“I never thought that,” she said. “I always thought that everybody knew everything about everybody.”

“Then why doesn’t anybody know who the killer is?”

“Now, that,” she said, “is an interesting topic for a column. I’ll start writing it up right now. I’ll call it . . . mmm . . .”

“‘Who did it?’”

She ticked a finger at him. “You oughta be a writer.”

—

Virgil had a bad night, stressed by the sense that he was getting nowhere, until at 8 o’clock the next morning, as he was shaving, Bell Wood called from Iowa. Virgil put the phone on speaker, and asked, “What’s up?”

“You know we put that ankle monitor on Van Den Berg?”

“Yeah. He cut it off?”

“We don’t know what he did. What we do know is, the monitoring service called this morning and said that he spent all night in what appears to be a cow pasture about six miles outside of Wheatfield.”

“A cow pasture?”

“That’s what it looks like on a satellite photo. The monitoring service has a time line on him: he was home until around eleven o’clock, and then he drove out to the cow pasture and stayed there. He’s still there.”

“Kinda chilly last night.”

“Not hunting season, so that’s not it . . . I was hoping you might go out and take a look. If we keep getting a signal, and you don’t find a body, we’ll have to figure he cut the monitor off, threw it into the pasture, and now he’s in the wind.”

“Doesn’t sound like Larry,” Virgil said. “Email me directions on how to get out there.”

“Five minutes. I’ll send you a bunch of screen grabs of Google Maps.”

Virgil couldn’t look at another potpie, but he stopped at Skinner & Holland and bought a bag of potato chips. When he told Holland about the ankle monitor and the cow pasture, Holland volunteered to come with him. As they drove out, Holland looked at Wood’s maps on Virgil’s iPad, and said, “If the monitor signal is accurate, looks like he’s about halfway down the pasture and halfway up the hill.”

“In other words, about dead center.”

“Yup.”

They left the car on the side of the road. Holland went prosthesis-deep in the roadside marsh, while Virgil managed to jump over the soggiest bit. They clambered over a sagging barbed-wire fence and walked slightly uphill, across a pasture spotted with last year’s dried cow pies, and found Van Den Berg’s body wrapped head to foot in semitransparent plastic. He looked like a luna moth’s cocoon.

Holland said, “There’s a lot of blood at the bottom of the plastic . . . Bet he was shot.”