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. Heprobably 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 bellsat 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.
