instead of leaving?” Van Den Berg asked.
“I am leaving,” the shooter said. He turned and headed for the door, still holding the remnants of the ice-cream cone.
“You better think about it,” Van Den Berg called after him. “Because I know you’re the one.”
“You ever say anything like that to another person, I will sue you for every dime you’ve got,” the shooter shouted back. “I can’t even believe . . .”
“I’ll give you until tomorrow morning, and then I’m going to Flowers. I need ten thousand now, and another ten . . .”
“You’re insane!”
And the shooter walked away.
Van Den Berg had gotten little sleep the night before, in the Lewis County jail, so he made himself a peanut butter and onion sandwich, ate it, lowered the shades in the bedroom, and lay down on the bed. He thought about calling the dispatcher at the packing plant to see if he could get a load out of town in the next couple of days, thought briefly about whether he’d put the finger on the wrong man as the shooter . . . and then he passed out.
He woke at 6 o’clock, hungry again, made himself a fried egg sandwich with a side of link sausages, thought about what to do; there were a couple of hours of daylight left, but he couldn’t think where he might want to go. He eventually went down into his man cave, got online, and went to Pornhub and spent three straight hours, with two five-minute recreational breaks, watching a variety of videos.
The shooter waited until well after dark before he left his house, which was four blocks down and one over from Van Den Berg’s house. He was carrying the rifle. The rifle didn’t have a sling, but he’d improvised with parachute cord, one loop around the narrowest part of the stock, at the grip, another loop around the barrel. He slung it over his shoulder, so that it hung straight down, and then pulled a hip-length coat over it.
No gloves yet. If anyone saw him, he wanted his bare hands visible . . . and empty.
Wheatfield mostly shut down at 8 o’clock, except when there was a service at St. Mary’s, but the church had been closed. By 9:30, it was dark and cool, and there were TV shows to watch. The shooter moved slowly and easily down the dark streets, unseen.
There were lights on at Van Den Berg’s. The shooter looked around, saw nothing moving, pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves, went to Van Den Berg’s front door, unslung the rifle, held it low but aimed at heart height, and pressed the doorbell.
Down in the basement, Van Den Berg turned his head at the sound of the bell. Who could that be? The shooter? Not Flowers . . . unless he’d hurt Janet worse than he thought.
He stood up, walked across the room to a cupboard, and took out a .357 Magnum.
No point in taking a chance.
The shooter heard him coming up the steps. Checked around again. The front door had a small window in it, at head height. He expected Van Den Berg to look out to see who’d come to the door. He was correct. He saw Van Den Berg coming and he pressed the muzzle of the gun against the door. Van Den Berg turned on the porch light, put his face to the window, saw the shooter’s face, unlocked the door, and pulled it open, and the muzzle of the gun was there, already aimed. He never had time even to flinch before the shooter pulled the trigger.
BANG!
The blast was fairly loud, if you were close to it, and sounded like nothing more than a gunshot. If you were more than a few dozen feet away and inside your own house, it would be hard to tell exactly what it was. There’d been no supersonic crack because the bullet had never traveled more than a few inches. The suppressor—the silencer—had taken care of the usual muzzle blast.
The shooter stepped inside, where Van Den Berg was sprawled on his back in the short entrance hall, a silver revolver by his side. The bullet had gone directly through his heart. The shooter turned off the porch light, closed the door, and waited for any sign that the gunshot had disturbed the town.
Nothing happened.
Satisfied that he was safe, he contemplated the body. He’d considered a variety of plans; the most appealing had involved Van Den Berg’s disappearance. He checked Van Den Berg’s pockets, found his car keys. He took a painter’s semitransparent plastic drop cloth out of his own coat pocket, unfolded it, and rolled the body onto it and rolled it over until it was completely cocooned. Van Den Berg hadn’t bled much, not like those bodies in the movies, and the shooter found some paper towels in the kitchen and cleaned up the small crimson puddle the dead man had left behind.
When everything was neat, he walked around to the windows in the living room, looking carefully up and down the street. The town was either asleep or glued to video screens.
He dragged the body through the kitchen, past the side door, and down into the garage, where Van Den Berg’s head went BUMP-BUMP-BUMP! down the three steps. He lifted the body into the back of Van Den Berg’s Jeep, went into the house to get the rifle, turned off all the interior lights but the one in the kitchen.
Before he got in the Jeep, he ejected the spent shell from the rifle and put it in his coat pocket, jacked another shell in the chamber, checked the safety, and put the rifle on the floor of the backseat. If he ran into a cop . . .
But he didn’t. He used the remote to open the garage door and then close it. He drove six miles out of town, to a cow pasture he was familiar with. The moon was high and three-quarters full. He lifted the body out of the back and carried it over his shoulder like a rolled carpet. Unexpectedly, he went ankle-deep in the mud in the roadside ditch. He crossed a nearly invisible barbed-wire fence, which hooked his coat; he had to struggle to get free. Finally, he carried the body up a hillside, where he dumped it behind a tree.
The police, he thought, would think that Van Den Berg had fled the theft charges in Iowa. The pasture wasn’t visited often, other than by the farm family’s two milk cows. Since there wasn’t much grazing grass growing yet, it would be at least weeks before the body was found, and maybe a few months.
He made it back to the Jeep, stamping his feet to take off the worst of the mud and water, which smelled like sulfur, did a U-turn, drove back to Van Den Berg’s, and parked in the garage. Inside, he turned off the kitchen light and then sat in the living room, waiting, and finally, at midnight, let himself out the side door and walked quietly to the street.
There was little electric light to be seen in Wheatfield at that time of night, and the stars looked close and only a little smudged by humidity. Nobody bothered him on the way home.
What a nice Minnesota night.
There’d be fireflies soon.