Zimmer called, “What do you see?”
“We need to get our crime scene people here to look for fingerprints,” Virgil called down, “because this is where the shooter was. There are . . . let me see . . . eight slats, and six of them are covered with dust and two are clean. I’m going to use a pencil to push this open . . .”
He did.
“And, yeah, I’m looking through a maple tree, but I can see right down there where everybody was shot . . . I’m coming down.”
Zimmer climbed up to look, and then Banning, and they agreed that behind the grille was probably where Apel had been perched. “Probably in the excavator bucket, like you thought,” Zimmer said. “You could get it adjusted just right and have the perfect sniper’s nest.”
“I believe we got him. Thank God for this,” Holland said.
“Let’s go hit the house,” Jenkins said.
“We got two machines missing here,” Holland said. “Davy and Ann are likely out on jobs somewhere. There won’t be anybody at the house.”
“Not a problem,” Virgil said. “That’s even better, in some ways. We get what we need . . . We’ll bust him as soon as he shows up.”
Banning had another padlock, which they put on the door. “That’ll tip them off when they get back,” Holland said, “unless they’ve got a bigger job and leave the equipment overnight.”
“I’ll have a couple of guys look around,” Zimmer said. “Somebody’ll have seen them.”
* * *
—
Apel’s house was like a reverse image of Osborne’s—a front door giving onto a porch, both appearing to be little used; a door halfway down the side of the house; and a back door, with a stone walkway that led to a detached garage. Virgil forced open the back door, which led into the mudroom, which was hung with winter coats. The house smelled old, from musty plaster, like most houses in Wheatfield.
Virgil and Jenkins cleared the place to make sure there was nobody inside and then headed down to the basement. The basement had an ancient wood-and-coal-burning furnace, bigger than a Volkswagen, no longer in use, with a modern, forced-air gas furnace beside it. A dozen fluorescent fixtures had been wired into the low ceiling, and when they were all on, the place was as brightly lit as a television studio.
What probably had once been a coalbin, with heavy walls made of four-by-four timbers, had been converted into an archery workspace. Apel owned seven bows, including four compounds and two recurves, all hung on wooden pegs, along with several sets of arrows and a couple of dozen miscellaneous arrows. Four different suits of camo clothing were on hooks on one wall, hanging over four different targets.
Jenkins checked the arrows, and said, “You know what? No matches.”
“They got rid of them,” Virgil said, peering around the basement. “Find the gun.”
They couldn’t find the gun, either. Zimmer brought in two more deputies, and they searched the place from top to bottom, poking into every possible nook and cranny. As they worked, neighbors stopped by to ask what was going on. They were brushed off, but Virgil thought one of them might tip Apel.
“If he shows up . . . be careful,” Virgil said.
“If he shows, we need to look in his car; and, if he runs, we need to get on him right away,” Jenkins said, “though I suspect he’s thrown the gun in a lake since he doesn’t need to kill anyone else.”
“I wonder if Ann knows about this,” Zimmer said. “I wonder if both of them are in on it.”
“This kind of craziness . . . I kinda doubt it. But keep them separated when they show up,” Virgil said.
Banning came in from the garage, covered with dust. “Nothing,” she said. “I did everything but dig up the floor.”
* * *
—
They were in the kitchen, talking about further possibilities, when a deputy stepped in the back door and called, “Apel’s back. He’s in the driveway; he sees us.”
Virgil said, “Get on top of him. Don’t give him a chance to fight.” The deputy went out the door again, with Jenkins and Banning right behind him. When Virgil got outside, two deputies had Apel pinned to the side of his truck and were patting him down. Apel spotted Virgil, and shouted, “What the hell are you doing? What is this?”
Virgil stepped around the nose of the truck, and said, “We have reason to believe that you may know about the shootings in town.”
“What! Are you nuts?”
“We found the sniper’s nest in your Quonset downtown,” Zimmer said.
“Sniper’s nest? What are you talking about? There’s no sniper’s nest . . .” He started struggling against the deputies. “You can’t see out of the place; you can’t even open the windows . . .”
“Through the grille up at the top of the building. Perfect view from up there,” Jenkins said. He added, “Man, you might as well give it up. We’ve got you. Period.”
Virgil: “We know all about your loan to Barry Osborne. We know he’s paying interest only on the loan. And we know you must’ve been worried about getting your money back when you heard that Margery was going to give a lot of money to the church . . .”
Apel looked at the faces surrounding him, seemed to pull himself together, and asked, “You got a search warrant for my house? I see you’ve been all over it.”
“We do,” Virgil said.
“Didn’t find anything, did you? You know why?” He shouted his answer into Virgil’s face: “BECAUSE I DIDN’T DO IT!”
Virgil took a step back. “Does anyone else have a key to the padlock on your Quonset?”
Apel scratched behind his ear. “Well, yeah. Everybody who plows in the winter.”
“How many people is that?” Virgil asked.
