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 thesecond 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 athousand 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.
