4
Virgil downloaded the photos to his iPad and walked back to the business district, checking the photographs for holes in the foliage or any other place where the shots might have come from. He discovered that the photos were a lot less help than he’d imagined they’d be. If the shot had come from that area, it could have come from anywhere.
When he finished, it was late in the afternoon. He heard the bells from St. Mary’s, saw a rush of people cross the street to the church for the first Mass. Nobody had been shot, so he went back to his car, found the address where Holland had arranged a room, and drove over.
An older Ford F-150 was parked nose in at the front door; a bumper sticker said “I dream of an America where a chicken can cross the road without having its motives questioned.”
Maybe the Vissers had a sense of humor; or maybe they were sincere and deeply into fowl. He climbed the stoop and knocked. A woman opened the inner door, looked through the screen, and said, “You’d be Virgil. You desperately need a decent haircut, and, fortunately, I’m the gal to give it to you. You don’t need it a lot shorter, but it does need to be cleaned up. Get rid of those split ends.”
Virgil asked, “Miz Visser?”
“Yup, as in ‘real pisser,’ as my husband would say, if he were here,” she said. “Walk around back, I’ll go through the house and open the door for you. You can park your truck at the side, on the gravel.”
Virgil parked on a gravel strip, got his bag, flipped the switch on what he believed was the loudest car alarm in the world, locked the truck, and walked around to the back door, where Visser was waiting. Virgil got a better look at her without the screen between them: a Netherlander blonde with pale blue eyes and nearly invisible eyebrows, she might have been a workout queen on a free cable channel. She was wearing a tight mock turtleneck, black yoga pants, and flats. She was pretty, in an earnest, small-town way.
“We don’t serve food, but you’ve got a microwave, and a comfortable bed.”
“It’s fine,” Virgil said, looking around the room. A compact bathroom, straight out of Home Depot, opened off the back wall, with a toilet, sink, and shower. The room smelled of pine-scented deodorizer.
“Fifty dollars a day, and we take it any way you roll it—cash, check, or Visa. But if it’s credit card, you have to go charge it at Skinner and Holland, and it’ll be fifty-five, because the store adds a ten percent service charge.”
“Of course they do,” Virgil said. “I’ll pay cash.”
“Great. Now, about the haircut—that’ll be forty, and again, if you charge it at Skinner and Holland . . .”
“Listen, Danielle—it’s Danielle, right?—I’m not sure I need . . .”
“Virgil, you do need one,” she said. “In a position like yours, you have to look professional or people won’t respect you.”
In the end, Virgil caved. He’d never liked his Mankato barber especially, because in his heart the guy wanted to give Virgil a military buzz cut. Danielle guided him back through the house and into the front parlor, which had been set up as a hairdresser’s shop, with a chair, hair dryers, an oval mirror, and bottles of hair stuff.
She pushed him into the chair, and Virgil said, “Not too much off, right? Neaten it up, that’s all I want.”
“Correct,” she said, as she threw a nylon cape over his chest and pinned it tight around his neck. “Now, let me tell you what’s going on with these shootings, okay? We’ve got a lot of smart women in this town and they all sit right here, and we talk. I can boil down what they told me.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
She turned Virgil away from the mirror and started talking and cutting. The women of Wheatfield rejected all suspicion of outside interference. “Somebody we know is doing this. You know why?”
“If I knew why, I could break the case,” Virgil said.
“Then I’ll tell you why.” She leaned close to his ear, and said, “Money. One way or another, it’s money. Specifically, it’s going to be money that somebody isn’t getting that they think they should get.”
“It’s a theory,” Virgil said.
One of Visser’s breasts gave his right ear a brief massage, but the hair snipping never slowed. “You’re dismissing me. You shouldn’t. This whole town was doomed until we got the Marian apparitions. Not only was the town doomed, all of us residents were, too. Except for a couple of government people and teachers, we were all poor. Or getting that way. Now, all of a sudden, everything has changed. But . . . But . . .” She leaned close again. “Some people have been left out. They’re still poor. They’re still doomed. They hate that.”
He got the ear massage again, as though for emphasis. He said, “That’s an interesting idea. Somebody who’s been left out but still owns a good, accurate rifle.”
