“I heard about Glen,” Howell said. “Sounded bad.”
“Yeah. Anyway, we need to talk to people who were friends with Glen, who might’ve spent some time shooting with him.”
“The only guy I saw him shooting with at all was a guy from town, Clay Ford. Don’t go telling Clay I told you that . . .”
* * *
—
Virgil found Will Courtland working on a piece of farm machinery in the welding shop next to his house. The shop smelled of hot metal and welding rods, and Virgil got him out in the driveway and asked about Andorra’s friends.
“The thing about Glen was, everybody liked him but he wasn’t a hang-out kind of guy,” Courtland said. “As far as I know, he mostly worked around his farm and at the range. Close friends . . . I’m not sure he had any. I can tell you the names of a couple of people I supposed would be his closest friends and maybe they could tell you more, but I can’t say that they’re superclose to him. I wasn’t. But, you know, you don’t have to be a close friend to go inside somebody’s house. You get deliveries from UPS and boxes from the mailman; you maybe get plumbers or electricians for stuff you can’t do on your own . . .”
He gestured to the machine in his shop, and said, “I’m working on this fellow’s rake. When I take it back, I’ll probably go sit at the kitchen table while he writes a check or gives me his VISA card. I mean, I’m friendly with him and all, but we’re not close. But there I’ll be, right in his house. Like the guy who shot Glen.”
* * *
—
That’s the way the day went.
They met at 5 o’clock at the Tarweveld Inn, where Jenkins and Shrake checked in. They left their luggage in their rooms, and Virgil took them down the street and introduced them to the back room at Skinner & Holland. Holland sat in with them.
Virgil summed up. “We got six consensus names and seven more random maybes,” he said. “The problem being, not a single person thinks any of those guys would be the shooter, and only two of them live in Wheatfield.”
“You think the shooter has to live here?” Jenkins asked.
“I think the shooter has to be somebody that people see regularly, so that he fits in, and they ignore him. Also, he’s familiar enough with Wheatfield that he’s got a spot to shoot from, and that he can get out of, without people noticing.”
“How about this?” Shrake asked. “What if he’s on a roof? And he doesn’t get out? He stays there with his rifle maybe for hours and sneaks off after dark? Has anybody looked on a roof?”
“I looked on the Eagles Club roof, but only because you can jump off it,” Virgil said. “Never occurred to me to look on the roof of the higher buildings. You know, where you might need a ladder or a rope to get off of it.”
“I didn’t think of that, either—that the guy would hide right where he was,” Holland said. “He’d still need a way to get up there. Couldn’t just put up a ladder with nobody noticing.”
Virgil pointed at him. “What about those remodeling jobs? Was there anyplace where they opened up the roof, and you could get up on top from the inside? Where there was like a hole in the ceiling?”
Holland said, “I don’t remember any—but I don’t know.”
“We have to go look,” Virgil said. “If he was up there and left anything behind—anything—we could get DNA.”
“And we got two guys we should interview, the ones who live here,” Shrake said.
Jenkins sighed. “We gotta do all that, but you want to know something? The roofs ain’t it. And neither one of those townie guys is the shooter. That’s all too easy. This guy’s doing something else.”
“Mr. Bright Side,” Holland said. To Virgil: “I was arguing with Father Brice about opening the church. I suggested we form a kind of militia to walk the streets before and during the Masses. I thought we could get Clay Ford to organize it. Brice said he’d think about, but I don’t think he’ll do it.”
* * *
—
Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake all trooped down to the business district. They could find no openings from the remodeled apartments that led to the roof, but one building at the near end of the downtown block did have access. The building housed what had been a dying hardware store that lately had been doing better. The owner opened what looked like a closet door on the second-floor storage area and led them up a dark, narrow staircase to the roof.
Up on top, they had a good view of the corner where the victims had been shot, and the building’s parapet would have made an excellent rifle rest. They searched the area on hands and knees and came up with not one atom of evidence nor any indication that anyone had recently been up there.
“If the guy came up to the roof and put a sandbag on the wall here,” Jenkins said, pointing at the two-foot-high parapet, “there’d be no sign. With this hard tar roof, there’s no scuffing. There’s nothing here.”
“Possible sequence,” Shrake said. “The guy has a key to the hardware store—don’t ask me how. He comes up here at the crack of dawn, before the store opens. He has a rifle and a sleeping bag and maybe even one of those little tents like canoe guys use. Maybe a rope, for a possible emergency getaway. He bags out all day until the bell rings and he shoots. Then he takes a nap until dark and the excitement’s over and he slides out the door.”
Jenkins said, “I’m still back where I was: the roof ain’t it. This guy is too smart to put himself where he could be trapped with no way out. The guy’s doing something else.”
* * *
—
They interviewed the two townies. Both had alibis for at least one of the shootings, and the alibis were convincing. One of the men, who claimed to be the best shot in town after Clay Ford, and possibly Roy Visser, said, “You tell us the guy didn’t even have his own rifle. You don’t even know how close he was when he fired it, so you don’t know if he was a good shot or not. I gotta tell you, it doesn’t sound to me like he’s a big marksman if he had to steal a rifle and had to kill to get it, huh? Sounds to me like it could be anybody who’s ever looked through a scope, which is everybody in town. No offense, but you need a whole new tree to bark up.”
His wife poked Jenkins in the chest, and said, “Yeah.”
14
Virgil went to bed discouraged. Every time he found something that looked like a lead, it turned out to be a dead end. God didn’t show up that night, so he slipped off to sleep without conversation.
* * *
—
Bell Wood, the Iowa state investigator, called at 9 o’clock the next morning, and said, “We’re going through Humboldt right now, so we’re an hour out of Armstrong. We still on for ten o’clock?”
“Might as well be, I’m not solving any murders,” Virgil said. “And who’s ‘we’?”
“Special Agent Easton, Special Agent Rivers, and myself,” Wood said. “If this thing works out, I might take a day off and come up and solve your Wheatfield problem myself.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Virgil said. “See you in a bit.”
* * *
—
Virgil called Jenkins and Shrake, who were at Mom’s getting breakfast. “I’ll be there in four minutes,” he said. He drove to Mom’s, parked, went inside, and saw Jenkins and Shrake picking at their pancakes.
When they saw Virgil, Shrake pointed at his plate, and asked, “What are these things?”
“I asked the same question,” Virgil said. “Got a tip from Mom’s son: stay away from the meat products.”
“So what are we doing?” Jenkins asked, pushing the pancakes away.
“I’ll pick up Skinner and drive down to Armstrong, where he’ll take us to Ralph Van Den Berg’s place. You two will hide in Jenkins’s piece of shit and wait for Larry Van Den Berg to get back to his house. He’ll be back on the street about now, and it’ll take him twenty minutes to get here. If he heads south for Iowa, we want to know about it. If he doesn’t for an hour or two, we’ll raid Ralph’s place anyway.”
“We gotta find something to eat,” Shrake said.