“Well . . . five, I guess. But we’ve used different guys in different winters, so there might be more keys out there . . . I never kept a close count because there’s nothing in there worth stealing except our equipment, our machines, and you couldn’t hardly steal those without twenty people seeing you.”
Virgil said, “Are any of those guys bow hunters? Because I’m sure you heard . . .”
Apel shouted, “Hey! Hey! Why don’t you ask me if I’ve got an alibi for the shootings?”
All the cops looked at one another, then Jenkins asked, “Well . . . do you?”
Apel pointed a finger at Virgil, and said, “Yeah, I do. You know where I was when Margery was shot? I was sitting in Danny Visser’s beauty parlor, getting my hair cut. Somebody ran in and told us about it . . . Kathy Meijer . . . and we ran outside and saw you running down the street like your hair was on fire . . .”
Virgil said, “What?”
* * *
—
Dead silence. Then Jenkins said, “There’s something going on here that we don’t know about. We’ve got too much . . .” He looked at Apel and shook his head.
Virgil: “Goddamnit, I’m going to go talk to Danny. You all stay right here, I’ll be back in one minute. If he’s telling the truth, we’ll know it.”
“Unless he’s got something going with Danny,” Jenkins said.
All the locals groaned, and Banning said, “No . . . No, that’s not right.”
Zimmer said, “I’ll tell you something that’s worried me right from the start. We don’t know who was in bed with Glen Andorra. We know she’d been with him right before he was killed, right? And she apparently never went back after that, because she’d have found him dead.”
“We don’t know that,” Virgil said, “’cause we don’t know exactly when Glen died. Probably ten days to two weeks ago. We don’t even know there was a woman. All we know is, he had a little . . . mmm . . . semen in his underwear.”
Banning said, “Yug,” and, “Doesn’t have to be a woman, though. There’s more than one way for that to happen.”
Zimmer said, “I think we’re all aware of
the possibilities, Lucy. We don’t really have to explore them any further.”
Jenkins said, “Condoms.”
“We know,” Zimmer said. “We know that, too.”
Virgil said to Apel, “We’ll keep you here for a while; I’m going to find Danny. Don’t make me do this if you’re lying.”
Apel said, “Go . . . Go!”
* * *
—
Virgil went.
And because he drove, and because the Apel house was only four blocks from Visser’s, it took one minute. He knocked on the beauty shop door and pushed in and found Danny Visser wrapping a woman’s hair with what looked like strips of tinfoil.
She turned to look at him, and said, “Virgil?”
“Danny, this is important. Could you step outside for a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Can I listen?” asked the woman with the tinfoil in her hair.
“Mmm . . . no,” Virgil said.
When they were outside, with the door shut, Virgil asked, “What were you doing at the precise time that Margery Osborne was shot?”
“Why?”
“Just . . .” He made a rolling motion with his index finger: tell me.
“I was right here, cutting hair. Davy Apel was here, and Kathy Meijer had an appointment after his. She came running in and said there was another shooting. We went out in the street and looked toward the church and saw all those people on the sidewalk outside it. We saw you, too, running around the corner. I said, ‘There goes Virgil, it must be bad.’”
* * *
—
Virgil went back to Apel’s place. Two deputies in the driveway were tossing Apel’s truck; everybody else was still waiting in the kitchen. Virgil went inside and looked at Jenkins, and said, “You’re right. We know something’s going on here, but we don’t know what it is.”
25
After more talk, which veered into argument and a bit of shouting, Virgil closed down the search of Apel’s house, and he and Jenkins retreated to the Skinner & Holland back room to try to figure out where they had gone wrong.
Jenkins insisted that they’d done everything right. “Apel’s in this. I don’t care if he’s got an alibi. I honestly think we’ve got to take a close look at the Visser chick.”
“It’s not only Visser—remember, there’s another witness who saw him in the barbershop when Margery Osborne was shot. Besides, Danny’s like Holland: too nice. Nope, she’s not involved.”
“Then what’s next?”
“Apel says at least a half dozen other people have keys to the Quonset, and he knows at least one of them bow-hunts,” Virgil said. “I guess we take a look at him.”
“Gonna be a waste of time unless maybe Apel talked somebody into shooting those people,” Jenkins said. “Apel’s in this somewhere, with that loan, that payback. We had a solid case on him. Still solid, except for Visser.”
“And the Kathy woman.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
* * *
—
While they were raking over the possibilities, Apel was in his basement, putting his archery collection back together after the search. The cops had not been tidy. They’d not exactly thrown things on the floor, but they’d moved everything around and stacked it helter-skelter, broadheads on top of field points, compound parts on top of stickbow tools. They’d dumped a pack of bowstring peep sights, and the tiny black plastic circles were scattered all over the worktable.
He was still at it when Ann came home. The cops had moved everything in the living room, looking behind curtains, under couches, and beneath rugs, and, as he ran up the stairs, he heard her go off. “What happened! What happened? David! Where are you?”
