Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(91)

“Smit’s only about, what, fifty yards from here?” Virgil said, looking down the street. “Man, this looks almost too good.”

Getting the ladder up was harder than expected—they couldn’t figure out how the extension worked and, when they did, it turned out to be somewhat broken, but Jenkins hammered the relevant stopper in place, and Virgil climbed up to the grille. It was eighteen inches high and a foot wide, with eight rotating metal louvers that could be moved from completely open to fully closed. They now were almost closed.

Zimmer called, “What do you see?”

“We need to get our crime scene people here to look for fingerprints,” Virgil called down, “because this is where the shooter was. There are . . . let me see . . . eight slats, and six of them are covered with dust and two are clean. I’m going to use a pencil to push this open . . .”

He did.

“And, yeah, I’m looking through a maple tree, but I can see right down there where everybody was shot . . . I’m coming down.”

Zimmer climbed up to look, and then Banning, and they agreed that behind the grille was probably where Apel had been perched. “Probably in the excavator bucket, like you thought,” Zimmer said. “You could get it adjusted just right and have the perfect sniper’s nest.”

“I believe we got him. Thank God for this,” Holland said.

“Let’s go hit the house,” Jenkins said.

“We got two machines missing here,” Holland said. “Davy and Ann are likely out on jobs somewhere. There won’t be anybody at the house.”

“Not a problem,” Virgil said. “That’s even better, in some ways. We get what we need . . . We’ll bust him as soon as he shows up.”

Banning had another padlock, which they put on the door. “That’ll tip them off when they get back,” Holland said, “unless they’ve got a bigger job and leave the equipment overnight.”

“I’ll have a couple of guys look around,” Zimmer said. “Somebody’ll have seen them.”



* * *



—

Apel’s house was like a reverse image of Osborne’s—a front door giving onto a porch, both appearing to be little used; a door halfway down the side of the house; and a back door, with a stone walkway that led to a detached garage. Virgil forced open the back door, which led into the mudroom, which was hung with winter coats. The house smelled old, from musty plaster, like most houses in Wheatfield.

Virgil and Jenkins cleared the place to make sure there was nobody inside and then headed down to the basement. The basement had an ancient wood-and-coal-burning furnace, bigger than a Volkswagen, no longer in use, with a modern, forced-air gas furnace beside it. A dozen fluorescent fixtures had been wired into the low ceiling, and when they were all on, the place was as brightly lit as a television studio.

What probably had once been a coalbin, with heavy walls made of four-by-four timbers, had been converted into an archery workspace. Apel owned seven bows, including four compounds and two recurves, all hung on wooden pegs, along with several sets of arrows and a couple of dozen miscellaneous arrows. Four different suits of camo clothing were on hooks on one wall, hanging over four different targets.

Jenkins checked the arrows, and said, “You know what? No matches.”

“They got rid of them,” Virgil said, peering around the basement. “Find the gun.”

They couldn’t find the gun, either. Zimmer brought in two more deputies, and they searched the place from top to bottom, poking into every possible nook and cranny. As they worked, neighbors stopped by to ask what was going on. They were brushed off, but Virgil thought one of them might tip Apel.

“If he shows up . . . be careful,” Virgil said.

“If he shows, we need to look in his car; and, if he runs, we need to get on him right away,” Jenkins said, “though I suspect he’s thrown the gun in a lake since he doesn’t need to kill anyone else.”

“I wonder if Ann knows about this,” Zimmer said. “I wonder if both of them are in on it.”

“This kind of craziness . . . I kinda doubt it. But keep them separated when they show up,” Virgil said.

Banning came in from the garage, covered with dust. “Nothing,” she said. “I did everything but dig up the floor.”



* * *



—

They were in the kitchen, talking about further possibilities, when a deputy stepped in the back door and called, “Apel’s back. He’s in the driveway; he sees us.”

Virgil said, “Get on top of him. Don’t give him a chance to fight.” The deputy went out the door again, with Jenkins and Banning right behind him. When Virgil got outside, two deputies had Apel pinned to the side of his truck and were patting him down. Apel spotted Virgil, and shouted, “What the hell are you doing? What is this?”

Virgil stepped around the nose of the truck, and said, “We have reason to believe that you may know about the shootings in town.”

“What! Are you nuts?”

“We found the sniper’s nest in your Quonset downtown,” Zimmer said.

“Sniper’s nest? What are you talking about? There’s no sniper’s nest . . .” He started struggling against the deputies. “You can’t see out of the place; you can’t even open the windows . . .”