17
Never actually found a dead body before,” Holland said, “though I’ve seen a lot of them.”
“I gotta know where you were last night, and where Skinner was,” Virgil said. “I know where Janet was, in the hospital. But you three had big problems with this guy.”
Holland wasn’t surprised. He said, “I was on a date, actually. You heard me set it up with the bank girl. Sara McDonald. She came back to my trailer and left about midnight.”
“What about Skinner?”
“I don’t know where Skinner was. But sometimes I just sit in my trailer, shootin’ flies with a pellet gun . . .”
“Shootin’ flies?”
“Yeah, and Skinner doesn’t like it because he feels sorry for the flies. The chances that he killed Larry are slim to none. Besides, whoever killed Larry”—Holland squatted and looked at the body again—“probably shot him with a small-caliber, high-powered bullet. There’s no blood on his back, that I can see, but a lot on his chest. He was killed by the same guy who shot the other people, and we know Skinner didn’t do that because he actually witnessed one of the shootings.”
“Yeah . . . I pretty much knew all that,” Virgil said. He pulled out his phone and called Zimmer.
Zimmer: “You’re calling to tell me you found the shooter?”
“Well, I found somebody. Larry Van Den Berg. Lying dead in a cow pasture. Probably shot.”
“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.”
The house to the left of Van Den Berg’s was vacant. An elderly man answered the door of the house to the right, blinking through Coke-bottle glasses, and Virgil identified himself, and asked if the old man had noticed any activity around Van Den Berg’s house the night before.
“What happened, somebody kill him? Or did he kill somebody else?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you’re that cop who’s been investigating the murders . . . So which is it?” the old man asked.
“Somebody killed him,” Virgil said. “Stood at the front door and shot him in the heart. Did you hear a shot about eleven o’clock last night?”
“I don’t know, but something woke me up. Don’t know what it was. I don’t sleep so good anymore, so I was pissed off about that. I was awake when he drove away, and I was still awake when he came back. His goddamn garage door sounds like a cement truck making a dump.”
“You heard him go and then come back?”
“That’s right. I sleep downstairs now, because, if I sleep upstairs, one of these days I’d come tumbling down ass over teakettle, and that’d be it for me. I’d lay there and suffer until I died of thirst, since nobody comes to visit me anymore. They’re all dead, anybody who might come. Anyway”—he scratched his bald head—“what was I saying? Oh, yeah. I sleep downstairs, so I not only heard him but saw his headlights sweep across the walls.”
“And that was about eleven o’clock?”
“Damned if I know. It was dark. I laid there for a long time awake, and it didn’t get light, so it was sometime in the middle of the night.”
“Think anybody else might have heard the shot?”
“Well, Louise Remington lives across the street. If anybody had her nose between the curtains, she’d be the one.”
Louise Remington, who appeared to be as old as the old man, slept at the far end of her house, away from the street. Like the old man, she’d been awakened by a sound she couldn’t exactly identify, but it was almost exactly 11 o’clock. “I looked at my clock when I woke up. Later on, I heard a car go out, and then come back not long after that, but I didn’t look at my clock. I read my magazine for an hour or so, and the car came back while I was reading, so it wasn’t gone long.”
The houses on both sides of Remington were lived in, but nobody was home at either. Virgil thought, If the car both came and went sometime after 11 o’clock, then the killer was probably driving it.
He walked back across the street to Van Den Berg’s, put on another set of vinyl gloves, lifted the garage door, lifted the back hatch of the Jeep, and immediately saw a small, thread-like line of blood that was feathered on one side, as if something had been dragged over it when it had already partially dried.
Something like a body. Maybe the crime scene crew would actually find something useful, Virgil thought.
If the shooter used Van Den Berg’s Jeep, then he probably walked to the house. And he hadn’t known Van Den Berg well enough to know about the ankle monitor. That was the first bare inkling of good news: a beginning picture of the killer. He closed the Jeep’s hatch and the garage door, and called Sawyer again.
