Jenkins said, “I’m still back where I was: the roof ain’t it. This guy is too smart to put himself where he could be trapped with no way out. The guy’s doing something else.”

—

They interviewed the two townies. Both had alibis for at least one of the shootings, and the alibis were convincing. One of the men, who claimed to be the best shot in town after Clay Ford, and possibly Roy Visser, said, “You tell us the guy didn’t even have his own rifle. You don’t even know how close he was when he fired it, so you don’t know if he was a good shot or not. I gotta tell you, it doesn’t sound to me like he’s a big marksman if he had to steal a rifle and had to kill to get it, huh? Sounds to me like it could be anybody who’s ever looked through a scope, which is everybody in town. No offense, but you need a whole new tree to bark up.”

His wife poked Jenkins in the chest, and said, “Yeah.”

14

Virgil went to bed discouraged. Every time he found something that looked like a lead, it turned out to be a dead end. God didn’t show up that night, so he slipped off to sleep without conversation.

—

Bell Wood, the Iowa state investigator, called at 9 o’clock the next morning, and said, “We’re going through Humboldt right now, so we’re an hour out of Armstrong. We still on for ten o’clock?”

“Might as well be, I’m not solving any murders,” Virgil said. “And who’s ‘we’?”

“Special Agent Easton, Special Agent Rivers, and myself,” Wood said. “If this thing works out, I might take a day off and come up and solve your Wheatfield problem myself.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Virgil said. “See you in a bit.”

—

Virgil called Jenkins and Shrake, who were at Mom’s getting breakfast. “I’ll be there in four minutes,” he said. He drove to Mom’s, parked, went inside, and saw Jenkins and Shrake picking at their pancakes.

When they saw Virgil, Shrake pointed at his plate, and asked, “What are these things?”

“I asked the same question,” Virgil said. “Got a tip from Mom’s son: stay away from the meat products.”

“So what are we doing?” Jenkins asked, pushing the pancakes away.

“I’ll pick up Skinner and drive down to Armstrong, where he’ll take us to Ralph Van Den Berg’s place. You two will hide in Jenkins’s piece of shit and wait for Larry Van Den Berg to get back to his house. He’ll be back on the street about now, and it’ll take him twenty minutes to get here. If he heads south for Iowa, we want to know about it. If he doesn’t for an hour or two, we’ll raid Ralph’s place anyway.”