Virgil nodded. “Okay.”
Holland said, “I think the shot came down from the business district. Maybe from a two-story building on the east side of the street. There are only a dozen of those, but most of the top-floor rooms are still empty. Some of them are being rehabbed to rent, and the walls are open for the construction work. Guy could get up there and have a pretty nice sniper’s nest. I borrowed one of Karl’s deputies, and we walked up and down over there, never found anything—no shells, nothing. Judging from the wounds, I suspect both people were shot with a .223. Small entry, bigger exit, but not all that big. About as big around as your middle finger, and clean on the edges. So: powerful, small-caliber full metal jacket slug. Maybe military ammo or target stuff.”
“You seem to know a lot about it,” Virgil said.
Holland lifted his prosthetic foot. “Infantry, Afghanistan. I’ve seen wounds like it.”
“Why do you think it was from a second story?” Virgil asked.
“Clear sight line. Had to be on the east side because on the west side the guy would have to lean way out the window to get the shot off. At that time of day, there are people on the sidewalks and on the street, crossing . . . lots of movement. I think the guy’s picking out people who are headed for the church but are standing still, waiting for traffic, when he pulls the trigger. And it occurred to me last night that maybe he isn’t trying to kill them.”
“Or maybe he’s so far out there that he’s shooting center of mass and hitting low,” Zimmer suggested. “Maybe he’s five hundred yards out, doesn’t have the elevation on his scope quite right. Maybe on that first shot he was holding on Coates’s chest and hit his leg instead. Adjusted the scope to hit higher but didn’t know what he was doing, gave it two or three clicks instead of five or six, was holding on Rice’s chest but still hit her in the hip. With a woman like Miz Rice, there aren’t more than about eight to ten inches between a ball joint shot and a heart shot.”
“Lot of maybes in there,” Holland said. “I keep thinking psycho in a sniper’s nest.”
“’Cause you were in the Army,” Zimmer said. “Say he’s on the second floor—you’re saying that he climbs down from there after shooting and carries his rifle to his car and drives away, and nobody sees him?”
Holland scratched his chin. “I can tell you he didn’t leave the gun behind or any brass. Me and Don . . .” He turned to Virgil. “Don’s the deputy I was working with . . . Anyway, me and Don went over those open places inch by inch, and there aren’t any guns hidden up there. Then we got all the store owners to open up the closed places, and there wasn’t anything there, either. We even stomped around looking for loose floorboards, and so on, where something might have been hidden. The only hidden thing we found was a porno magazine from 1952. The kind where the guy wears black socks.”
“Are there any witnesses still around?” Virgil asked.
Holland nodded toward the curtain. “Skinner was coming across the street to work when Rice got hit. He was one of the first to get to her. When Coates got hit, Father Brice was standing on the church steps, looking right at him. Brice’s been coming down once or twice a week from St. Paul; he’ll be here tomorrow.”
“I’ll want to talk to them,” Virgil said. To Zimmer: “Suppose Wardell’s right—a .223, a long way out. But when he looked, he didn’t find any brass. If the guy was in a hurry to leave his spot, he wouldn’t want to be fumbling around, looking for the shells. I’m thinking it might not be a semiauto. He could be shooting a bolt-action, which would be more accurate than most semiautos, and would be quite a bit more rare. Maybe you could check gun stores for bolt-action .223s? And maybe for suppressors?”
Zimmer nodded. “We’ll start right now. Probably not more than a dozen places between the Cities and here, not more than another dozen between here and Des Moines.”
“If he’s shooting from a car, he wouldn’t have to worry about any of that,” Holland said. “He could be shooting anything from anywhere, and shooting from inside a car would muffle the shot.”
“Like those Washington, D.C., snipers,” Virgil said.
“I was thinking about those guys, but they were travelers . . . I believe this is gonna be a local guy,” Holland said. “Somebody who knows his way around downtown, somebody people know, somebody who wouldn’t be out of place if he was seen.”
“If we get him, it’s because we’ll have figured out one thing,” Virgil said. “That’s why—why is he doing it?”
“Unless he’s nuts,” Zimmer said. “Then there’s no ‘why’ that you can figure out.”
“That’s the nightmare,” Virgil said. “We don’t want to go there yet.”
3
Virgil, Holland, and Zimmer talked a while longer—Virgil asked whether there were any known anti-Catholic bigots around town, but neither one of them knew of any. Zimmer mentioned that a couple of Nazis lived out in the countryside and were known to have .223 black rifles, but Zimmer said, “They’re, basically, play Nazis. I’ve known both of them since they were born, and they’re a couple of dumbasses.”
“Doesn’t take a real smart guy to pull a trigger,” Virgil said.
“No, but they have to get away after they pull it,” Zimmer said. “Neither one of those guys could elude his way out of a cocktail lounge.”
“If nothing else comes up, I’ll take a look at them,” Virgil said.
“Call before you do that, and I’ll have a deputy go along. They do have those guns,” Zimmer said.
As they were leaving the back room, Holland said, “I’ll introduce you to Skinner before you leave. He saw Miz Rice get shot.”
“This was the kid who was driving around town with his girlfriends and an open beer when he was twelve?”
“You gotta make some allowances for Skinner,” Holland said. “He’s sort of . . . a genius.”
“A genius who runs a cash register?”
“He’s a high school senior, part owner of the store, and he’s pulling down eighteen hundred dollars a week working weekends only. He generally goes to school during the week,” Holland said. “How much were you making when you were seventeen and going to school?”
“Shoot, I’m not making that much now,” Virgil said.
Holland said that Skinner was the only child of the town hippie. The identity of Skinner’s father was not precisely known; his mother, Caroline, admitted that there were several possible candidates.
“Tough for the kid,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, but growing up here, in Wheatfield, who you are is more important than who your old man was. Everybody knows Skinner and that he’s a good guy.”
“Except your former cop,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, well, I believe he was excessively focused on . . .” He glanced at Virgil as he trailed off.
“The law?” Virgil suggested.
“Don’t get all stuffy about it,” Holland said.
* * *
—
Holland took over the cash register, and Skinner trailed Virgil outside.
The kid pointed up the street. “She was standing at the corner, waiting to cross to the church. Wearing a green jacket and black pants. I was walking up to the store when I saw her get hit. I don’t know, maybe because that Coates guy got shot, and I had it in my mind, but as soon as I saw it, I knew she was shot. She jerked sideways, and then she made this noise, not a scream, more like she was calling out to somebody, and then she fell over, and tried to crawl . . .”
“You didn’t hear the shot?”
“Nope, not a thing. Anyway, I ran up to her, and she was bleeding bad, and she said, ‘Somebody shot me . . . Somebody shot me . . .’ I had a newspaper under my arm, and me and another guy pressed some folded paper over the holes in her hips. And I saw this guy I knew, and told him to call the hospital at Fairmont, to get an ambulance down here. They took her to Fairmont, and then Fairmont called the Mayo in Rochester, and they flew her there on the Mayo chopper.”