“I am patient, but I’ve got a second place for you to check. I think I found the actual murder scene—he was dumped in the cow pasture, but he was murdered in town.”

He got Van Den Berg’s house number off the mailbox and walked a hundred feet down to the corner and read the street sign—Harley Street—and Sawyer said they’d stop there first.

“He was shot from the front door, I believe, with that same .223 he used in the other shootings. It’s possible that the killer rang the bell.”

“You’ve been messing around in my crime scene, haven’t you?”

“I’ll see you when you get here,” Virgil answered. “I’ll be talking to the neighbors.”

—

The house to the left of Van Den Berg’s was vacant. An elderly man answered the door of the house to the right, blinking through Coke-bottle glasses, and Virgil identified himself, and asked if the old man had noticed any activity around Van Den Berg’s house the night before.

“What happened, somebody kill him? Or did he kill somebody else?”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because you’re that cop who’s been investigating the murders . . . So which is it?” the old man asked.

“Somebody killed him,” Virgil said. “Stood at the front door and shot him in the heart. Did you hear a shot about eleven o’clock last night?”

“I don’t know, but something woke me up. Don’t know what it was. I don’t sleep so good anymore, so I was pissed off about that. I was awake when he drove away, and I was still awake when he came back. His goddamn garage door sounds like a cement truck making a dump.”

“You heard him go and then come back?”

“That’s right. I sleep downstairs now, because, if I sleep upstairs, one of these days I’d come tumbling down ass over teakettle, and that’d be it for me. I’d lay there and suffer until I died of thirst, since nobody comes to visit me anymore. They’re all dead, anybody who might come. Anyway”—he scratched his bald head—“what was I saying? Oh, yeah. I sleep downstairs, so I not only heard him but saw his headlights sweep across the walls.”

“And that was about eleven o’clock?”

“Damned if I know. It was dark. I laid there for a long time awake, and it didn’t get light, so it was sometime in the middle of the night.”

“Think anybody else might have heard the shot?”

“Well, Louise Remington lives across the street. If anybody had her nose between the curtains, she’d be the one.”

—