Virgil looked around the pasture, the sprouting corn in an adjacent field, the top of a red barn, an actual television aerial on the top of the house next to it, the blue skies, the puffy clouds, and said, “We can’t catch a break. We can’t.”
17
Never actually found a dead body before,” Holland said, “though I’ve seen a lot of them.”
“I gotta know where you were last night, and where Skinner was,” Virgil said. “I know where Janet was, in the hospital. But you three had big problems with this guy.”
Holland wasn’t surprised. He said, “I was on a date, actually. You heard me set it up with the bank girl. Sara McDonald. She came back to my trailer and left about midnight.”
“What about Skinner?”
“I don’t know where Skinner was. But sometimes I just sit in my trailer, shootin’ flies with a pellet gun...”
“Shootin’ flies?”
“Yeah, and Skinner doesn’t like it because he feels sorry for the flies. The chances that he killed Larry are slim to none. Besides, whoever killed Larry”—Holland squatted and looked at the body again—“probably shot him with a small-caliber, high-powered bullet. There’s no blood on his back, that I can see, but a lot on hischest. He was killed by the same guy who shot the other people, and we know Skinner didn’t do that because he actually witnessed one of the shootings.”
“Yeah... I pretty much knew all that,” Virgil said. He pulled out his phone and called Zimmer.
Zimmer: “You’re calling to tell me you found the shooter?”
“Well, I found somebody. Larry Van Den Berg. Lying dead in a cow pasture. Probably shot.”
“What!”
“Yeah. Holland’s with me, and we think it’s the same guy who shot the others,” Virgil said. “We need some of your people out here, and I’ll get the crime scene crew moving again.”
—
Virgil called Bell Wood in Des Moines and told him what had happened. “I had a bad feeling about it,” Wood said. “Listen, I talked to the monitoring service, and they peg the time that he left his house at eleven-nineteen, and he got out to the pasture at eleven twenty-eight. He was probably killed right around eleven, unless he was shot at the pasture.”
“Nah,” Virgil said, looking down toward the fence. “The killer would have had to march him across a swampy ditch, and over a fence, in the dark. It would have been too awkward. Besides, he’s got that Saran Wrap all over him. No point in doing that if he was killed here.”
“Sorry about that, Virgil. I doubt that it has anything to do with Van Den Berg getting killed, but it probably kills our case against his brother, too. Ralph can claim he had no idea that the Legos were stolen. Since we’d have to prosecute Larry to nail down whathappened with the Legos, where they came from, and he’d have to have a chance to respond, but he can’t now... we’re sorta out of luck. What I’m saying is...”
“You’re saying Ralph has a motive.”
“Or his wife. Or some associate that we don’t know about.”
Virgil thought about it, then said, “Nope. The two brothers were working on what was, basically, an impulse theft. I doubt there are any associates.”
“I would tend to agree, but, uh, better to bring it up now than to find out later.”
—
An hour later, a line of a dozen deputies was slow-walking the pasture and the roadside, looking for anything that might relate to the murder. Holland had called Skinner, who left school to drive out, and who told Virgil that nobody was going to find anything. “The killer drove him out here, threw him in the pasture, and drove back home. Period. What’s to find?”
“Thanks for that.”
Zimmer came by, said that he’d parked a deputy outside Van Den Berg’s house. “You’ll want to go in there, so I thought it’d be best to keep an eye on the place.”
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 almosta 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.”
—
