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.”
A good-looking, forty-something woman walked by and winked at Skinner, who said, “Hey, Madison.”
She said, “Skinner . . . Don’t be a stranger.”
Virgil looked at her for a second as she walked away, then checked out Skinner’s face, which was a picture of innocence, before wrenching himself back to the original topic. “Do you remember which way Rice was facing when she got hit?”
“Yeah, I talked about that with Wardell. She was looking across the street at the church, but I couldn’t tell you if her hips were square to the street or she was square to the church—that’s a big difference in terms of where the bullet would’ve come from and where it wound up.”
“All right.”
“Then me and Wardell were talking about whether the shooter was up high or level with her,” Skinner continued. “The thing is, if she had a little more weight on one leg than the other, it would have cocked her hip one way or the other—so you can’t tell where the shooter was. I can tell you that the bullet hit the ball of her joint on the entry side but not on the exit side. On the exit side, it was lower.”
“You seem to have thought about it quite a bit,” Virgil said.
Skinner nodded. “I don’t ever see people getting shot. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. It’s got me worried, Virgil. The town’s got a good thing going, and I’d hate to see some nutball mess us up. One or two more shootings and we’re toast.”
“Why’d you stick newspaper in the wounds?”
“Untouched by human hands, or any other hands, or even germs,” Skinner said. “That newsprint pulp comes out of a big vat and gets ironed out flat and rolled up on a reel, and then it’s printed on, so the inside of a newspaper is about as sterile as a bandage.”
“How do you know that?”
“Went on a tour of a paper plant when I was at Scout camp. The guide told us.”
“So, tell me about the Nazis.”
“Aw, don’t waste your time on them. It’s two guys and their girlfriends, and they don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of,” Skinner said. “They decided they wanted to be somebody, get somebody to pay attention to them, so they signed up to be Nazis and got themselves a couple of pit bulls. They’re not exactly harmless, but bar fights are really more their style. The Nazis, not the pit bulls.”
“Then they’re seriously stupid.”
“Yeah, they are that. They used to work over at the elevator, but after they signed up to be Nazis they got fired. Now they all live on welfare. They didn’t shoot anyone, though. The shooter is somebody smarter.”
“Got any ideas?”
Skinner scraped his lower lip with his upper teeth, then said, “No. It could be somebody who doesn’t like what’s happened to the town since the apparitions, but I can’t think who that would be. If maybe there are a couple of people like that, none of them would be crazy enough to go around shooting people. You have to understand—I know every single person who lives here. Not counting the visitors.”
“You think it’s a visitor?”
“Could be. When I lie in bed and try to think of a person I know, who could be doing this, I come up with a total blank. We got our assholes, we’ve got a couple of goofs, some people angry from watching Fox News . . . but it seems to me that it has to be something more than a goof.”
“Like what?” Virgil asked.
“Don’t know. It’s like an oxymoron: random shootings for a reason,” Skinner said. “Gonna have to think more about it. The two people who got shot, Rice and Coates, don’t have any connections. Nothing at all. Didn’t know each other, didn’t come from the same place, Coates isn’t even a Catholic. The only thing they have in common is the fact that they were shot and where they were shot. That could mean the shooter has a particular spot he likes to go to and is maybe sighted in at a specific range.”
“I told Wardell and the sheriff that we need to figure out why people were shot . . .”
“That’s exactly right, Virgil,” Skinner said. “If you can figure that out, we’ll know who’s doing it. Unless he’s some outsider religious nut and he really is crazy. But how would he know the town well enough to find a spot and not be seen or even caught? People here notice if you drop your Sno Ball wrapper on the ground. That he can get away with shooting people . . .”
Skinner shook his head.
“I’ll tell you something, Skinner. Anybody who snipes innocent people is seriously unbalanced even if he believes he has a reason,” Virgil said. “Most people won’t even shoplift for fear of getting caught. Shooting people? You’re dealing with a nut even if there’s a payoff somewhere.”
Skinner nodded. “I’ll think about that, too.”