“Where are you?”
“Turning off I-90. We should be there in ten minutes,” she said.
“Good. I’ve been talking to neighbors, and I have reason to believe that Van Den Berg’s own car was used to move his body. We need to process the car, and the sooner, the better. This is the first thing we’ve got that I believe the killer touched, other than the body.”
“You’ve been messing with my crime scene some more, haven’t you?”
“Of course not,” Virgil lied. “I’ve been too busy interviewing the neighbors, and they say they heard the garage door go up and down about the time Van Den Berg was killed and moved. When you get here . . .”
“We’ll look first thing,” she said.
Sawyer and her partner, Baldwin, got out and looked at the garage door, then Baldwin asked Virgil, “Tell the truth. Did you touch that door?”
“Yeah, but I was wearing gloves.”
“Still, wouldn’t have done a lot of good for any fingerprints on it,” Baldwin said.
“You know how many times prints have helped me with a case? I can count the times on an imaginary finger,” Virgil said.
“Be quiet, and get the door open,” Sawyer said.
Inside the garage, the two crime scene specialists did a walk-around before touching the car, then Baldwin said, “Whoa!” and, “Bea, I think Virgil was telling the truth, for a change. He didn’t mess with the crime scene.”
“How so?”
“Because if he’d messed with the crime scene, he probably would have seen this .223 shell on the floor and picked it up.”
Virgil said, “What?” and he and Sawyer walked around the car and looked where Baldwin was pointing: a brass .223 shell had rolled against the garage’s outer wall. “Let me get my camera,” Baldwin said.
Five minutes later, Sawyer had inserted a five-inch steel turkey lacer into the end of the shell to pick it up, and they examined the case under a bright beam of an LED flashlight. “Nothing I can see,” she said.
Virgil said, “There’s a partial.”
“There’s no partial.”
“Yes, there is, and I’m going to put the word out that I’ve got a partial,” Virgil said. “And that I bagged it, and that I’m carrying it around town with me.”
Sawyer said, “That, mmm, could be dangerous if the killer . . .”
“I need something to happen,” Virgil said.
“You might want to wear a vest under that T-shirt,” Baldwin suggested. “This guy is supposedly a long-distance shooter.”
Virgil ignored the advice. “Listen, you guys got your fuming wand with you?”
“Yes, but we don’t have a print yet,” Baldwin said.
“You will,” Virgil said.
Virgil drove to Bob Martin’s house, the elderly gunsmith. He was home. “I need an empty .223 cartridge, and I need you to keep your mouth shut about me needing it,” Virgil said.
“The first is easy, the second is harder,” Martin said.
“Yeah, well, if you don’t keep it shut, you could hurt the town even worse than it already has been.”
Martin agreed to keep his mouth shut, retrieved an empty shell from his workbench, and said, “Listen, Virgil, I think I know what you’re planning to do and I don’t like it.”
“About keeping your mouth shut,” Virgil said, “I wouldn’t mind if you told your friends I came over and fingerprinted you and cleared you when I compared your print to a picture that I had on my cell phone . . . that I got off this shell . . . You gotta lie sincerely.”
“I can do that . . . But, jeez, Virgil, you gotta be careful.”
When Virgil got back to Van Den Berg’s house, Sawyer and Baldwin were examining the streak of blood in the back of the Jeep.
“That nails down the Jeep transporting the body,” Sawyer said.
“Good work,” Virgil said, not mentioning that he’d already seen the blood and knew that the Jeep had been used to transport the body, and that none of that helped. He showed the .223 cartridge to Sawyer—she wouldn’t have let him use the actual cartridge found in the garage—and rolled his thumb across it. “I need you to fume this and pull the print.”
“I don’t like this,” she said. “You’re going to get hurt.”
“Nah, I’m gonna live forever.”
“I’ll only do it under protest,” she said. “Then when I visit you in the hospital, or at the funeral home, I can tell you that I told you so.”
“I’ll take it any way you want to do it.”
