“Ooo. Gives me a hard-on,” Bakker said.

Banning: “’Bout time something did.”

“Hey . . .”

* * *

—

At 5:45, Jenkins kicked the side door.

He, Virgil, and Bakker were armored up, Jenkins and Bakker both wearing helmets and leading the way in, Virgil trailing. They first went down to the basement, Bakker now leading the way with the muzzle of his shotgun. The basement had wall-top, dirt-grimed windows on all four sides, and they could see that one of the windows under the porch was hanging open. The basement floor was dusty and crisscrossed by woman-sized footprints, which finally went up the stairs.

It appeared that she’d gone up and down several times—“maybe when Apel was talking to her,” Jenkins said. The basement was empty of anything useful. There were no lightbulbs in the sockets; an old workbench stood against one wall, not worth salvaging; and built-in shelves had been stripped of whatever they’d been holding, except for a pile of decades-old Tarweveld Advertisers. A hot-water tank was tilted on one rusty, broken foot. The centerpiece was a huge old coal-burning furnace, like the abandoned one in the Apels’ house, its heavy metal door hanging open; to one side was a coalbin. Virgil checked the bin, thinking that Apel might have gone out its door, but it had been nailed shut.

“Gotta be upstairs,” Jenkins said.

They turned toward the stairs. Virgil said, “Take it slow. Darren, if you want to lead . . . What?”

Bakker was looking at the furnace, then put a finger to his lips, and said, quietly, to Virgil, “Remember that hotfoot at the Nazis’ place?”

Jenkins said, “What?”

Bakker stepped over to the pile of old newspapers, said, aloud, “If we gotta search the house, there’s no point in freezing our asses off while we’re doing it. Help me get some wood in the furnace.”

He pointed at the ducts coming out of the ancient furnace; one of them was two feet in diameter.

Virgil said, “Yeah, you’re probably right.” He wrenched one of the rotting shelves off the wall and banged the side of the furnace.

Bakker took a cigarette lighter out of his pocket, muttered, “I’m probably gonna feel like an asshole,” lit the newspaper, got a smoky fire going on the crumpling newsprint, stuck it in the furnace, and waved it around.

Ann Apel cried, “Don’t do that.”

Virgil stuck his head in the furnace. “Ann! Come out of there.” She was in the largest of the ducts.

Her voice wavered. “I’m going to kill myself.”

Virgil: “Don’t do that. Ann, c’mon . . .”

“Go away!”

“We can’t go away, Ann. Listen, you’ve still got all your rights to a—”

BANG!

They all jumped, and Jenkins said, “Oh, no.”

There was a metallic rattling in the furnace, and a rifle stock fell partway out of the duct where Apel had been hiding. From upstairs, Zimmer shouted, “We’re coming in!”

Bakker reached into the furnace, grabbed the rifle stock, and pulled it out.

Virgil was the thinnest of the cops, and he managed to crawl into the furnace up to his waist. Behind him, up the stairs, Zimmer was shouting, “What happened? What happened?”

Virgil could see one of Apel’s lower legs. He grabbed her foot and pulled, and she slid slowly out of the duct and into the main chamber of the furnace. She was covered with soot and blood, and Virgil twisted her into a semifetal position, her feet toward the furnace door.

“Help me,” he said to Bakker. Virgil’s hands were now slick with blood, and he and Bakker eased Apel out of the furnace. She was trying to speak but failing, making an ug-ug-ug sound, maybe swallowing blood or bits of her tongue.

Zimmer looked over Virgil’s shoulder as they lowered her to the basement floor and he turned and shouted up the stairs, “Get those ambulance guys down here. Get them. Bring a stretcher.”

Jenkins was looking at Apel with an experienced eye. “Put the muzzle under her chin and pulled the trigger. Kinda fucked it up, huh?”

To Virgil’s somewhat less experienced eye, it appeared that she’d managed to shoot off the end of her jaw, chunks of her lips, and the end of her tongue and the end of her nose. Blood was bubbling from her mouth. Her eyes were open and aware but dimming with shock.

Virgil shouted, “Hurry it up. Goddamnit!”

* * *

—

After that, it was all medical and forensics—getting Apel up the stairs, bagging the rifle, calling for the crime scene team again; the process of taking statements from the witnesses would start later in the day. Virgil and Bakker went next door to wash off Apel’s blood and some of the soot, and Virgil said, “You did good, Darren. I never would have thought of that, that she might be hiding in the duct.”

“My dad’s an HVAC guy, I saw him rip out a lot of those old furnaces when I was young,” Bakker said. “I knew you could get somebody inside one of those ducts because, when I was a kid, I made a fort out of them and I got inside myself.”

Banning took Davy Apel to the lockup, and Jenkins called Shrake to tell him what had happened.

Shrake said, “Wait, she shot herself? If she shot herself, man, that doesn’t count.”

* * *

—

Virgil called his boss, who wasn’t yet at work, and left a message, telling him about the arrests. When he was done with the immediate routine, the sun was starting its climb up from the horizon, still orange but now tending toward yellow-white. The old house had lilacs growing down one side, and he wandered over to give them a sniff.

The flowers’ perfume was heavy, and redolent of simpler times.

Jenkins came over, and said, “You are a sneaky little shit. I gotta say, I admire that in a cop.”

29

   Zimmer’s deputies took care of most of the paperwork, although Virgil’s share took three hours the next morning. Jenkins said, “Didn’t I hear you say a couple of times—and I quote—‘It’s a guy, and he’s a loner. There aren’t two people involved’—unquote?”

“I never said anything remotely like that,” Virgil said. “You gotta stop messing with the weed, Jenkins. It’s a lot stronger than the stuff you smoked in school. It’s ruining your memory.”

“That must be it,” Jenkins said.

* * *

—