Virgil walked Skinner up to the corner where Rice was shot and then down the street where Coates was hit. They talked about possible angles, but if you made the simplest assumption, that both were square to the street, then the shots would have come from the general area of the business district. If their hips were turned one way or the other, the shots could have come from behind any business on either side of Main Street or from a residential area farther back.
“I need to look at a satellite photo,” Virgil said, “to try to narrow things down. Will you be around?”
“Until five, at the store. We got a girl that comes in and takes it to eight o’clock, when we close. I’ll give you my cell number. If you need anything, call me.”
They exchanged cell phone numbers—Virgil gave Skinner his direct number on the off chance that Skinner actually might think of something—and then Virgil went out to his truck and got his iPad. A Google Earth satellite photo gave him a solid overhead shot of the town. It had been taken in the winter, with no leaves on the trees, so he had an unobstructed view of the street layout.
Assuming that both victims had either been standing more or less square to the street or turned slightly one way or the other, Virgil configured a slice of pie extending from the points where the victims were standing down to the business district.
Only a half dozen houses fell within the pie slice, as well as a number of auto- or farm-related shops and services. One section of the slice that included Rice didn’t include Coates. Virgil thought that probably eliminated that area. If the sniper successfully got away from his first position, why wouldn’t he go there again?
Time for a walk-around.
Virgil spent two hours working his way up and down the Main Street shopping area. There were twenty storefronts on the block-long business district. All of them had apartments or storage on the second floor, and a half dozen of them were being rehabbed as short-term housing for visiting pilgrims. The carpenters and other construction workers quit at 4 o’clock, according to one store owner, which made Virgil think that might have restricted the time that the sniper had to shoot—it had to be after 4.
Virgil climbed the stairs to two of the units being renovated. The entire length of Main Street stretched out below him, and he could easily see both ends of town, fading into newly plowed rolling black prairie, and the church steeples, which were the highest points in Wheatfield. He could clearly see where the two victims had been standing. There were several solid positions—windowsills, framing for walls—where a rifle could have been supported. There hadn’t been much wind the day before—at least, not in Mankato—and a quiet day would help with accuracy.
The building owner had climbed the stairs with him to the second apartment, watched him calculate the distances and angles. “Even on a quiet day, it’d take some good shooting,” Virgil told the owner, whose name was Curt Lane.
Lane said, “Hang here one second,” and he turned and ran down the stairs; he was back a minute later with a golf range finder. He handed it to Virgil, and said, “Put the crosshairs on the spot they got shot and push the button on top.”
Virgil did and got two hundred and forty yards for Rice and two hundred and seventy for Coates. “Good shooting,” he said. “Our guy might not be just a regular nut, he might also be a gun nut. Know anybody like that?”
“There are a lot of gun guys in town, there not being a lot else to do,” Lane said. “You go out to the old quarry and shoot you some soda bottles, or there’s a sportsman’s club a few miles farther out. Most all the guys hunt, and quite a few of the gals.”
Virgil nodded, then looked up and down the street. Two-thirds of the parking spaces were taken, and he could see perhaps twenty people out walking. “If the shooter was up here, you’d think somebody would have heard the shot.”
“I would have,” Lane said. “I’m right downstairs. You say the guy was shooting a .223? I hunt up north, where rifles are legal, and I know what a .223 sounds like. Guys up there deer hunting let go a half dozen shots—POP-POP-POP-POP-POP-POP!—most likely a .223 or an AK. They’re loud. Not a big boom like a .30–06, but you’d hear them for a few blocks anyway.”
“As far as I can find out, nobody heard anything,” Virgil said.
“Don’t know what to tell you, except maybe he was a lot farther out,” Lane said.
“I hope so,” Virgil said. “If he’s local and he’s shooting from a thousand yards, or something, we’ll spot him pretty quick. Not many people are that good, and the ones who are are known.”
