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.”