“Piffle,” she said. “Everybody in town owns a good, accurate rifle. Roy has a .308 that could knock the testicles off a chickadee at a hundred yards.”
As she said it, the front door banged open and then banged shut again. She shouted, “Isn’t that right, honey?”
Roy walked in. He looked like a Special Forces sergeant, arms like small tree trunks, a neck that went out to his ears, small waist. He was dressed in a gray work shirt and gray slacks with oil splotches.
“Isn’t what right?” He came over to get a kiss and then sat down in a customer chair at the side of the room. The odor of 10W-40 wafted through the room.
“This is Virgil. I told him you had a .308 that could knock the testicles off a chickadee at a hundred yards.”
“Only if it was bendin’ over,” Roy Visser said. He added, “You gotta stop this craziness, Virgil. It’s ruinin’ the town.”
Virgil asked for names of people who’d been left out of the gold rush and who might own a highly accurate .223.
“You know, not many people around here have .223s, because they’re pretty useless. All you can do with them is play army. I understand the Nazis got a couple, and they play army, and they’re left out and poor. I don’t know who else would. You could talk to Glen Andorra about that.”
“Who’s he?”
“Farmer. He’s got some rough land out west of here. He didn’t know what to do with it, and then he came up with the idea of starting a sportsman’s club. You know, rifle range, trap, skeet, sporting clays, pistols, archery. I believe the rifle range goes out to six hundred yards. He might have some ideas.”
“Does he live out there?”
“Yeah, he does. Hard to explain how to find his place, but I could show you on the computer,” Visser said. And, “Jeez, Danny, get your tit out of his ear.”
“He doesn’t mind,” Danielle said. “Do you, Virgil?”
“I’ll let you guys work it out,” Virgil said. Although it did feel good, and was beginning to have an effect.
When she was done cutting his hair, Danielle said, as she was putting her scissors away, “You sit right there, we’re not quite done yet. You’re entitled to a shoulder massage.”
“I don’t . . .”
“Take it,” Roy said.
Virgil took it. The massage lasted five minutes, and he could have used another five. He also decided not to tell Frankie about it. Danielle took the cape off and spun the chair around. Virgil checked himself, and said, “All right, I’ll drive down here for haircuts from now on. That’s the best one I’ve had in . . . maybe forever.”
“Got some hair down your neck, though,” Danielle said. “You might want to jump in the shower before you head out to Glen’s place.”
The day was working out, Virgil thought, as he showered. He had some ideas of where the bullets were coming from, a lead to a guy who might know about local shooters—Roy had shown him on a Google satellite photo of the gun range and the house where Glen Andorra lived—and he’d gotten an excellent haircut.
He left the Vissers’ house at 5 o’clock, still with more than three hours until sunset. At five-twenty, he pulled up to the gate that blocked the dirt track to the sportsman’s club. The gate needed a key card for entry, which he didn’t have. He climbed out of the truck to see what he could see, which wasn’t much because the range was behind a low ridge that began just beyond the gate.
He could hear the boom-boom of a heavy rifle being fired slowly. Aimed shots. He was about to turn around and go out to the main road and down to Andorra’s house when a pickup topped the ridge and rolled down toward him. He got back in his truck and, when the gate opened, drove through to the other side and flagged down the pickup.
The driver ran his window down, and asked, “Forget your card?”
“Don’t have one,” Virgil said. “I’m with the state police. I’m looking for Glen Andorra.”
“Haven’t seen him, he’s not out here. Maybe check his house.”
“I’ll do that,” Virgil said.
Before going to Andorra’s, he drove over the ridge and down to the shooting area, which was a series of ranges based around a parking lot in the middle of a deep bowl, with a creek oxbowing at the bottom of the lot. The ranges weren’t fancy, mostly defined by a row of picnic-style tables and benches, with a roof overhead for shelter. The rifle range was in the deeper part of the bowl, and shooters fired at a series of bulldozer-built berms. To Virgil’s eye, the berms appeared to have been set at fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty, and two hundred yards, and then four more berms out to six hundred yards. A narrow dirt two-track ran down the length of the range, so shooters could drive down to check out their targets.
