The longer she thought about it, the angrier she got—nine years!—until she finally put on her jacket and walked over to Van Den Berg’s house. There, she pounded on the door until a still-angry Van Den Berg opened up, and demanded, “What do you want?”

“Nine years back, Larry, that’s what I want. You have been fooling around on me the whole time. That gentleman’s club out by Cheyenne, where you stop both coming and going, that’s no better than a whorehouse. I want my key. And I want some of that Lego money.”

Van Den Berg had a beer in his left hand, and it wasn’t the first of the day. He glowered at her, then said, “There ain’t no more money. The Legos are long gone.”

She knew he was lying because Skinner had maneuvered around the woodlot while Ralph Van Den Berg was hauling the Legos to his house for packing, and she could see from Skinner’s video that the truck was still more than half-full.

“You’re lying, Larry. We got photographic proof.”

“That fuckin’ . . .” He pushed the door open. “I’m not gonna stand here, arguing. You better come in.”

She stepped inside as he stepped back, and she said, “All I want is my share.”

“Tell you what I’ll give you,” he said. “How about this?”

He hit her right in the eye—hard—and she bounced off the door, and then he hit her in the mouth, and she fell down. “Now, get the fuck out of here,” he said, kicking her hip. He was wearing steel-toed trucker boots, and she felt as though her hip had broken.

She tried to crawl away, and wailed, “Don’t, don’t, Larry . . . Don’t, please . . .”

He kicked her again, and she cried out, and as she crawled back through the door, he kicked her in the butt, and said, “Come back, and I’ll fuck you up. You tell your Skinner and Holland the same thing. They fuck with me, I’ll fuck with them. Now, get the fuck out of my yard.”

Fischer managed to get to her feet. Her hip burned like fire, and she hobbled back to her house, crying as she went. At her house, she looked at herself in the mirror and began to weep, for her nine years, for her hopes that she’d have two or three bouncing babies by now. Maybe she wept even a little for Larry.

12

   Virgil woke early but lay in bed, thinking about Sherlock Holmes and that whole Holmes thing—that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, must be the truth. What Holmes never admitted was that there is a vast universe of the possible, and sorting through all the possibilities is often impossible. Holmes would have been better off, Virgil thought, working with the Flowers Maxims:

    If it’s criminal, it’s either stupid or crazy.

 Stupid people usually have guns, crazy people always do.

 In a choice between stupid and crazy, first investigate the stupid, because stupid is more common than crazy.

 In many cases, stupid is also more dangerous than crazy. You could sometimes talk to crazy, but there’s no dealing with stupid.

 None of the above is always true.

Having established that the criminal was most likely dumb—with exceptions—the question became, how was he avoiding detection? A rifle shot actually makes two loud noises: the boom or bang caused by the exploding gunpowder and the loud crack when the bullet breaks the sound barrier.

When he was in the Army, in Serbia, Virgil had once spent some time in the pits below the targets on a rifle range. He was six hundred yards out from the shooting line and became familiar with the difference between a muzzle blast and a supersonic crack. The two sounds were separate and distinct. The passing bullet produced a crack—some people described it as ZINGGGG! or WHIZZZZ!—that was quite loud, followed by the hollow boom of the muzzle blast. On the other hand, the ZINGGGG! didn’t sound like what most people thought of as a gunshot.

Other than Bram Smit, the old man with the shotgun, nobody had reported either one, and Smit had said the noise he heard sounded like a muffled thud—somebody dropping a shoe overhead. The muzzle blast would be attenuated by the suppressor, but it would still be loud. There must be other ways to muffle a shot, though—and that might be the thud that Smit had reported.

Maybe, Virgil thought, other witnesses actually had heard the shots but hadn’t recognized them for what they were.

If they had heard them at all . . .

If the bullet was subsonic and didn’t break the sound barrier, that would be far more interesting. There were a few commercial loaders of subsonic .223, but the energy levels of subsonic bullets were far lower than ordinary bullets, and the shooter would probably have to be much closer than they’d thought—likely not more than a hundred yards out, and possibly closer than that.

The arcing ballistics of the bullet might explain the two lower body shots. At a hundred yards, a subsonic bullet could drop a foot, so the shooter, not aware of that, might have been aiming at the victim’s heart and hitting too low. And then by the Osborne murder, might have fully compensated for that.

A combination subsonic ammunition and suppressor would mean that the shot would be silent at the point of impact with the victim. As far as he knew, nobody had looked for the shooter at only fifty to a hundred yards out . . .

But all that subsonic stuff sounded crazy smart and didn’t explain the two thuds heard by Smit. Nope. The shooter was probably using standard ammo, and the witnesses simply hadn’t identified the sonic boom as a rifle shot. Sonic booms, as far as Virgil knew, might be reduced by the frontal area of the bullet, and .223s were small, sleek slugs.

But Smit . . . Smit created a problem. Was it possible that he hadn’t heard the muzzle blast, the bang, but instead heard only the sonic boom, as the bullet passed close to his house?

* * *

—

Virgil was shaving when another thought occurred to him. He’d had an appointment the day before to meet Bud Dexter at Skinner & Holland at 4 o’clock. Virgil’d run a few minutes late, and they’d been talking for a while, but not too long, when Osborne got shot. She’d been shot, he’d bet, at 4:15, at almost exactly the time the other two were shot.

Why 4:15, or within a couple of minutes of 4:15? The obvious answer was that 4:15 was the time when you got the biggest crowds on the street corner across from the church. The first service was at 4:30, and if the Virgin Mary were planning to pop up, you’d want to be there a bit early to get a good seat.

But exactly 4:15? There’d be people on the corner at 4:10 and 4:25, as well. Maybe the shooter was coming from a job that ended at 3:30 or 4, and after going through whatever preparations he had to perform, it simply worked out to 4:15?

Nope. That wasn’t right.