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 . . .”

“Through the grille up at the top of the building. Perfect view from up there,” Jenkins said. He added, “Man, you might as well give it up. We’ve got you. Period.”

Virgil: “We know all about your loan to Barry Osborne. We know he’s paying interest only on the loan. And we know you must’ve been worried about getting your money back when you heard that Margery was going to give a lot of money to the church . . .”

Apel looked at the faces surrounding him, seemed to pull himself together, and asked, “You got a search warrant for my house? I see you’ve been all over it.”

“We do,” Virgil said.

“Didn’t find anything, did you? You know why?” He shouted his answer into Virgil’s face: “BECAUSE I DIDN’T DO IT!”

Virgil took a step back. “Does anyone else have a key to the padlock on your Quonset?”

Apel scratched behind his ear. “Well, yeah. Everybody who plows in the winter.”

“How many people is that?” Virgil asked.

“Well . . . five, I guess. But we’ve used different guys in different winters, so there might be more keys out there . . . I never kept a close count because there’s nothing in there worth stealing except our equipment, our machines, and you couldn’t hardly steal those without twenty people seeing you.”

Virgil said, “Are any of those guys bow hunters? Because I’m sure you heard . . .”

Apel shouted, “Hey! Hey! Why don’t you ask me if I’ve got an alibi for the shootings?”

All the cops looked at one another, then Jenkins asked, “Well . . . do you?”

Apel pointed a finger at Virgil, and said, “Yeah, I do. You know where I was when Margery was shot? I was sitting in Danny Visser’s beauty parlor, getting my hair cut. Somebody ran in and told us about it . . . Kathy Meijer . . . and we ran outside and saw you running down the street like your hair was on fire . . .”

Virgil said, “What?”

—

Dead silence. Then Jenkins said, “There’s something going on here that we don’t know about. We’ve got too much . . .” He looked at Apel and shook his head.

Virgil: “Goddamnit, I’m going to go talk to Danny. You all stay right here, I’ll be back in one minute. If he’s telling the truth, we’ll know it.”

“Unless he’s got something going with Danny,” Jenkins said.

All the locals groaned, and Banning said, “No . . . No, that’s not right.”