The shooting end of the range featured four benches with picnic table seats and a flagpole atop which a red flag fluttered in the breeze to make newcomers aware that shooting was going on.
Two men were sitting at one of the benches, one of them with a rifle snuggled on top of Army-green sandbags, the other looking downrange through a scope, his rifle lying on a case off to the side. The aimed rifle went boom, the shooter jerked with the recoil, and the scope man said something to him. Virgil got out of the truck, and called to them: “Hey! Excuse me.”
They were both wearing electronic earmuffs, which cut the sound of a muzzle blast but allowed them to hear normal speech. They both turned to look, and Virgil walked down and identified himself.
“I’m looking at the shootings up in Wheatfield,” he said. “I’d be interested in anyone shooting a .223 at longer ranges—four hundred to five hundred yards, or so—maybe with a scoped bolt-action.”
The two men looked at each other and then simultaneously shook their heads. The shooter said, “There are a couple of Nazis on the county line over toward Blue Earth, they got .223s, but Glen kicked them out when they announced they were Nazis. Only one of them had a card anyway; he’d bring the other one in with him.”
“Is that common?” Virgil asked.
“Hell, no,” the man said. “Membership costs fifty bucks a year. Me’n Bill are shooting up a box of .300 Winchester Magnums, goes for forty bucks a box. A year out here costs less than a box and a half of ammo. A heck of a bargain, and they wouldn’t even pay that. Pissed some of us off even before they were Nazis.”
The scope man said, “It wasn’t the Nazis that shot those people in town, though. They had about the cheapest guns that would actually work and thirty-dollar scopes. They had trouble keeping their shots on the paper at a hundred yards, never mind for four or five blocks.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “Have you seen Glen Andorra around today?”
“Haven’t seen him for a while,” the shooter said. “But I’m not out here that much. Can’t afford it.”
“That’s where a .223 would be good, if you could get a bolt-action,” the scope man said to the shooter. “Get more practice with centerfires, don’t get banged up by the recoil. Then, shoot the mag enough to be sure its hittin’ where you want, and don’t go burnin’ whole boxes of million-dollar ammo.”
“What are you usin’ the mag for anyway?” Virgil asked.
“Brother’s got a place out in Colorado with elk on it. Me’n Bill drive out every year,” the shooter said.
“Good deal,” Virgil said.
They talked guns and hunting for a few minutes, and Virgil mentioned his sideline as an outdoors writer. The shooter said, “You oughta do an article on supercheap elk hunts. Everyone thinks they’re superexpensive, but they don’t have to be. You get somebody with a piece of land out in Wyoming or Colorado, bunk on their kitchen floor, you’re only spending three hundred bucks for gas. Plus, you gotta pay for the tags. That’s another six hundred. We shot a big cow elk out there, we took a hundred and eighty pounds of boned meat off her—that’s five bucks a pound for better than anything you’d get out of a supermarket. Don’t have all them chemicals, and so on.”
“Not a bad idea,” Virgil admitted. He took their names, and said, “I might call you about that.”
As Virgil was walking away, another pickup rolled down into the shooting bowl and turned off toward the pistol range. Virgil stopped to talk as the couple in the truck were getting their weapons out of the back of the camper, but the woman said, “We don’t pay much attention to the rifle people. We shoot handguns at seven yards.”
They hadn’t seen Andorra for a couple of weeks, and the man said they came out to shoot most evenings.
No card was needed to get out of the range. The gate slid sideways as Virgil approached it, and he took the dirt road out to the highway and turned left. Andorra lived in a typical early-twentieth-century Minnesota farmhouse, a white four-square clapboard, with a front porch, a side entrance off the driveway, and triangular attic dormers.
The place was neatly kept, without having been modernized. There was still a clothesline, on the side of the property opposite the driveway, with a rug hanging on it; the lawn needed to be cut, if you were a serious lawn guy. Virgil couldn’t see any cars, but they could be in the garage in back. He got out, sniffed the country air—cows, he thought, but not too nearby—went to the side door, and rang the bell. And rang again. No movement inside.