Apel crossed the top of the stairs and saw her looking around, aghast. She’d been using one of the Bob-Cats to clean ditches for a farmer down on the Iowa line and was wearing jeans that were wet to the knee; she’d left her shoes on the back stoop and was barefoot. Apel blurted, “That fuckin’ Flowers, the state cop, got a search warrant, and every cop in the county was in here . . .”
“What!”
“All kinds of weird shit is going on,” Apel said. “We maybe need to get a lawyer. I’m freaked out. Freaked out!”
“We gotta talk,” she said.
Davy Apel told Ann everything that Flowers had told him about the evidence, and that he’d told Flowers about getting his hair cut while Margery Osborne was getting killed. Then he asked, “What do you think about an attorney?”
“Well, they went away . . . I think it’s too early for a lawyer, and it’d cost a fortune.”
They talked some more, and when the conversation finally ran down, Ann said, “I’m going to take a shower, and an Aleve, and lie down and put a wet washcloth on my eyes. I didn’t need this.”
When she got out of the shower, they both lay on their beds and worked through it, slowly, going back and forth over the details. Finally, Apel said, “You good with this?”
“I guess so.”
* * *
—
Apel left the house and drove downtown to Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment and went inside, where the owner was sitting in a high-backed, broken-down chair, looking at her laptop screen.
She jumped when he came in—not many people came in—he having banged the door open in his haste. She said, “Davy,” and he said, “Trudy.” He walked over to her, put his hands on the back of the chair, imprisoning her, put his face six inches from hers, and said, “I’m going to ask you an important question and you better tell me the truth or, honest to God, I’ll stomp a major mudhole in your ass. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Davy . . .” She shrank back in the chair.
“Was Ann fuckin’ Glen Andorra?”
“Davy, I’m-a . . . I’m-a . . . I’m-a . . .”
“Stop the ‘I’m-a’ shit. Was she fuckin’ Glen?”
She tried to shrink back even farther, which was impossible, and he leaned even farther into her, and she finally muttered, “Maybe . . .”
“Maybe? Maybe? WAS SHE FUCKIN’ GLEN?”
She stared at him, and then said, “I don’t want . . .”
“WAS SHE?”
Trudy was pale as a winter sky now, and she said, in a voice that was barely audible, “I think so . . .”
“THINK?”
“Yes . . . Yes, she was . . . For a while . . . I’m so sorry, Davy. I didn’t know your marriage was so troubled. When she told me that you were going to divorce, I could hardly believe it . . .”
“I can hardly believe it myself,” Apel said, “since this is the first I’ve heard about it.”
“That’s impossible,” Trudy said. “She said you haven’t been sleeping together for a year.”
Apel twisted away from her, rubbed his forehead. “Oh, horseshit, we’re still doing it all the time.”
“That’s not what she . . .”
Apel: “Okay, not all the time. But a couple of times a month anyway.”
“She said . . . Never mind.”
“WHAT?”
“Oh, God, please don’t tell her you talked to me. She’s my best friend—ever,” Trudy said. “She said thank God you weren’t doing it anymore because she didn’t think she could keep two men happy.”
Apel turned away. “Then it was Glen. For sure.”
“I think so . . . You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”
He turned back, his forehead wrinkled. “Hurt you? Of course not. Who do you think you’re talking to? I’ve known you since we were in kindergarten.”
“She told me that she thought you might have found out about Glen, and she thought that maybe . . . you know . . .”
He didn’t catch on for a moment, then said, “She thought I killed him?”
“That’s what she hinted at.”
“Maybe.”
“That’s right,” Apel said. “If you do, she might kill you. Like she might have done to Glen, who she was fuckin’. And maybe how she killed Barry and Margery and Larry Van Den Berg, and shot that cop and those other people . . .”
“Oh my God,” Trudy said. “Oh, God.”
* * *
—
Virgil, Jenkins, Skinner, and Holland were all sitting in the back room, eating chicken potpies, when Apel pushed through the curtain that separated the back from the front of the store. They all stopped eating to look at him, and he said, “I might know who the killer is.”
Virgil: “Okay, who is it?”
“Let me start by saying this. All that evidence you had against me? You were right about it,” Apel said. “It all points to me, but I didn’t do any of it. You know where I was when Margery got shot . . . But you were right about the money. Margery Osborne probably had enough money for me to get paid off. That’s the only way I’d get it back.”
Holland: “So, you shot her, Davy?”
“Not me,” Apel said.
A few seconds passed before the penny dropped.
Virgil: “Are you telling us your wife . . .”
“I don’t know. I really don’t, but . . . maybe. Maybe. I’m a little scared right now because I’m the last guy standing between her and all that money, and I believe she knows I’m thinking about her.”
“But you have no proof, other than what you believe?”
“I know somebody who’ll tell you that Ann was sleeping with Glen Andorra, not that there was much sleep involved.” He explained about Trudy at Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment.
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