Zimmer was accompanied by Lucy Banning, the deputy who’d taken Larry Van Den Berg to jail. They gathered in Skinner & Holland’s back room to talk about Apel. Skinner was in school, but Holland was at the store and wanted to hear about what Virgil had found. When Zimmer asked if Virgil thought it was appropriate to include a civilian in a police discussion, Virgil shrugged, and said, “Sometimes. And this is one of those times. Nobody knows more about the locals than the locals.”

“And I am the mayor,” Holland said. “By a landslide.”

Virgil told them what they’d learned about Apel. All of it was suggestion, but the fact that Apel lived in what amounted to Osborne’s backyard and had easy and rapid access to the house was convincing.

“Plus,” Jenkins added, “when the guy shot Virgil, and Shrake was running, we almost had him cornered. But when he disappeared, he was running that way—toward his house and Osborne’s.”

“You know what? When I talked to Apel, he reminded me that I’d seen him standing on his porch and that he’d pointed out where the guy had run to,” Virgil said. “No way he had time to change into a white T-shirt and shorts. We’re talking about a couple of seconds.”

Jenkins said, “Huh.” And, “We’ll figure that out later.”

—

Holland thought he knew what the loan to Osborne involved. “Years ago, back when I was in college, Barry and Davy started a brew pub out on the Interstate in that old Burton Ford dealership. The rumor at the time was, Davy’s wife had come into an inheritance, they put up the money, and Barry operated the place—Davy and Ann had their own business to run; they make good money running their heavy equipment.”

“What I remember about it is,” Zimmer said, “the brew pub went down like the Titanic.”

“Wasn’t there some kind of . . . disease that they caught out of there?” Banning asked.

“Wasn’t a disease. I heard that tanks were contaminated with soap of some kind, and, at the grand opening, everybody who’d had a beer got the runs something fierce,” Zimmer said. “They’d named the place the Mad Hatter, and after the grand opening, everybody started calling it the Mud Butter.”

“That’s not good,” Jenkins said.

“It was a bad location anyway,” Zimmer said. “There’s nothing out there. If you go in and have three or four beers, you’re automatically driving drunk when you leave. Took the highway patrol about one second to figure that out. You got to drinking at the Mud Butter, and there was about a fifty-fifty chance the bears would be all over your ass when you left.”

“That’s not good,” Jenkins said.