He walked down the driveway to the garage and looked in the windows. He could see a newer Mustang 5.0 parked next to a Bob-Cat.
He said, “Huh,” scratched his head, and glanced back at the house. He was getting a bad feeling about this. He called Wardell Holland. Holland answered on the second ring, and Virgil asked, “Do you know Glen Andorra?”
“Sort of. I nod at him,” Holland said. “He doesn’t live in town.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m out at his place. Do you know anyone who would know him well enough to have his phone number?”
“Yeah. Try Doug Cooper. Let me get Doug’s cell number for you . . . He farms out there.”
Virgil called Cooper, who didn’t have Andorra’s phone number. “Why are you looking for him?”
Virgil explained, and Cooper said, “Tell you what, I thought about checking on him. I drive by his place every day—I’m about two miles down the road—and there’s been this rug hanging on his clothesline for a couple of weeks now. That’s not like Glen. He’s a fussy guy, and we’ve had some rain coming through, but the rug never moved, so . . . I thought about checking on him.”
“I’ll check, I guess,” Virgil said. “There’s a Mustang in his garage . . .”
“Well, that’s his only car. Since you’re the law, I’d go look inside, if I were you.”
Virgil walked all the way around the house and wound up climbing the six steps of the front porch and peering through the hand-sized cut-glass windows in the door and the big window on the porch itself.
The only thing he saw that might be useful was a double-hung window on the far side of the house that appeared to be cracked open at the bottom. He walked around to check it, but the window was up eight feet. He went to the garage, found the door unlocked, borrowed a stepladder, walked it around to the side of the house, set it under the window, climbed up, looked inside.
The window was open, but only two or three inches. Virgil stared into what was once a dining room but was now being used as a place to watch television. The wide-screen was tuned to a game show, the cheery quizmaster joking with a group of D-list Hollywood celebrities. A man whom he assumed was Glen Andorra was lying back in an easy chair, and he had the withered, rotted look of a genuine zombie.
And Virgil could smell him in the air that wafted out through the window.
“Ah, jeez,” he said aloud. He got on the phone to the sheriff’s office, and Zimmer said he’d send a bunch of cars. “Does it look natural?”
“Hard to tell . . . He might have been sitting there for two weeks,” Virgil said. “There’s warm air coming out—I think the furnace is turned on.”
“Oh, boy. Sit right there, Virgie, I’ll have you two cars in ten minutes, and I’ll be out in twenty.”
Virgil went to his Tahoe, got a couple of vinyl gloves out of his equipment box, and tried the front and two side doors. The rearmost of the two rattled in its frame, and Virgil went back to his truck, got a butter knife out of his equipment box—stolen from the Holiday Inn for this very purpose—fit it into the space between the door and the jamb, and pushed back the century-old bolt on the door.
He found himself in a mudroom, as he expected. The door opened on the kitchen, and it was unlocked. When he stepped inside, the odor of decomposition was overwhelming. He went back outside, got his jar of Vicks VapoRub from the equipment box, and jelled up his nostrils.
Back inside, he stepped carefully through the kitchen. A door to the right would lead to a stairway that would go three or four steps down to a landing, then out the other side door and down into the basement. He knew this because most old farmhouses were built like that.
Straight ahead was a narrow door that would lead to the living room; and, to his left, a two-panel door that would lead to the dining room, where Andorra lay back in his chair. A couple of Persian-style carpets were rolled up next to the basement door, and with the carpet hung from the clothesline, it suggested that Andorra may have been doing spring cleaning.
Virgil, watching every footstep, moved into the dining room. Andorra’s face was a combination of dark gray and purple skin, hanging loose. His eyelids, thankfully, hung down over whatever was left of his eyes, which Virgil didn’t want to think about.
Virgil decided that the death was not a natural one, the chief indicator being the large-caliber bullet hole at the side of Andorra’s head. An older-looking 1911 .45 semiautomatic pistol lay on the floor by the side of the chair.
The Vicks was doing its job, but Virgil gagged and stepped away, into the kitchen, got himself together again breathing through his mouth. If he blew his guts all over the place, the crime scene crew would be distinctly unhappy.
