“I’ll go over and take a look tomorrow,” Skinner said. “In the meantime . . . this printer is gonna take an hour to print out all these emails. I’d put them on a thumb drive, but I can’t find one. I mean, everybody’s got a thumb drive.”
“Show me one of these porn channels he’s signed up for,” Fischer said. “That jerk. He told me once that he never looks at porn because it’s tacky. I thought I was his main sexual connection. I tell you, Skinner, this explains a lot about his attitudes.”
“You actually don’t need to go out to the porn sites. He’s got his own collection on the machine, and it’s hooked up to the TV.” He pointed to a cable snaking along the wall and up behind the TV. “That’s an HDMI cable.”
“Then let me see one.”
Fischer settled on a video called Last Tango in Chatsworth, and Skinner fired it up for her, then began sorting through the paper chugging out of what must have been a fifteen-year-old dot matrix printer. “Got a fuckin’ parallel port,” he muttered, as he worked. “I didn’t even know you could find parallel ports anymore . . .”
Behind him, Fischer said, “Oh my God. OH MY GOD!”
Skinner turned to look, said, “Well, that’s not something you see every day. Wonder how they did that? You’d think they’d get stuck.”
The printer and the video ended simultaneously, and Skinner stacked up the paper, and said, “We gotta get out of here before it gets light.”
“You gotta get out of here. I’m going to look at every one of these filthy things. I want to know what kind of man I’ve been engaged to,” Fischer said. “Show me how that computer thingy works.”
“Okay, but I don’t want to walk all the way home. How about if I crash at your place?”
“Whatever,” she said, waving a hand at him, as The Gang Goes Bang! came up on the TV.
Skinner kissed her good-bye, left her on the couch, and crept out the back door. Dark as a coal sack outside, except for the stars, which were bright and plentiful. With the incriminating pack of paper under his arm, he went back to Fischer’s house, snuck in again, and lay in her bed until dawn, reading the emails.
By first light, he was convinced that the Van Den Bergs were up to something illegal, sending shipments of illegal somethings all over the country. Had to be the Legos. Could have been drugs, the way they talked in code, but they weren’t making enough money to be drug dealers.
It occurred to him that if a legitimate seller of Lego kits could find an off-the-books source that only cost, say, half of the normal wholesale price, he could make a killing. Wouldn’t even have to pay taxes on the profit. The Lego company would supply the advertising, and if you bought even a small number of kits from the company . . . you’d have the perfect cover.
“Sweet,” Skinner said. “Crooked but sweet.”
Shortly after dawn, he heard the back door rattle and was seized by the sudden fear that Larry had come home unexpectedly; but then Fischer called out, “Skinner? You still here?”
“Back in the bedroom,” he called.
She appeared in the bedroom doorway and posed there, one hand on the jamb. She had, he thought, a weird glow in her eyes.
7
Three people shot, one of them dead, all possibly tied to the Marian apparitions.
As Skinner and Fischer were sneaking into Van Den Berg’s house, Virgil was in bed; he’d spent a few minutes thinking about God and His religions and wondered why religions were so often tied to violence. When he was in college, years earlier, during the usual late-night weed-fired discussions of sex, politics, and religion, he’d decided that religions and political parties were quite alike, except that religions dealt with morality, primarily, while political parties dealt with economics.
In other words, they were both dealing with people’s deepest feelings about how the world should work. Differences could escalate to physical clashes, as they might have even in the late-night weed-fired college discussions, except, of course, for the weed: “You’re so full of shit, dude. Pass the joint.”
Now, lying in bed all these years later, he still wondered why religions, since they dealt with morality, shouldn’t shun any form of violence to others? Then again, he thought, maybe they did. Maybe the connection between religion and violence was Fake News.
His mind got caught in a loop speculating about it, and he finally got out of bed and opened up his laptop and looked up the most religious states and the most violent states. Turns out the six most religious states, as determined in one major study, were also among the ten states with the highest murder rates. The six least religious states were among the ten with the lowest.
He found that depressing, turned off the computer, and lay awake thinking about other demographic characteristics that could account for the overlap. Perhaps the most religious people lived in the parts of the country that were also the poorest and that accounted for the crime rather than religiosity? But, then, was religiosity related to poverty or were the two unrelated?
What would happen if the most religious places legalized weed?
He was still speculating about that when he drifted off.
* * *
—
When he woke the next morning, he had a text from Bea Sawyer that said “We were at the scene until 2 a.m. Got a motel room in Albert Lea. Not much new. Don’t call early.”
Virgil got up, shaved and showered, contemplated his store of T-shirts and picked a white “Larkin Poe” shirt that showed a snake wrapped around an apple. After dressing, he walked over to Mom’s Cafe, where he had two of the worst pancakes of his entire life, which made him wonder how, exactly, a cook could screw up something so simple. The pancakes tasted as though the flour had been cut with sawdust, while the syrup had the consistency of tap water.
Done with breakfast, he walked down to Skinner & Holland, where he found a tall, rugged-looking Catholic priest, in a black suit and clerical collar, standing on the sidewalk, eating an ice-cream cone, and talking with Holland.
When Holland saw Virgil coming, he said to the priest, “Here he is.”
Virgil walked up, and Holland introduced him to the priest, George Brice, who said, “I think we have a mutual friend.”
He mentioned a St. Paul priest that Virgil had met through his father, and they talked for a moment about one of Virgil’s earlier cases that had involved a Lutheran minister who was an international criminal, a fake but politically explosive archaeological find, a variety of gunmen from the Middle East, and a secret American intelligence organization that Virgil wasn’t even supposed to dream about but occasionally did anyway.
“There’s been a murder now. Wardell tells me you think it’s related to the two church shootings,” Brice said, bringing the conversation back to the present. “Is that correct?”
“Yes, but I’m not a hundred percent on that,” Virgil said. “We found out that Glen Andorra was having a sexual relationship with somebody, but we don’t know who. Sex can be a powerful motivator for homicide. If his death was murder and not a suicide, it might not have anything to do with these church shootings. Even if it doesn’t, though, I believe the gun used in the church shootings came from Andorra. And since we’re talking about murder, whoever killed Andorra is probably the church shooter. It’s just not a hundred percent.”
“He was shot up close, and in cold blood, before anyone was shot here,” Holland said. “I don’t see how a lover would have done both things unless killing Andorra unhinged her.”
“Ah, it’s not his girlfriend, it’s a madman,” Brice said, as he finished the ice-cream cone. He stepped over to a trash can and dumped the cone’s paper wrapper.
“I believe you’re right,” Holland said. “But is that all he is?”
* * *
—
I need to talk to you about what you saw when Harvey Coates was shot,” Virgil said to Brice.
“C’mon in the back room,” Holland said.
Virgil and Brice followed him through the store, where a dozen people were lined up at the cash register. “Still going gangbusters,” Brice said.