The fuming wand looked like a black, industrial-strength dildo but was actually a butane torch with a brass tip filled with Super Glue. The idea was to heat up the glue and then fume the .223 cartridge; the glue’s fumes would stick to the fatty acids in Virgil’s print and would then harden. When it was hardened, Sawyer dusted the print with a black powder, making it more visible. The process took only a few minutes, and, when it was done, Virgil took a photo of the print with his cell phone.
“And I need one of your tiny evidence bags. Plus, one of those fingerprint ink pads,” Virgil said.
The pad looked like a woman’s compact, except it was made of plastic and half as large. The pad inside was filled with purple ink that would make a nice, readable fingerprint on ordinary paper. The .223 cartridge went in a transparent four-inch ziplock bag.
“You think the shooter will believe you’re walking around with evidence in your pocket?” Baldwin asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’d be more believable if I let out the word that you’re walking around with evidence in your pocket,” Virgil said.
“Never mind,” Baldwin said.
Virgil left them to process the house and drove down the street to Skinner & Holland. On the way, Shrake called to say that they’d located Andorra’s son, heir to the farm, and he had good alibis for two of the shootings: he worked at a truck dispatching company and had signed out on time-stamped loads. “He’s out,” Shrake said.
“Okay. Look, I need you guys back here. Change cars—find some old crack-and-dent sedans that you can get comfortable in. We’re talking surveillance mode.”
“You got a suspect?”
“Not yet, but I hope to get one.”
At Skinner & Holland, Skinner was behind the cash register, and Holland was in the back room, counting the daily take. When he saw Virgil, Skinner said, “Jennie’s back. She’s down at her house, and she’s okay. Except she hurts.”
“Good. I need to talk to you and Wardell.”
“I can’t leave the register.”
“Then one at a time . . . But let me get a potpie.”
Virgil carried the frozen potpie to the back—nasty, but he was starving, having had no real breakfast—and put it in the microwave. He told Holland what he was going to do and what Holland should say about it. “I need to explain it to Skinner as well, but I want to do the actual printing out in public.”
“I dunno, man. Frankly, this sounds a little stupid . . .”
“Send Skinner back here.”
When he’d told Skinner what he was planning, Virgil sent him back out front, then sat and ate the potpie. When he was finished, he went out the back door, around to his truck, got the fingerprint pad and a piece of white paper, and carried them into the store. He printed both Holland and Skinner, as three locals watched, then compared their prints to the print on his cell phone.
“I guess you guys are in the clear,” he said. “Neither of you have that big of a whorl.”
“You got it off a cartridge?” Holland asked. “Can I see it?”
“Not much to see,” Virgil said. He took the evidence bag out of his jacket pocket and dangled it in front of Holland’s nose. “The print’s clear enough. Now, I just have to find a match.”
He put the bag back in his pocket, turned to the locals—a fourth had joined the first three, and none were leaving—and asked, “Anybody else want to get cleared?”
Virgil’s last stop was back at his room, where he knocked on the connecting door between his room and the main part of the house. Danielle popped it open, and asked, “What’s up?”
“About the town blog . . . ?”
“Yes?”
“Could you put a news story up for me without saying where it came from?” Virgil asked.
“Depends on what it is.”
Virgil explained about the cartridge shell and the fingerprint. “I’d like to get the word out that I’m going around printing suspects, without it coming from me.”
“Hey, that’s a good story. I’ll put it at the top of my ‘Heard Around Town’ column.”
When she’d gone to post the news, Virgil locked the door, went out to his truck, got his armored vest and his iPad, and started reading all the news he’d neglected over the past few days. He checked a few wildlife forums and “The Online Photographer.”
He had nothing to do until news of the fingerprinting had percolated through the town and until Jenkins and Shrake got back.
How long would that take? In Wheatfield, everybody should have heard about it before nightfall, he thought. Jenkins and Shrake should be set up by then.
And finally he asked himself, how stupid is this?