As he stood there, head down, he heard movement, and all the hair on the back of his neck stood straight up. He backed away into the mudroom, then jumped off the stoop and jogged to his truck, got his Glock out of the gun safe.
The sound he’d heard had been quiet but distinct, with the feeling of some weight. But despite a mildly superstitious nature, he didn’t believe that Andorra was about to lurch out of the dining room. There was somebody else here.
He called Zimmer.
“I’m in my car, on the way,” Zimmer said.
“There might be somebody else in the house,” Virgil said. “Something’s moving, didn’t sound like a rat. Something bigger.”
“Oh, boy . . .”
“I wanted you to know. I’m gonna check . . . Talk to the cops coming out, tell them to take care.”
“Wait ’til they get there.”
“Ah . . . I’m too curious. I’m going to take a look.”
“Take your gun with you, Virgil.”
“Got it.”
Virgil rang off and walked back to the stoop, then up into the mudroom. He stopped to listen, heard nothing at all. He moved slowly through the kitchen, listening. The house had three floors, but the noise had felt closer, and not above him.
He was coming up to the dining room door when he heard it again, off to his right. Behind the basement door.
A chill ran up his spine, and he called out, “I’m going to open the door and I’ve got a gun . . . Don’t move.” He turned to his right, and said loud enough to be heard through the door, “Jim, line up on the door with your shotgun, but stay behind that wall. Be ready . . .”
He stepped quietly past the basement door, listened, heard nothing, reached way back, grabbed the doorknob, and yanked the door open.
No gunfire.
He peeked around the door, saw nothing but the empty landing in front of the exterior door.
He decided to wait for the deputies, but as he stepped back from the door, heard a whimper. Dog? Kid?
Whatever it was, it sounded hurt rather than dangerous. He swallowed, pushed the Glock out in front of him, hit the basement light switch, and stepped slowly down to the landing. Two more steps down was another landing, at the top of the stairway that led down into the basement. He listened, then stepped down and peeked around the corner into the basement.
From where he stood, he could smell dog poop, even through the Vicks and the background odor of decomposition. At the bottom of the stairs, he saw a shredded yellow sack and, beyond that, a dog. A big dog, lying on his stomach. The dog lifted his head and whimpered.
“Easy, there,” Virgil said.
He eased down the stairs, into the stench of the poop. The basement was damp but not wet. At the bottom of the stairs, in the glare of the bare lightbulb, he saw that the shredded bag had once contained twenty pounds of dry dog food. The food was gone, and part of the bag had been chewed off by the dog.
The dog, a yellow-and-white collie, was watching him but not moving. Virgil stepped past him and looked around: the dog had had food, but he saw no water, though there must have been some if the animal had been locked in the basement for two weeks.
He moved slowly through the basement. The dog whimpered again, and Virgil saw a hole next to a wall going down through the concrete floor: a sump.
The sump was damp, but with no standing water. Normally, there’d be a little water in it, but the dog must have drunk it, which answered that question. Virgil remembered . . . a bowl? Up on the landing?
He went back to the stairs, saw a stainless steel bowl that he’d ignored on his way down the basement. He picked it up, ran back down the stairs, went to a laundry sink, filled the bowl with cold water, and carried it to the dog.
The dog whimpered again and edged toward the bowl and drank. And drank. And drank. And then edged away from the bowl and lay down again, his head stretched out in front of him between his paws, his eyes rolling up to Virgil.
A man shouted, and Virgil almost jumped out of his skin.
“Virgil! Virgil Flowers!”
Virgil shouted back, “Down in the basement.”
“Holy cow, it stinks in here . . .”
A deputy appeared on the landing, one hand pinching his nose. “What’s that?”
“Collie,” Virgil said. “He’s alive, but not by much. I got him some water.”
“Ah, man . . . I gotta get out of here.”
“Go back out through the mudroom,” Virgil said. He touched the collie on the head: his hair was matted and felt almost like plastic broom bristles. “We’ll be back, boy,” he said.
Outside, the deputy said, “Another guy’ll be here in a minute. I don’t know if I can go back in there until we air it out.”
“Let me give you some Vicks,” Virgil said.