No gloves yet. If anyone saw him, he wanted his bare hands visible . . . and empty.

Wheatfield mostly shut down at 8 o’clock, except when there was a service at St. Mary’s, but the church had been closed. By 9:30, it was dark and cool, and there were TV shows to watch. The shooter moved slowly and easily down the dark streets, unseen.

There were lights on at Van Den Berg’s. The shooter looked around, saw nothing moving, pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves, went to Van Den Berg’s front door, unslung the rifle, held it low but aimed at heart height, and pressed the doorbell.

Down in the basement, Van Den Berg turned his head at the sound of the bell. Who could that be? The shooter? Not Flowers . . . unless he’d hurt Janet worse than he thought.

He stood up, walked across the room to a cupboard, and took out a .357 Magnum.

No point in taking a chance.

* * *

—

The shooter heard him coming up the steps. Checked around again. The front door had a small window in it, at head height. He expected Van Den Berg to look out to see who’d come to the door. He was correct. He saw Van Den Berg coming and he pressed the muzzle of the gun against the door. Van Den Berg turned on the porch light, put his face to the window, saw the shooter’s face, unlocked the door, and pulled it open, and the muzzle of the gun was there, already aimed. He never had time even to flinch before the shooter pulled the trigger.

BANG!

The blast was fairly loud, if you were close to it, and sounded like nothing more than a gunshot. If you were more than a few dozen feet away and inside your own house, it would be hard to tell exactly what it was. There’d been no supersonic crack because the bullet had never traveled more than a few inches. The suppressor—the silencer—had taken care of the usual muzzle blast.

The shooter stepped inside, where Van Den Berg was sprawled on his back in the short entrance hall, a silver revolver by his side. The bullet had gone directly through his heart. The shooter turned off the porch light, closed the door, and waited for any sign that the gunshot had disturbed the town.

Nothing happened.

Satisfied that he was safe, he contemplated the body. He’d considered a variety of plans; the most appealing had involved Van Den Berg’s disappearance. He checked Van Den Berg’s pockets, found his car keys. He took a painter’s semitransparent plastic drop cloth out of his own coat pocket, unfolded it, and rolled the body onto it and rolled it over until it was completely cocooned. Van Den Berg hadn’t bled much, not like those bodies in the movies, and the shooter found some paper towels in the kitchen and cleaned up the small crimson puddle the dead man had left behind.

When everything was neat, he walked around to the windows in the living room, looking carefully up and down the street. The town was either asleep or glued to video screens.

He dragged the body through the kitchen, past the side door, and down into the garage, where Van Den Berg’s head went BUMP-BUMP-BUMP! down the three steps. He lifted the body into the back of Van Den Berg’s Jeep, went into the house to get the rifle, turned off all the interior lights but the one in the kitchen.

Before he got in the Jeep, he ejected the spent shell from the rifle and put it in his coat pocket, jacked another shell in the chamber, checked the safety, and put the rifle on the floor of the backseat. If he ran into a cop . . .

But he didn’t. He used the remote to open the garage door and then close it. He drove six miles out of town, to a cow pasture he was familiar with. The moon was high and three-quarters full. He lifted the body out of the back and carried it over his shoulder like a rolled carpet. Unexpectedly, he went ankle-deep in the mud in the roadside ditch. He crossed a nearly invisible barbed-wire fence, which hooked his coat; he had to struggle to get free. Finally, he carried the body up a hillside, where he dumped it behind a tree.

The police, he thought, would think that Van Den Berg had fled the theft charges in Iowa. The pasture wasn’t visited often, other than by the farm family’s two milk cows. Since there wasn’t much grazing grass growing yet, it would be at least weeks before the body was found, and maybe a few months.

He made it back to the Jeep, stamping his feet to take off the worst of the mud and water, which smelled like sulfur, did a U-turn, drove back to Van Den Berg’s, and parked in the garage. Inside, he turned off the kitchen light and then sat in the living room, waiting, and finally, at midnight, let himself out the side door and walked quietly to the street.

There was little electric light to be seen in Wheatfield at that time of night, and the stars looked close and only a little smudged by humidity. Nobody bothered him on the way home.

What a nice Minnesota night.

There’d be fireflies soon.

16

   After choking the breath out of Van Den Berg, Virgil met with Jenkins and Shrake at Skinner & Holland. Skinner was in school, but Holland was working in the store, and Virgil told him about Fischer getting beaten up again.

“Somebody needs to have a word with Larry,” Holland said. “As mayor, I’m exactly the right guy to do it.”

“I already had a word with him,” Virgil said.

Holland eye-checked him, then said, “I hope you didn’t get yourself in trouble.”

“I don’t think there’ll be a problem. Janet’s a mess. Banning is taking her to see a doc, and she’ll take some evidentiary photos in case we need them.”

* * *

—

Jenkins and Shrake had been talking about the case, and when they got in the back room, Jenkins said, “I think we’ve got to look real close at this Barry Osborne. Son of Margery.”

“I already talked to him. He was pretty screwed up,” Virgil said.

“You might be screwed up, too, if you’d shot your own mother,” Shrake said.

“Okay. I’ll buy that,” Virgil said. “Why did he shoot her?”

“Because he wanted to inherit?”

Virgil nodded, then shouted, “Hey, Wardell!”

Holland stuck his head through the curtain, and asked, “Yeah?”

“Did Margery Osborne have any money?”

Holland stepped into the room and shook his head. “Not as far as I know. She and her husband had a little farm down south of here, too small to be economic. Margery worked in town as a health care aide . . . you know, hospice care and Alzheimer’s people. She and her husband retired, moved to town, and he died a couple of years later. That must’ve been . . . jeez, ten, twelve years ago.”

“What about her house?”

“She lives with Barry. That’s actually Barry’s house, I think. I could make a call and find out.”