Jenkins didn’t know where Apel’s business was, but Virgil made a call to Holland, swore him to secrecy, and asked. “He’s got an old Quonset on Second Street,” Holland said.

“Is that anywhere near Bram Smit’s house?”

“Well, yeah. Down a ways, but not far. Fifty or sixty yards. Not far from the Vissers’, either. Look over your shoulder when you go to your room tonight and you’ll see it right there, down the street.”

Virgil rang off, and said to Jenkins, “We need to check his business. This looks promising.”

“If he’s the guy, we still need something else. Something physical. At this point, I don’t see a conviction. I don’t even see a search warrant. If he did it for the money, he’s gone as far as he can go, he doesn’t need to shoot anyone else, which means he’s probably thrown the gun in a river somewhere. Or he’s getting ready to.”

“He still had it this morning,” Virgil said. “I doubt he’d risk moving around with it when the next yard’s full of cops. Maybe get rid of it tonight.”

“He could have gotten rid of it right after he shot Osborne. Be a priority, I’d think,” Jenkins said.

“Let’s hope he didn’t—that’s all we can do. And don’t forget that we have that .223 shell, and he still believes we have a fingerprint,” Virgil said.

“He offered to let us print him . . .”

“Calling our bluff. We should check this Quonset, see if it works as the place he might have been shooting from. If it does, we need to maneuver him.”

“By doing what?”

“You’ll think of something,” Virgil said.

* * *

—

Apel’s Quonset was a seventy-year-old, post–Korean War two-story steel shed meant to cover heavy equipment and its associated appurtenances, and nothing else. Access was through twelve-foot, outward-swinging doors at one end of the hut.

The Quonset had a half dozen two-foot-square windows on each side, through which they could see a Bob-Cat and some attachments, an older Caterpillar excavator, and space for a couple of more pieces of equipment. A long wooden workbench on one wall held cans that they couldn’t identify, along with what appeared to be spare or damaged parts, some tools, shovels, and miscellaneous operating gear.

Standing at the end of the Quonset that faced the church, Virgil said, “Guess what? You couldn’t see the targets from here.” They couldn’t because there was a low wooden hut in the way, with signs on all three sides that said “Pet Parlor—Pet Bathing and Grooming.” The signs were old, and the hut appeared to be vacant.

Jenkins stepped back from the Quonset, looked up, and asked, “How about from up there?”

Virgil stepped back and looked up. The roof of the Quonset overhung the vertical wall, under which, right at the top of the wall, was what looked like a ventilation grille. They walked back along the side of the hut, trying to see the grille through the windows, but they couldn’t because of the way the windows were pushed out from the rounded sides, each under its own small gable.

They walked around to the swinging doors, which were locked with a hinge and a padlock; but there was a half-inch space between the doors, near the bottom, and when Virgil got down on his knees and looked through the crack, he could see light coming through the grille at the other end.

“What?” Jenkins asked.

Virgil stood, brushed off his knees, looked up at the Quonset’s overhanging roof. “That’s, what do you think, sixteen to eighteen feet up there? Something like that?”

“Probably.”

“It’s clear, open space inside, and I don’t see any ladder.”

“He could bring one . . . A construction guy’s probably got to have one,” Jenkins said.

“Let’s go back to the scene of the shooting, see if we can see the top of the Quonset from there.”

They got in the truck, drove past Bram Smit’s house on the way out to Main Street, and down to the church. On the way, Virgil said, “You know what? I bet you could raise that excavator bucket up high enough that he could crawl up there.”

Jenkins said, “I bet you’re right.”

Across the street from the church, where the three victims had been shot, Virgil got out of the truck, got his Nikon and longest lens, and looked down the street toward the Quonset. It would have to be three hundred yards away, he thought; and while he couldn’t see much of the building, he could see the peak of its roof and the ventilation grille. He took a picture.

“Time to call the sheriff,” he said.

24

   Zimmer was accompanied by Lucy Banning, the deputy who’d taken Larry Van Den Berg to jail. They gathered in Skinner & Holland’s back room to talk about Apel. Skinner was in school, but Holland was at the store and wanted to hear about what Virgil had found. When Zimmer asked if Virgil thought it was appropriate to include a civilian in a police discussion, Virgil shrugged, and said, “Sometimes. And this is one of those times. Nobody knows more about the locals than the locals.”

“And I am the mayor,” Holland said. “By a landslide.”

Virgil told them what they’d learned about Apel. All of it was suggestion, but the fact that Apel lived in what amounted to Osborne’s backyard and had easy and rapid access to the house was convincing.

“Plus,” Jenkins added, “when the guy shot Virgil, and Shrake was running, we almost had him cornered. But when he disappeared, he was running that way—toward his house and Osborne’s.”

“You know what? When I talked to Apel, he reminded me that I’d seen him standing on his porch and that he’d pointed out where the guy had run to,” Virgil said. “No way he had time to change into a white T-shirt and shorts. We’re talking about a couple of seconds.”

Jenkins said, “Huh.” And, “We’ll figure that out later.”

* * *

—

Holland thought he knew what the loan to Osborne involved. “Years ago, back when I was in college, Barry and Davy started a brew pub out on the Interstate in that old Burton Ford dealership. The rumor at the time was, Davy’s wife had come into an inheritance, they put up the money, and Barry operated the place—Davy and Ann had their own business to run; they make good money running their heavy equipment.”

“What I remember about it is,” Zimmer said, “the brew pub went down like the Titanic.”

“Wasn’t there some kind of . . . disease that they caught out of there?” Banning asked.