13
Virgil, now seriously bummed, went out to his truck and called Frankie, asked her how she was feeling. Better, she said. The morning sickness had receded, at least temporarily. He told her what had happened with the bell recordings.
“Sounds like you were trying to avoid an actual investigation,” she said. “Where would figuring out the boom and bang get you? You checked all the various directions and didn’t get anywhere.”
“Thanks.”
“I speak only the truth,” she said. “Go work harder.”
“It’s weird—I’m both frantic and bored. I gotta find this guy, but I’d rather be home with you.”
“The harder you work, the sooner you’ll get here.”
He told her about arresting Van Den Berg and the circumstances surrounding it. “Good for you,” she said. “You know what I think about that kind of thing.”
She’d once been attacked by a couple of hired thugs outside a convenience store when they’d mistaken her for somebody else. Retribution had been exacted, in the guise of several Armenians armed with baseball bats who thought they were doing Virgil a favor by beating up her attacker. Virgil disapproved, in theory, but Frankie admitted that the men had greatly lifted her spirits and she sent a thank-you note and a bottle of top-end Artsakh to the chief Armenian.
When he got off the phone, Virgil sat in his truck for a while, thinking about his next move. He couldn’t think of anything relevant, so what he did next had nothing to do with the shootings. He called a friend named Bell Wood, a major crimes investigator with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.
“Virgil fuckin’ Flowers,” Wood said when he picked up his phone. “The poor girl’s answer to soft porn.”
Virgil asked, “Did you guys lose a trailerload of Legos last year?”
“Not only that, we lost the trailer,” Wood said. “You wouldn’t know where they are, would you?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Virgil said. “They might not be there long. One of your suspects is in jail up here for beating up his girlfriend. He’ll probably get out tomorrow morning, and he’ll probably be afraid that she or one of her friends will rat him out and he’ll move everything.”
“Give me the details,” Wood said. “There’s a ten-thousand-dollar reward from the insurance company, but since you’re a law enforcement officer, you don’t qualify.”
“I was told this by the girlfriend, so maybe she would,” Virgil said. “She could use the money.”
“Probably. But since she’d be dealing with the weasels from an insurance company, I wouldn’t hold your breath,” Wood said. “In the meantime: details.”
Virgil told him the whole story, and Wood said, “What? They’re down here in Iowa?”
“Barely, I think. They’re not actually in Armstrong; they’re a few miles north of town. You don’t have to go very far north before you’re out of Iowa and into Minnesota. The guy who found them, who is fairly smart, says they’re in Iowa.”
“I’ve been in Armstrong,” Wood said. “The high school’s on the north side of town, right as you’d be coming in. You can’t miss it. Why don’t you come on down around ten o’clock, we’ll meet in the parking lot?”
“That’s good. The guy’ll make bail between nine and ten, and if he’s going to move the truck, he’ll have to pick up his tractor unit. We can watch his brother’s place until he shows and grab both of them. I’d sorta like to see this guy get some time.”
“Ten o’clock, then,” Wood said. “By the way, Jack Carey told me this morning that you’d been seen in Wheatfield and that shortly after you arrived a woman got murdered.”
“You shouldn’t draw any conclusions from that, about me being a curse, or anything, but yeah, that’s basically what happened,” Virgil said.
Virgil had pulled back onto Main Street when his phone buzzed again: Jenkins, another BCA investigator.
“Where are you?” Virgil asked. “Is Shrake with you?”
“He’s about a hundred yards back,” Jenkins said. “We thought two cars would be handy. We’re on I-90, going past Blue Earth. See you in a half hour or so.”
“Glad to have you. We’ve got some boring stuff to do today.”
“That’s great. I Iove boring stuff. So does Shrake. Any nice-looking women in Wheatfield?”
“Well, as you know, there’s the Virgin Mary,” Virgil said. “If she knows you’re coming . . . But, of course, she would.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where do you want to hook up?” Jenkins asked.
“About fifteen miles past Wheatfield,” Virgil said. “You got your iPad?”
“Does the Tin Man have a sheet metal cock?”
“I assume that means yes,” Virgil said. “Let me give you the address. It’s out in the countryside.”
Bea Sawyer, the crime scene specialist, had hidden the key to Glen Andorra’s house, wrapped in a plastic baggie, beneath a brick by the mailbox. Virgil retrieved it, went into the house. The odor of death still lingered, but not with the choking virulence of Virgil’s first visit; the Vicks wouldn’t be necessary.
Sawyer’s partner had duplicated the hard drive on Andorra’s Dell laptop for further examination at BCA headquarters. The password had been “ppasswordd,” and Virgil turned the computer on, entered it, and searched for “range.”
