Zimmer said, “I’ll tell you something that’s worried me right from the start. We don’t know who was in bed with Glen Andorra. We know she’d been with him right before he was killed, right? And she apparently never went back after that, because she’d have found him dead.”

“We don’t know that,” Virgil said, “’cause we don’t know exactly when Glen died. Probably ten days to two weeks ago. We don’t even know there was a woman. All we know is, he had a little . . . mmm . . . semen in his underwear.”

Banning said, “Yug,” and, “Doesn’t have to be a woman, though. There’s more than one way for that to happen.”

Zimmer said, “I think we’re all aware of the possibilities, Lucy. We don’t really have to explore them any further.”

Jenkins said, “Condoms.”

“We know,” Zimmer said. “We know that, too.”

Virgil said to Apel, “We’ll keep you here for a while; I’m going to find Danny. Don’t make me do this if you’re lying.”

Apel said, “Go . . . Go!”

—

Virgil went.

And because he drove, and because the Apel house was only four blocks from Visser’s, it took one minute. He knocked on the beauty shop door and pushed in and found Danny Visser wrapping a woman’s hair with what looked like strips of tinfoil.

She turned to look at him, and said, “Virgil?”

“Danny, this is important. Could you step outside for a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Can I listen?” asked the woman with the tinfoil in her hair.

“Mmm . . . no,” Virgil said.

When they were outside, with the door shut, Virgil asked, “What were you doing at the precise time that Margery Osborne was shot?”

“Why?”

“Just . . .” He made a rolling motion with his index finger: tell me.

“I was right here, cutting hair. Davy Apel was here, and Kathy Meijer had an appointment after his. She came running in and said there was another shooting. We went out in the street and looked toward the church and saw all those people on the sidewalk outside it. We saw you, too, running around the corner. I said, ‘There goes Virgil, it must be bad.’”

—

Virgil went back to Apel’s place. Two deputies in the driveway were tossing Apel’s truck; everybody else was still waiting in the kitchen. Virgil went inside and looked at Jenkins, and said, “You’re right. We know something’s going on here, but we don’t know what it is.”

25

After more talk, which veered into argument and a bit of shouting, Virgil closed down the search of Apel’s house, and he and Jenkins retreated to the Skinner & Holland back room to try to figure out where they had gone wrong.