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!”