He found a long series of emails and several WordPad documents, including one that was a list of range members, with their addresses, phone numbers, and emails. He printed out the list, which turned out to be twenty-four pages long, then scanned through the last hundred or so emails, where he found nothing of interest.
He remembered what Bud Dexter, Andorra’s shooting friend, had said about Andorra getting a new showerhead. He climbed the stairs to the main bathroom, where he found what looked like a new showerhead in the stall and, in the wastebasket, the package it had come in. Maybe Andorra never emptied the basket, but it seemed more likely that he’d been killed shortly after Dexter had spoken to him on the range.
As he was walking back down the stairs, a civilian Crown Vic that dated back to 2011 pulled into the driveway, followed by a Ford Explorer. Jenkins got out of the Crown Vic, waited for Shrake to catch up. They were both large men, somewhat battered, who wore too-sharp gray suits and high-polish steel-toed dress shoes.
Virgil went to the door and let them in, and Shrake wrinkled his nose, and asked, “You got something in the oven?”
“Guy was dead here for a couple of weeks,” Virgil said. “Anyway, we need to interview a bunch of people. We’re looking for a good marksman who knew Glen Andorra. Andorra was the dead guy here—”
Jenkins interrupted. “We got a briefing from Jon before we came down. He told us you’d screwed up the investigation, as usual, and were looking for a couple of pros to figure it out for you. We know about Andorra and Osborne and the two wounded victims, and that you can’t figure out why nobody could hear the gunshots—”
“Figured that one out,” Virgil said.
He brought them up to date, including the fact that they were back to square one. “We’ve got some legwork to do. I’d be willing to bet that the shooter was a regular out here and knew Andorra well enough to be invited to his house and allowed to walk around, out of sight, while Andorra sat in his easy chair. The range has something like a hundred and eighty members. I don’t think we need to interview all of them; I think we can talk to a couple of dozen, at random, and get some pointers to the real possibilities.”
He divided up the list of range members, taking eight pages himself and giving eight more each to Shrake and Jenkins, and added, “We’ll want to spot these addresses on our mapping software so we can work through clusters of people instead of running all over the place.”
“Good,” Jenkins said. “Let me get my iPad. Does this place have WiFi?”
It did.
Shrake found Marlin Brown crawling around his freshly tilled garden plot, following a yellow string across the ground, his nose about two inches from the dirt. He was a compact man, wearing compact coveralls with plastic knee protectors. Shrake watched him, puzzled, then called, “Mr. Brown?”
Brown looked up. He had dirt on his nose. “Hi.”
“I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’d like to speak to you for a moment.”
Brown stepped carefully out of the garden plot, and Shrake asked, “What the heck are you doing?”
Brown said, “Planting radishes.” He held out a cupped palm.
“Really.” Shrake peered into Brown’s hand, which contained perhaps a hundred reddish gray spheres smaller than BBs.
“Cherry Belle Organics,” Brown said. “I’m a little late getting them in, but it’s been cool.”
“Those’ll turn into radishes?”
“Not a gardener, huh?”
“I once grew a marigold,” Shrake said. “It died and made me sad.”
“That’s life on the farm,” Brown said. “Anyway, what can I do for you?”
Brown went to Andorra’s range to shoot his shotgun and didn’t know much about the rifle guys. He did have some names of people whom he’d seen shooting rifles, and Shrake made notes on his list. “This is shotgun country down here,” Brown said. “Not much call for high-powered rifles.”
Dick Howell was a rural route mail carrier. When Jenkins pulled into his driveway, he found Howell’s girlfriend unloading groceries from her car. Jenkins was aware that country women, when alone, were nervous about large men in suits showing up unexpectedly, so when he climbed out of his car, he stood next to the car door, and called, “I’m an agent with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Is Mr. Howell here?”
“He’s out carrying his route,” she called back. Jenkins had seen her relax, so he took his ID out of his coat pocket and walked up to her, showed her the ID, and asked, “Do you know where he might be?”
“I can call him and ask,” she said.
She did, and Jenkins caught Howell as he waited in a turnout by a bridge over a wide creek; he was sitting on the railing, looking down at the water.
Jenkins introduced himself, and asked, “Any fish in there?”
“Nothing you’d want to eat, I don’t believe,” Howell said. He was chewing tobacco, and he hocked a wad into the creek.
Jenkins thought, Not now anyway, but didn’t say it. Instead, he said, “I’m looking for information about target shooters over at Glen Andorra’s range.”
“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.”