16
After choking the breath out of Van Den Berg, Virgil met with Jenkins and Shrake at Skinner & Holland. Skinner was in school, but Holland was working in the store, and Virgil told him about Fischer getting beaten up again.
“Somebody needs to have a word with Larry,” Holland said. “As mayor, I’m exactly the right guy to do it.”
“I already had a word with him,” Virgil said.
Holland eye-checked him, then said, “I hope you didn’t get yourself in trouble.”
“I don’t think there’ll be a problem. Janet’s a mess. Banning is taking her to see a doc, and she’ll take some evidentiary photos in case we need them.”
Jenkins and Shrake had been talking about the case, and when they got in the back room, Jenkins said, “I think we’ve got to look real close at this Barry Osborne. Son of Margery.”
“I already talked to him. He was pretty screwed up,” Virgil said.
“You might be screwed up, too, if you’d shot your own mother,” Shrake said.
“Okay. I’ll buy that,” Virgil said. “Why did he shoot her?”
“Because he wanted to inherit?”
Virgil nodded, then shouted, “Hey, Wardell!”
Holland stuck his head through the curtain, and asked, “Yeah?”
“Did Margery Osborne have any money?”
Holland stepped into the room and shook his head. “Not as far as I know. She and her husband had a little farm down south of here, too small to be economic. Margery worked in town as a health care aide . . . you know, hospice care and Alzheimer’s people. She and her husband retired, moved to town, and he died a couple of years later. That must’ve been . . . jeez, ten, twelve years ago.”
“What about her house?”
“She lives with Barry. That’s actually Barry’s house, I think. I could make a call and find out.”
“Could you?”
“Probably with the Blue Earth bank,” Holland muttered. He took a phone out of his pocket, scrolled through a directory, pushed a button, and said, “Hey, this is Wardell . . . I know, I know, but I’ve been drop-dead busy. Listen, I’m calling for a state police officer. You know Barry Osborne? His mom was Margery Osborne, the lady who got shot? Okay, can you check something? I need to find out who owns the house. If he owns it, or if maybe his mom did . . . Okay?”
He smothered the phone against his shirt, and said, “I’m talking to a friend at the Blue Earth bank. They got links into the title company. She wants my body. Real bad.”
“She gonna get it?” Shrake asked.
“She already has, on several occasions,” Holland said. He went back to listening on the phone, and a moment later said, “Yeah, I’m here.” He listened some more, and then said, “Thanks, Sara. I’ll call you again when you get off work.”
He hung up, and said, “Barry owns it. Bought it seven years ago, with a fifteen-year mortgage, minimum down payment, but it was cheap. Seller was a guy named Ole Birkstrum, no relation.”
“Well, poop,” Shrake said. “Nurse’s aide, kid already owns the house. Not like she was a walking gold mine, huh?”
“Maybe he hated her,” Jenkins said. “One of those bad mother–son things. He’s a psycho, and he knocks her off.”
Virgil said, “That’s possible, but, like I said, when Zimmer and I talked to him, he’d been crying.”
“Obviously faked,” Shrake said.
Virgil said, “Yeah. What else you got?”
Holland said, “Since you’re wondering about inheritances . . . I bet Glen Andorra’s place was worth three or four mil.”
Jenkins and Shrake looked at each other, and Shrake said, “Whoa! There’s a motive.”
“Where’d you get that number?” Virgil asked.
“Pulled it out of my ass,” Holland said. “Except for that shooting range along the creek, he had a nice piece of property. I think he owned a whole section, and he inherited from his parents, so I doubt there’s a mortgage on it. Good land around here sells for seven thousand dollars an acre, give or take. If he’s got six hundred and forty acres, you take out a hundred acres for the range . . . you’ve still got property north of three million. And the range isn’t worthless. Plus, the house and machinery.”
Virgil to Holland: “Somebody said his kid lives in the Cities?”
“Yeah. Zimmer’s talked to him, I think, and most likely he would have talked to the medical examiner and maybe a funeral home.”
“We gotta talk to him,” Jenkins said. “The Cities are two and a half hours from here, he could have gone back and forth easy enough, do these other shootings, take the spotlight off his old man.”
Shrake was tapping on his phone, looked up: “Including the house, and if he’s got average farm machinery, the place isn’t three million, it’s more than four. No tax.”
“Did his kid grow up here?” Virgil asked Holland.
“Yeah, he was here through high school, a couple of years ahead of me,” Holland said. “We both played basketball, but he wasn’t good enough for college ball.”
Virgil said to Jenkins and Shrake, “We need to track him down and push on him. Why don’t you guys figure out where he is right now? He could be down here. Or if he’s back in the Cities, go on back and find him.”
“Good with me,” Jenkins said. To Shrake: “We can get a decent pancake.”
Shrake asked Virgil, “What are you going to do?”
“We haven’t talked to any of the people who run the church, except Father Brice. I’ll track down some of the church council and see if they have any ideas of what might be going on.”
“Weak,” Shrake said.
Jenkins and Shrake were out of town in twenty minutes, having spoken to Jared Andorra on the phone: he was in the Cities and could talk to them as soon as they got there.
Virgil had gotten Brice’s cell phone number and called him to ask about the church council. Brice had gone back to the archdiocese headquarters in St. Paul; Virgil had gotten the impression that he worked there as a kind of troubleshooter. “There’s almost always somebody from the council around the church in the afternoon,” Brice said. “Go on across and knock on the door.”
Virgil did that, and a Hispanic man opened the door and peered out. “You are the Virgil?”
“Yes. I need to talk to some members of the council.”
“Come in,” the man said, pushing the door open. Inside, Virgil found two more men and a woman mounting an elaborately framed, life-sized photograph of the Wheatfield Virgin Mary on the wall of the narthex. The photo had been taken by somebody with a decent camera rather than a cell phone. Thinking back to what Van Den Berg had said, threatening to blackmail Holland, Skinner, and Fischer, Virgil thought that the Virgin did resemble Fischer, except that the Virgin had dark hair, Fischer was a blonde. Looking closer, Virgil noticed that the Virgin had blondish eyebrows, which would be unusual for a brunette Israelite in the first century.
Something to think about.
As it turned out, all four people were members of the ten-person council. Virgil sat them down in the pews at the back of the church and interviewed them as a group. He learned nothing: nobody knew of anyone who was jealous of the church’s sudden fame, or resented it, or who’d wish to slow the stream of worshippers.
“Only two churches in town, and the other church—the pastor was happy with this vision,” one of the men said. “More people go to his church, too.”
Virgil went back to Skinner & Holland. He’d had breakfast but no lunch, so he bought a chicken potpie and a Diet Coke and carried them to the back room. He tried to think about the case but found he didn’t have anything of substance to think about. When he finished eating, he drove out to Glen Andorra’s house, went in, and spent the afternoon looking for anything that might be relevant.
Anything.
He gave up at dinnertime, drove to Blue Earth, and ate at a Country Kitchen, then sat in his truck in the parking lot and talked to Frankie for a half hour. As he was talking to her, he saw Banning, the sheriff’s deputy, and a man walk into the restaurant. He said good-bye to Frankie and followed them in. Banning saw him and waved from her booth, introduced the man as her boyfriend, Gabe, and said that Fischer would be in the hospital overnight.
“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.”