They did, for the inside of the Quonset hut. The town had one, in the municipal equipment shed, and Holland went to get it with the store’s pickup truck. They then met at the Quonset, Banning used her cutters to take the padlock off, and they were in.

The hut was on the back side of the Main Street stores, so they had no audience for their entry. A tired-looking Bob-Cat sat in one corner of the hut, but the large excavator was gone. Zimmer looked around, and said, “You know what? This is one of those Korean War surplus huts, so it’s insulated. See how thick the walls are? Gotta be a foot thick. Probably full of asbestos . . . But it would sure cut down the sound of a gunshot.”

“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.”

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