“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.
“Skinner and Holland have chicken potpies that aren’t bad. I’ve had a couple of them,” Virgil said.
Shrake looked at Jenkins, and said, “We gotta hurry.”
* * *
—
Virgil picked up Skinner as Jenkins and Shrake ran into the store.
“They’re in a hurry,” Skinner said, looking after them.
“Breakfast,” Virgil explained. “They were down at Mom’s. They were uncertain about the food.”
They walked by Jenkins’s Crown Vic on the way to Virgil’s Tahoe, and Skinner asked, “What kind of car is that?”
“Crown Victoria—they quit making them before you started driving, even if you started driving when you were twelve,” Virgil said.
“Actually, I started when I was eight. I only started running into that cop when I was twelve.” Skinner stooped to peer through the Crown Vic’s side window. “Looks like a piece of shit.”
“You have naturally good taste,” Virgil said.
* * *
—
They headed south, and Skinner said, “I had a bad thought this morning. If the guy quits shooting right now, we’ll probably never get him. If Father Brice left the church open, we might have another chance.”
“What you mean is, if we let somebody else get murdered, we might be able to ambush him because we’d be waiting for the shooting.”
“The way you say it, it sounds wrong,” Skinner said.
“I apologize.”
“See? Now you’re giving me a hard time.”
They engaged in more pointless speculation all the way to the Iowa line; and Skinner filled in some of his own background. His mother, he said, was a pleasant, intellectual woman who communed with the earth and Buddha, and sometimes went on earth- or Buddha-related trips, and other times on mind-expanding trips, depending on what was coming in from Colorado. “She’s a positive enough person, but ambition to my mom is like kryptonite to Superman,” Skinner said. “She wants nothing to do with it. With the money from the trust fund Grandpa set up for her, it’s not a problem. We’re not rich, but we’re not poor, either.”
He was not curious about the identity of his father. Virgil suggested the red hair might be a tip-off, but Skinner said his mother was tall, red-haired, and freckled, so appearance wouldn’t help.
* * *
—
In Armstrong, Skinner pointed out the high school. “I played a basketball game there in junior high. I can’t remember why.”
A pickup truck with a camper back and a dusty black Mustang pulled into the parking lot ahead of them, moved to one side, and parked. Bell Wood got out of the Mustang, hitched up his pants, and looked around, and, a second later, a woman got out of the other side. Another man got out of the pickup, wearing overalls, a plaid shirt, and a ball cap. Skinner muttered, “Cops.”