When he’d worked his way down one side of Main Street and up the other, Virgil walked around behind the buildings, first on the east side, then on the west. The east side was bricked in with commercial buildings: a Goodwill store, housed in an unpainted metal hobby barn, Burden’s Tractor & Implement, a car wash, the brick Fraternal Order of the Eagles, which was mostly a bar with a rooftop that might have provided a sniper’s nest, and STM Wine & Spirits. The Eagles club wasn’t open, but Virgil saw somebody walking around inside and banged on the door until Goran Bilbija pulled it open an inch, and said, “We’re closed.”
Virgil identified himself, and Bilbija let him in and pointed to a stairway that led to a second-floor office and storage room. Virgil looked in both, but neither had a window that a sniper could have shot out of. A ladder, bolted to the wall, led to the roof, with a hatch held in place by heavy hooks, the kind seen on barn doors.
“I don’t know the last time that was opened, but it’s been a while. When we retarred the roof—that was, mmm, five years ago?—we did it with ladders from the outside,” Bilbija said.
Virgil climbed the ladder anyway, got the hooks loose, and when he pushed up on the hatch a double handful of dust rained down on his hair and shoulders.
He managed to heave the hatch up onto the roof and climbed outside. When he looked at the hatch, he decided Bilbija was right: the thing hadn’t been opened in years, and part of the problem with pushing it open was that it had been tarred shut.
On the other hand, the roof had good sight lines to the places where the shooting victims had been standing. When Virgil walked around the roof, he found the second floor was built over half the structure, with the back half dropping to a single story. If someone had a short ladder—not even a stepladder but one of the three-step stools used to reach high cupboards—he could have climbed onto the back roof, then used the stool to climb to the top. Getting down would be even faster, if it had become necessary to flee. He could have gone from roof to roof with no more than a three-foot drop.
If the shooter climbed up and down the back of the building, between the wall and the dumpster by the kitchen door, he might even do it unseen.
Virgil put it down as a possibility. The roof didn’t show any footprints, discarded DNA-laden cigarette butts, a book of matches from a sleazy nightclub, an accidentally dropped driver’s license, or any other fictional possibilities, so he went back down the hatch and pulled it shut.
“Find anything?” Bilbija asked.
“A nice view, but . . . no.”
“Didn’t think you would,” Bilbija said. “Say, you want a beer or a quick shot to keep you going? I got a nice rye.”
Virgil declined the offer and worked his way back up Main Street, this time behind the stores on the west side, and found a more complicated situation, a mix of mostly ramshackle prewar houses and small businesses, some of them in converted houses. The ProNails place had a dusty, handwritten “Out of Business” sign in a window, but Auto Heaven, Buster’s Better Quality Meats, and Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment were still operating; nobody had heard a shot fired.
Because of the way the houses and businesses were mixed, there were multiple spaces and slots between hedges and behind fences where a rifleman could have hidden. Virgil was lining up a theoretical shot down toward the churches when a man’s voice called, “Hold it right there! I got a gun on you!”
Virgil raised his hands: “I’m a cop. Don’t shoot.”
A heavyset man in a blue T-shirt and a ragged pair of Dickies coveralls stepped out from behind a garage twenty feet away. He was maybe fifty, balding, with a wind-eroded face. He was aiming an ancient twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun at Virgil’s stomach. “Cop, my ass.”
“Call the sheriff, ask him. Call the mayor. My name is Flowers, I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” Virgil was talking fast and trying to keep his voice from shaking, not entirely successfully.
The guy looked less certain in his resolve but didn’t drop the muzzle of the gun; from Virgil’s point of view, the twin bores of the shotgun looked about the size of apples. Instead, the man half turned his head and shouted, “Laura! Call down to the store and ask somebody if they know a cop named Flowers.” To Virgil he said, “Keep your hands up.”
Virgil kept his hands up, and said, “Point the gun somewhere else.”
“Bullshit.”
“You pull that trigger and you’re gonna spend the rest of your life in Stillwater prison for killing a cop,” Virgil said. “I’ve identified myself, and if you don’t point the gun somewhere else, I’m gonna bust you for aggravated assault, and that’s a minimum of five years. Now, point the fuckin’ gun somewhere else.”
