They asked the bank president for an opinion. He pulled on his lower lip for a minute, then said, “Since he’s dead, you could probably check his income tax records on this, but, if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a loan payment.”
They asked him to start the process of getting further records from the cloud, and when he went away to do that, Virgil said to Jenkins, “Try this: it’s a loan payment, and Apel needs the money—the principal. But Osborne doesn’t have any money. Apel counts on getting it when Margery dies, but then he hears that the old lady is giving her money to the church. He kills Margery Osborne so that Barry will inherit. Then Barry’s talking to him over the hedge, mentions that we’re looking at his mother’s money and trying to figure out who might benefit from her death . . .”
“And that freaks him out,” said Jenkins, “and he doesn’t want Barry to tell us that he owes Apel a bundle. In the meantime, that greed head Van Den Berg figures it out, because he knows more about who has what than anybody else in town. He needs money himself and tries to blackmail Apel . . .”
“Who walks over and kills him,” Virgil said.
“Whew! Glad that’s settled,” Jenkins said. “I’m heading home; you go over and bust Apel.”
“We’re not there yet.”
“No kiddin’. But if we’re right . . . we can figure something out.”
The bank president came back after a while, and said, “You can come look at the checks, if you want, but I can tell you that Barry was paying Mr. Apel exactly the same amount since September of 2009. Rent, or anything else, would have gone up since then—I bet it’s a fixed interest loan.”
Virgil called a researcher/hacker at the BCA, with whom he’d had a hasty romance a few years before and was still on tenuous terms with. “Sandy, do you remember when you once found a way to look at state income tax returns?”
“I remember nothing of the kind. That’s would be illegal,” she said.
“Listen, babe, we’ve had four murders now, and three people hurt bad, including Shrake. All we need to know is whether this guy is getting interest on a loan and how much . . .”
Long silence. Then, “I heard about Shrake. And I’m not your babe. Or sweetheart. Or honeybun.”
“So . . . Shrake . . .”
More silence. Then, “Give me a name.”
She called back a half hour later, as Virgil and Jenkins were driving back to Wheatfield. “It’s an interest-only loan. I can tell that because he’s paying tax on all of it, so none of it is return of principal. I looked up loan rates on the internet. In 2009, the normal interest rate was probably between four and five percent, because the big recession had started, but if it was a loan between friends, it could have been as low as three percent. At five percent, the loan would be for $130,000 or so. At three percent, it would have been more, something around $225,000.”
“Thank you.”
When they were off their call, Jenkins said, “Even if he kills both Margery and Barry, he still gets the money. He’ll have to wait a while, but if he has a signed note, he can make a claim against the estates. That all goes on in private. If we hadn’t figured this out, we might not ever hear about it.”
“Yes.”
“Of course, if we looked further down the line, there might be more Osborne relatives who’d inherit with Barry dead.”
“That would be a stretch. Apel has the motive, he had the opportunity—at least with Barry—and we know he shoots a bow. Now we need to put together the rest of the case. We don’t know if he’s got alibis for any of the shootings. I want to look at what he does and where he does it.”
“He’s a heavy-equipment operator and contractor,” Jenkins said. “I asked, when I was talking to him.”
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