“We had a fight, but she was into it, too.”
“Not what she says,” Banning said. “Doesn’t look like she messed you up much.”
“Look. Let me talk to her, we’ll straighten it out,” Van Den Berg said.
“Too late for that. I’m going to have to take you in,” Banning said. She unhooked handcuffs from a belt case, and Virgil moved off to one side, where he’d have a clear run at Van Den Berg. The other man looked at him and then back at Banning. “You always wanted to do this, you bitch.” He threw the hose he was holding on the ground, and it snaked around, pumping water.
But he didn’t resist. Banning put on the cuffs and led him to the car. Virgil walked over to the house and turned off the faucet, and asked Banning, “You want me to follow you in?”
“Naw. He’ll be okay in the back of the car. You getting anywhere on the shootings?”
“Trying to figure out why nobody can hear the gunshots. They were from a .223, so . . . they had to be loud. And we’re wondering why they’re all exactly at four-fifteen.”
Banning scratched her ear, frowning, then shook her head, and said, “Beats me.”
They loaded Van Den Berg into the backseat of the patrol car, Banning said, “See ya,” and drove away. Virgil got in his truck and started back to Skinner & Holland. He was halfway there when the patrol car pulled up behind him, and the flashers came on.
Virgil pulled over, and Banning hopped out, and when Virgil rolled down his window she said, “Larry says he has something to tell you.”
“Okay.” Virgil followed her back to the patrol car, and Banning opened the back door, and Van Den Berg leaned out, and said, “I know why nobody heard the gunshots and why everybody got shot at four-fifteen. You let me go, and I’ll tell you.”
Virgil said, “Larry, if you know something, you have to tell us. It’s murder we’re talking about now. You beating up Janet, that’s a whole different thing.”
“You’re not going to let me go? Then you know what? You can go fuck yourself.” He looked at Banning. “Shut the door.”
Virgil said, “Larry . . .”
“Fuck you.” He laughed. “Fuck you.”
Van Den Berg sat in the center of the backseat, staring at the screen separating him from the front seat, and wouldn’t say anything else. Virgil tried again, but Van Den Berg turned away.
Virgil said to Banning, “Take him.”
She slammed the back door, and Virgil said, quietly, “See if he’ll talk to you. Maybe he does know something.”
“I will,” Banning said. “Sorry about that language.”
“Lot of people have been telling me to go fuck myself,” Virgil said. “It’s starting to wear on me.”
* * *
—
At the store, Virgil found Skinner and Fischer still in the back room, and Fischer asked, anxiously, if they’d made the arrest.
“He’s on his way to jail,” Virgil said.
Holland came in and asked the same question as Fischer.
Virgil answered the same way, but added, “You know what? He says he knows why nobody heard those shots. And why all those people got shot at the same time. He said he’d tell me if I’d let him off the hook on the assault. I wouldn’t do that. But he figured it out in five minutes, and I kinda believed him.”
The other three looked at one another, all frowning, then Skinner said, “If that dumbass figured it out . . .”
Fischer said, “I keep telling you, he’s not a dumbass. He probably did figure it out. If he did, then I say let him out. That’s more important than—”
Holland shook his head. “No. He’s going down.”
“What we gotta do here is crowdsource it. Ask around,” Skinner said. “If he figured it out in five minutes, somebody else will even if we can’t. We could get Danny Visser to put it up on the town blog.”
Virgil said, “We can do that. We need to find that out. Our real problem is, right now we don’t have anything to work with. We know where the killer got the gun and the suppressor and the ammunition, and none of that helps. The crime scene people aren’t giving us any help, because they’re like us—they got nothing to work with. If we knew why he was always shooting at four-fifteen, if we knew why we can’t hear the shots . . . then we’d know something serious.”
* * *
—
The priest, George Brice, stuck his head into the room, saw Virgil, and stepped inside. “I heard you were back here, and I wondered if you’re getting anywhere? People are unhappy that we’ve closed the church. I won’t reopen it until we have a handle on what’s happening . . .”
Virgil: “We don’t know enough yet.”
He explained about the gunshot problem and the 4:15 shootings, and Brice looked from one to the other, and then said, “I can tell you why that is—though I didn’t think of it until this second.”
“What?” Virgil asked.
“We’ve got these big speakers up in the bell tower,” Brice said. “Recordings of the bells of Notre-Dame. We start playing the bells at four-fifteen, for three minutes. The call for the four-thirty Mass.”
They all stared at him, then Virgil slapped himself on the forehead, and said, “Duh.”
Holland said, “We should have thought of it. But we’ve been playing the bells every day since Christmas. They’re louder than heck, but I don’t even hear them anymore.”
“Same with me,” Skinner said, and Fischer nodded.
“The bells would cover the gunshots for anyone near the church, and he wouldn’t fire until he heard them. The bells determined the time. I thought I’d figured out something important, but I hadn’t,” Virgil said. “We really are back to square one.”
13
Virgil, now seriously bummed, went out to his truck and called Frankie, asked her how she was feeling. Better, she said. The morning sickness had receded, at least temporarily. He told her what had happened with the bell recordings.
“Sounds like you were trying to avoid an actual investigation,” she said. “Where would figuring out the boom and bang get you? You checked all the various directions and didn’t get anywhere.”
“Thanks.”
“I speak only the truth,” she said. “Go work harder.”
“It’s weird—I’m both frantic and bored. I gotta find this guy, but I’d rather be home with you.”
“The harder you work, the sooner you’ll get here.”
He told her about arresting Van Den Berg and the circumstances surrounding it. “Good for you,” she said. “You know what I think about that kind of thing.”
She’d once been attacked by a couple of hired thugs outside a convenience store when they’d mistaken her for somebody else. Retribution had been exacted, in the guise of several Armenians armed with baseball bats who thought they were doing Virgil a favor by beating up her attacker. Virgil disapproved, in theory, but Frankie admitted that the men had greatly lifted her spirits and she sent a thank-you note and a bottle of top-end Artsakh to the chief Armenian.
* * *
—
When he got off the phone, Virgil sat in his truck for a while, thinking about his next move. He couldn’t think of anything relevant, so what he did next had nothing to do with the shootings. He called a friend named Bell Wood, a major crimes investigator with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.
“Virgil fuckin’ Flowers,” Wood said when he picked up his phone. “The poor girl’s answer to soft porn.”
Virgil asked, “Did you guys lose a trailerload of Legos last year?”
“Not only that, we lost the trailer,” Wood said. “You wouldn’t know where they are, would you?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Virgil said. “They might not be there long. One of your suspects is in jail up here for beating up his girlfriend. He’ll probably get out tomorrow morning, and he’ll probably be afraid that she or one of her friends will rat him out and he’ll move everything.”
“Give me the details,” Wood said. “There’s a ten-thousand-dollar reward from the insurance company, but since you’re a law enforcement officer, you don’t qualify.”