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.