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.”
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 som
ething 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.”
* * *
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