Sawyer and Baldwin still had work to do around the body and wouldn’t be moving it to the medical examiner until later; an ME investigator was on his way with a van and would do the actual removal.
“I’m going back to town,” Virgil said. “If anything amazing comes up, call me.”
—
When he got back to Wheatfield, the place was closed: a few people lingered in the park between the two downtown churches, but the last service at St. Mary’s had ended an hour earlier, and none of the stores, not even Skinner & Holland, were open. He was tempted to drive back to Frankie’s farm, a little more than an hour away, to spend the night in a familiar bed, but, in the end, he drove back to the Vissers’.
On the way down Main Street, he saw a couple standing on the sidewalk, and the woman was poking the man in the chest. Virgil couldn’t see the man’s foot in the bad light, but he thought it might be Holland.
At the Vissers’, he parked at the side of the house, took his weapons out of the truck, walked around to the rear entrance, and, as he was stowing the guns under the bed, Danielle Visser knocked on the interior door, and called, “Virgil?”
Virgil opened the door, and she said, “I thought you might like to know that we’re going to take Pat. He’s weak, but the vet said he should be okay when he’s all rehydrated and everything. His kidneys are still working okay, that was the big threat.”
“Good,” Virgil said. “Listen, do you know if Glen Andorra had a girlfriend?”
“No, I didn’t know. Does he?”
“There are some indications.”
Visser turned, and shouted, “Hey, Roy! Did Glen have a squeeze?”
Roy walked down the hall, and said, “Not that I know of. We got a mystery woman now? Cool beans.”
“Anything else happened since dinner?” Danielle asked. “Anything I can put in the town blog?”
“The town has a blog?”
“Sure. I’m the editor.”
Virgil shook his head. “Probably not anything significant. I’ll be looking for a guy whose initials are ‘BD’ and who goes out to the gun range and shoots a nine-millimeter or .38 caliber handgun. I’d also like to talk to the woman who was involved with Andorra.”
“So would I!” Danielle Visser said. “That’d pump up the traffic on the old website. No idea who she is?”
“I don’t even know it’s a she,” Virgil said.
“C’mon. Nothing queer about old Glen,” Roy Visser said.
“Minnesota’s full of Norwegian bachelor farmers,” Virgil said. “Not because none of them can find women.”
“Maybe, but not Glen,” Roy said. “He’d come here twice a year for a haircut, and about the time Danny got finished working over his ear, we had firm indications that he was a straight shooter, if you get my meaning.”
“You were checking him out? I find that interesting,” Danielle Visser told her husband, who was not even slightly embarrassed. Back to Virgil: “Now, about this BD? Is he a suspect?”
“Not at all,” Virgil said. “There’s a chance he might have been the last person to talk to Glen, but even that’s a little unlikely.”
“I’ll put up a request for information,” Danielle Visser said. “Most everybody in town reads me, now that we got so much going on.”
“Do that,” Virgil said. “Ask for email replies to my official address. I’ll give you that. Don’t pass on my phone number. The nuts would drive me nuts.”
—
The Vissers went to post the request for information, and Virgil turned on the small television and clicked around until he found a Minnesota Twins game, turned down the volume, and got on the phone to Frankie.
“I thought about coming home tonight, but... I need to push,” he said.
“We’re fine... It was windy here today. All the apple blossoms blew off the trees. They looked kind of neat on the ground, like a quilt.”
They talked for an hour and a half about stuff that nobody else would be interested in.