The muzzle moved a foot to the left, and Virgil took a breath. They stood there like that, and then, a moment later, Laura yelled, “Wardell says he’s a state police officer.”
The guy considered that, then lifted the muzzle, pointing it at the sky. “I thought you were maybe that sniper guy,” he said, “a stranger sneaking around like that.”
Virgil walked up to him. The guy was holding the gun in one hand, and Virgil snatched it away from him, then turned and kicked the guy in the ass—hard. “You fuckhead, you could have killed me. Jesus Christ, I oughta beat the crap out of you. I mean . . . Jesus, going around pointing a shotgun.”
“I thought . . .” the guy moaned, squeezing his ass with one hand.
“You think you see the sniper, call the cops,” Virgil shouted. He was still furious. He broke open the gun’s action and ejected two shells that looked as old as the gun itself.
A woman came out from behind the garage and asked the heavyset man, “Now what have you done, Bram?”
Virgil, shaking his head, shouted at him again, “You fuckin’ moron . . .”
Bram said, “There aren’t any cops. You know how long it takes a cop to get here? A half hour, if you’re lucky. If you live in this town, you take care of yourself.”
Virgil looked at him for another few seconds, then tossed the gun back to him. He kept the shells. “You point this fuckin’ gun at anyone else, I swear to God I’ll stick it so far up your ass you’ll blow your head off if you sneeze.”
“I thought you was the sniper . . .”
Virgil shook his head again. “Man!”
Virgil turned to the woman. “Thank you for helping out. I apologize for the language, but he scared me to death.”
“He didn’t mean no harm,” she said, anxiously twisting her hands together. She was also heavyset and also windburned; they had to be husband and wife, Virgil realized.
“Doesn’t make any difference if he meant no harm,” Virgil said, his voice softening. “If he’d jiggled that trigger, he’d have cut me in half.”
Bram and Laura Smit—“Not Smith, Smit, ending with the ‘t’”—disagreed about the sniper’s gunshots. They’d been home when the two shootings took place, and Laura Smit hadn’t heard anything that might have been a gunshot. Bram thought he might have, but was uncertain.
Laura said, “That was your tinnitus, honey.”
Bram shook his head. “I’ll tell you why I know I heard it. Because with the second one, I called it before we knew anybody was shot.”
“That’s true,” Laura admitted.
Now Virgil was interested. “What did it sound like, exactly? Was it close by?”
“Couldn’t tell where it came from, how close it was, or anything, but it didn’t sound like a gun,” he said. “It sounded like when you’re downstairs and somebody upstairs drops a boot. More like a thump than a bang. Not too loud. With the first one, I went to see if Laura had fallen or something, but she hadn’t, so I almost forgot about it. Then, later that day, we heard about the shooting down by the church, and I wondered if I might have heard the shot.”
“You tell anyone?”
“Well, no, because I really didn’t think I had,” Smit said.
“But the second shot . . .”
“Yesterday afternoon, I had my head in the refrigerator and I heard that sound again. I went and found Laura, and said, ‘I heard it again,’ and she thought I was imagining it. Then we found out somebody had been shot again.”
“Did you tell anyone about that?”
“I talked him out of it,” Laura confessed. “I didn’t think, you know, it was any of our business . . . if there’s somebody around shooting people. Bram got his gun out . . . I mean, there aren’t any police around here, Virgil. Not since Wally left, and that was three years ago. We’re on our own, and I don’t want to go poking a stick in a hornet’s nest.”
Virgil walked around the garage with them, into their house, which smelled like cookies because Laura had been baking. Virgil accepted a peanut butter cookie and looked out some of the windows; from nowhere in the house could he see the place where either of the victims had been standing when they were shot.
They went out in the yard, and he looked at the other houses in the neighborhood. As far as he could see, none of them had clear sight lines to the shooting scenes, but, then, the shooter wouldn’t need much of an opening. A .223 slug was about the thickness of an ordinary number 2 pencil—if the shooter could find an opening the size of a soup can, he’d be able to use a scope and have a clear line between the muzzle and the target. In other words, he could shoot right through most solid-looking trees, just as you can see blue skies through most trees if you look around a little.
