Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(96)

“Not only that, his alibi may have a flat tire but it’s not completely flat,” Jenkins said. “A good defense attorney would get that time all confused: get you up the street faster, get him in the shop earlier. Nobody could say it’s not possible.”

“He’s still taking an awful chance,” Holland said.

“Maybe he saw what was about to happen—that we had all of this circumstantial evidence—and he decided to move first and to blame her,” Virgil said. “I mean, the marriage is apparently on the rocks.”

“Plus, she was the one sleeping with Glen,” Holland said. “She’s the one who’d know about Andorra’s guns, and she could walk right up to him . . .”

“Try it the other way: Davy follows Ann out to Andorra’s place. She goes inside. The light comes on in the bedroom window, bedsprings can be heard squeaking a half mile away, Ann drives off with a smile on her face. Apel goes over to Andorra’s the next day on some pretext and kills Andorra for screwing his old lady,” Jenkins said. “What’s more likely—what will a jury think is more likely? That a woman cold-bloodedly killed her lover so she could steal a gun? Or that a guy killed his wife’s lover out of jealousy?”

“And then he decides to take a gun and collect on the debt. Kill one person, why not two? Some dimwitted idea of making it look like a crazy person was sniping people. But it gets away from him,” Skinner said. “Wow. That’s a neat problem. You know what? I like it.”

Holland mimed a backhand to Skinner’s head. “How is this neat, in any way, shape, or form, genius?”

“Because thinking about it is neat,” Skinner said. “Let me make a suggestion. We tell Davy to go home and maybe open a window a little bit so Virgil and Jenkins can sneak over there and listen in. Then, he starts an argument with Ann—accuses her of sleeping with Glen. Then, when they’re screaming at each other, he accuses her of killing all those people. Like he just thought of it. Killing Glen and Margery and Barry and Larry—shooting those other people, using a bow . . . See what she says to him. Maybe she admits it, but maybe she accuses him of doing it. All without knowing you’re listening.”

“Is he that good an actor, do you think?” Holland asked.

Virgil said, “I don’t know, but it could work. We wouldn’t listen in, though, we’d put a wire on him. I got a kit in my truck. We could record the whole thing.”

“What if he won’t do it?” Holland asked.

“Then we go back to thinking he might be the one,” Jenkins said.

They all sat, staring into space, mulling it over, for several seconds, and Skinner finally said, “Wow.”





26


Virgil kicked Skinner and Holland out of the back room. “You can’t be here when Apel comes back. Gotta be cops only. Gotta be totally official. If this goes to a trial, we don’t want to look like amateur night at the grocery store, with a bunch of yokels wandering around.”

“Yeah, we yokels,” Skinner said to Holland.

“Give Virgie the finger when we leave,” Holland said. “I would, but I’m a cripple, and he might beat me up.”



* * *



—

Apel was back an hour after he left, and Virgil had the body wire on the back room table. He pointed at it—a thin, black box, two inches by two inches, and a half inch thick, with the microphone wire trailing out of one corner—and said, “We’ve worked this out. We want you to confront Ann. First of all, we want you to ask about Glen . . .”

Apel was wearing a loose, button-front Carhartt work shirt. They taped the box to his back, above his belt, and trailed the wire around his body and pinned the dime-sized microphone under his shirt next to a buttonhole. Virgil checked the receiver/recorder to make sure it worked, rechecked the battery, and finally rehearsed Apel on the confrontation.

“I can do it,” Apel said. “This thing with Glen: I thought something might be going on, but not with him. I thought maybe she had something with one of the guys she’d met on a worksite. I knew we were coming apart . . .”

He went on for a while, and Virgil and Jenkins heard him out, then sent him on his way.

As he was going out the door, Jenkins said, “On your way home, think about Ann and Andorra gettin’ it on. Think about the details of it. It’ll be hard, but you ought to be majorly pissed by the time you arrive. You want to have a real head of steam when you get there . . .”



* * *



—

Virgil and Jenkins would set up in Jenkins’s rental car, parked on the street around the corner from the Apels’ house. The receiver/recorder worked best within a hundred feet of the microphone and transmitter. On the way over, Jenkins said, “You’re plotting something. Is there more going on than I know about?”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to talk about it because I’m probably wrong, and then you and Shrake would make fun of me until I got something even worse on you guys.”

Jenkins thought about that. “What if you’re not as clever as you think you are?”

“Then, uh, we go home without solving this case.”

When they left Skinner & Holland, they told Apel to wait five minutes before he followed them. Five minutes after they parked, Apel turned into his driveway and parked in front of the garage. “Here we go,” Jenkins said.