“Sure.”
“Can I listen?” asked the woman with the tinfoil in her hair.
“Mmm... no,” Virgil said.
When they were outside, with the door shut, Virgil asked, “What were you doing at the precise time that Margery Osborne was shot?”
“Why?”
“Just...” He made a rolling motion with his index finger: tell me.
“I was right here, cutting hair. Davy Apel was here, and Kathy Meijer had an appointment after his. She came running in and said there was another shooting. We went out in the street and looked toward the church and saw all those people on the sidewalk outside it. We saw you, too, running around the corner. I said, ‘There goes Virgil, it must be bad.’”
—
Virgil went back to Apel’s place. Two deputies in the driveway were tossing Apel’s truck; everybody else was still waiting in the kitchen. Virgil went inside and looked at Jenkins, and said, “You’re right. We know something’s going on here, but we don’t know what it is.”
25
After more talk, which veered into argument and a bit of shouting, Virgil closed down the search of Apel’s house, and he and Jenkins retreated to the Skinner & Holland back room to try to figure out where they had gone wrong.
Jenkins insisted that they’d done everything right. “Apel’s in this. I don’t care if he’s got an alibi. I honestly think we’ve got to take a close look at the Visser chick.”
“It’s not only Visser—remember, there’s another witness who saw him in the barbershop when Margery Osborne was shot. Besides, Danny’s like Holland: too nice. Nope, she’s not involved.”
“Then what’s next?”
“Apel says at least a half dozen other people have keys to the Quonset, and he knows at least one of them bow-hunts,” Virgil said. “I guess we take a look at him.”
“Gonna be a waste of time unless maybe Apel talked somebody into shooting those people,” Jenkins said. “Apel’s in this somewhere, with that loan, that payback. We had a solid case on him. Still solid, except for Visser.”
“And the Kathy woman.”
“Yeah, well...”
—
While they were raking over the possibilities, Apel was in his basement, putting his archery collection back together after the search. The cops had not been tidy. They’d not exactly thrown things on the floor, but they’d moved everything around and stacked it helter-skelter, broadheads on top of field points, compound parts on top of stickbow tools. They’d dumped a pack of bowstring peep sights, and the tiny black plastic circles were scattered all over the worktable.
He was still at it when Ann came home. The cops had moved everything in the living room, looking behind curtains, under couches, and beneath rugs, and, as he ran up the stairs, he heard her go off. “What happened! What happened? David! Where are you?”
Apel crossed the top of the stairs and saw her looking around, aghast. She’d been using one of the Bob-Cats to clean ditches for a farmer down on the Iowa line and was wearing jeans that were wet to the knee; she’d left her shoes on the back stoop and was barefoot. Apel blurted, “That fuckin’ Flowers, the state cop, got a search warrant, and every cop in the county was in here...”
“What!”
“All kinds of weird shit is going on,” Apel said. “We maybe need to get a lawyer. I’m freaked out. Freaked out!”
“We gotta talk,” she said.
Davy Apel told Ann everything that Flowers had told him about the evidence, and that he’d told Flowers about getting hishair cut while Margery Osborne was getting killed. Then he asked, “What do you think about an attorney?”
“Well, they went away... I think it’s too early for a lawyer, and it’d cost a fortune.”
They talked some more, and when the conversation finally ran down, Ann said, “I’m going to take a shower, and an Aleve, and lie down and put a wet washcloth on my eyes. I didn’t need this.”
When she got out of the shower, they both lay on their beds and worked through it, slowly, going back and forth over the details. Finally, Apel said, “You good with this?”
“I guess so.”