He accepted a second cookie, and said to Bram, “I’m sorry I kinda lost it there, but I’ve had too many guns pointed at me lately. I’m going to give you a card, and if you think of anything I might need to know, or if you hear the sound again, give me a call.”
Smit nodded. “I will. We’re not Catholics, but that church saved the town. Everybody knows that. This crazy man could send us back to the poorhouse.”
Virgil spent another half hour wandering around the area on the back side of Main Street but didn’t see anything that made him want to look closer.
He went back to Main Street, got an exceptionally bad cheeseburger and even worse fries at Mom’s Cafe, the only restaurant he could find, then headed back to Skinner & Holland. Skinner was behind the cash register, and Virgil picked up a package of cinnamon gum to get the taste of the burger out of his mouth, paid most of a dollar for it, and dropped the change in a jar that said “Tips. Help the Deserving.”
“You the deserving?” Virgil asked Skinner.
“Maybe,” he said.
“How come this place is called Skinner and Holland, Eats and Souvenirs, and the only eats you’ve got are Sno Balls and Cheetos and fake-cheese crackers?” Virgil asked.
“There’re some frozen entrées in the freezer, and you’re welcome to use the microwave,” Skinner said. “That’s what me’n Wardell mostly eat. We’re talking about starting a diner, but we haven’t found the right venue. And Holland’s mom would get pissed. She owns Mom’s Cafe.”
“She sure doesn’t need the competition,” Virgil said. “I ate the worst cheeseburger of my life there about five minutes ago.”
Skinner winced, and said, “I wouldn’t wander too far from a toilet. They got three cooks there; we call them Hepatitis A, B, and C. That burger’s gonna hit the bottom of the bucket in one piece, if you know what I mean.”
“I do,” Virgil said. “Maybe I ought to start a cafe if you’re afraid to piss off Holland’s mom.”
Holland had come up behind him, and now he said, “Who’s gonna piss off Mom?”
Skinner said, “Virgil got a cheeseburger down at the cafe.”
“That’ll teach you,” Holland said. “God knows where the meat comes from. Probably from a veterinarian’s.” Then, “Figure anything out?”
“Found a guy who thinks he might have heard the shots; I need to check some sight lines.” A couple of customers had edged up to listen in. Virgil said, “We can talk about it later.”
“That’s more than anybody else has gotten,” Holland said.
“If you could prove that it’s Holland’s mom who did the shooting, it’d benefit everybody,” Skinner said.
“Except Mom,” Holland added. To Virgil: “You had a hepatitis shot?”
“Already heard that joke,” Virgil said.
Skinner and Holland looked at each other, and then Skinner said, “That wasn’t a joke.”
“Ah, Jesus,” Virgil said.
Virgil left Skinner & Holland, chewing his way through the pack of gum, walked around to his truck, opened his camera case and took out his Nikon and a long lens. He hung the camera on a shoulder and got a pair of image-stabilizing Canon binoculars out of the gear box in the back. After locking the truck, he trudged over to where the shooting victims were hit and glassed the west side of the business district, picking out spots where a shot might have come from.
There were several. He took a series of photos that he could later review on his iPad.
On his way back to the truck, he saw Skinner leaving the store.
“Solved the restaurant problem,” Skinner said.
“Yeah?”
“Taco truck,” Skinner said. “Who doesn’t like tacos? On top of the tourists, we got a whole bunch of Mexicans in town, so that’d add to the market. Bet there’s a truck up in the Cities that we could buy—I’m gonna look at it this week. Get it going. Maybe we could find a Mexican lady to run it. I know there are some in town who make damn good tacos ’cause I’ve eaten them.”
“Why don’t you start a corporation?” Virgil said.
“Where would that get us?” Skinner asked.
“It’d give me an opportunity to buy some of your stock.”
“Ah,” Skinner said. “Hmm. Let me think about that.”