A cat came out of a back room and looked at them.

An hour after they arrived, they were back in the street.

Zimmer said, looking at the house, “What a fuckin’ mess.”

* * *

—

Virgil stopped back at the Vissers’ to use the bathroom and then sat on the bed and called the Tarweveld Inn to see if they had any available rooms for Jenkins and Shrake. They did. When Brice had closed the church, a dozen people had checked out, and whoever answered the phone at the inn seemed both surprised and grateful that somebody might want to check in. He almost signed up for a third room for himself but decided to stay with the Vissers. Not only were they friendly, they were a source of local information.

Night was coming down. Virgil had decided he needed something real to eat, so he drove down I-90 to Blue Earth and got some decent barbecue and California sweet corn.

Back at his room, he got out a legal pad and drew circles on it for a while, trying to figure out a rationale for shooting two out-of-towners, and then a well-known and well-liked local.

He could think of only one: the calculated killing of Glen Andorra to get the tool he needed—the rifle—and then two more to establish a pattern that would appear random, and then Osborne, to accomplish some unknown task while appearing to be the third in a random sequence. If that were the case, the shooter might take down one more to draw attention away from Osborne, the real target.

Of course, there might not be a rationale if the shooter were simply nuts. Maybe he’d been drawn to shooting at people at the church simply because that’s where a crowd could be found; or maybe he hated the idea of something miraculous happening there that hadn’t reached him.

He’d have to dig around, disturb the community, if he were going to flush out a crazy man. If the shootings had a solid motive, he had one question to ask:

Who benefits?

* * *

—

Though it was late, he pulled up the emails sent by Clay Ford and the Nazis, lists of people who could support their alibis. With a bit of luck, he got through to all of them. And both Ford and the Nazis were cleared. It wasn’t absolutely definitive, but unless something else pointed to them, Virgil was willing to accept their alibis.

* * *

—

Before he went to sleep, Virgil contemplated God and His ways, an effort to make sense out of the chaos that cops regularly encounter. Sometimes, the act of rigorous contemplation led to new paths of investigation. But not on this night.

Instead, he spent some time thinking about Margery Osborne and what her son had said about her. She’d been born during World War II; her father was a veteran of the Pacific Theater and hadn’t seen his daughter until she was three years old. He’d suffered from every disease the Pacific had to offer, frightening her with his random onsets of malaria. She’d been in junior high school before the farm got reliable television reception—she’d missed the advent of Elvis Presley but was there for the Beatles. She lived through the Vietnam era as the wife of a small farmer who, like her father, was a war veteran. She’d had two children, one of whom died shortly after he was born. She and her husband had struggled with a noneconomic farm, and she’d gone to work as a health care aide in Fairmont, seen the farm sold, and her husband die . . .

A world of experience and memories, all gone in an instant. For what? Money? What else could it be except the product of insanity?

But he wasn’t getting that feeling, that edge of craziness.

Margery Osborne, he thought, had probably been sent into the final darkness for nothing more than the God Almighty Dollar.

11

   Larry Van Den Berg rolled into Wheatfield at midmorning, parked his truck beside his house, went inside, made himself a pimento loaf with mustard and onion sandwich, got a beer from the refrigerator, and checked his secret email account for messages from his brother. Lego sales were holding up, though they hadn’t gotten rid of them as fast as they’d hoped. But, then, there were a lot of them.

The last note said “This week, $1,400.”

Nice.

He thought about the other iron he had in the fire: could he have been the only one to see the remarkable resemblance between Janet Fischer and the Virgin Mary? He’d give her a call. She didn’t go to work down at Skinner & Holland until later in the afternoon. Even if she didn’t confess, he might have time to rip off a piece of ass before she went to work.

She answered her phone on the first ring. “I’m not talking to you anymore, after what you said.”

“I don’t think you got any choice. Besides, you know you still love me,” Van Den Berg said. “Tell you what. You at home? I’ll come over, and we’ll talk about it. Maybe snuggle a little.”

“Well, you can come over anyway,” she said, and she hung up.

Van Den Berg looked at the phone. Not the first time she’d hung up on him, although lately it had been happening more often. Still, he was the confident sort. He jumped in the shower, hit his pits and crotch with some 212 Sexy Men deodorant, in orange mandarin scent, got dressed, smiled at himself in the bathroom mirror, and started off for Janet’s, smelling like an orange.

Nice day outside, warm, and redolent of the oncoming summer. Lilacs blooming; he stopped to sniff one, closing his eyes, remembered his mother. Okay, that wasn’t good, but everything else was. A hot girlfriend, steady work, if not exactly the job of his dreams, money in the bank with the prospect of more. Maybe it was time to buy a boat. From Wheatfield, pulling a trailer, he could be at Lake Okoboji in an hour, and the Iowegians kept it stocked with walleye, pike, bass, and muskie.

Of course, as is the way of the world, and most of his dreams, it all went straight into the toilet when he got to Fischer’s.

* * *

—

Janet Fischer lived in a tiny house that looked exactly like a big house only shrunken; it was roughly the size and shape of a boxcar. The roof was peaked, with a small window at its apex; the roofline couldn’t have been more than twelve feet up; a narrow plank porch framed the front door.

The house had been built by the same man who’d built all the town windmills, sometime after World War II. It contained a compact kitchen that was separated from the living room by a breakfast bar; the living room contained a two-cushion couch and two easy chairs, separated by a coffee table. The single bathroom had only a sink, toilet, and shower, no tub. The single bedroom contained a queen-sized bed. The bed frame butted against the wall at the head end, with not more than a six-inch-wide clearance on one side and two feet on the other, and no more than four feet at the end of the bed. When the sex got intense, the bed knocked on the wall between the bedroom and the living room and shook the entire structure.