“That witch,” Apel said. He walked a couple of circles around the shop, picked up a well-worn sweater, looked at all the fuzzballs put it back, said, “Listen, you can’t call her and tell her anything about me coming here, okay? No matter how good a friend you are. You know why?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s right,” Apel said. “If you do, she might kill you. Like she might have done to Glen, who she was fuckin’. And maybe how she killed Barry and Margery and Larry Van Den Berg, and shot that cop and those other people . . .”

“Oh my God,” Trudy said. “Oh, God.”

—

Virgil, Jenkins, Skinner, and Holland were all sitting in the back room, eating chicken potpies, when Apel pushed through the curtain that separated the back from the front of the store. They all stopped eating to look at him, and he said, “I might know who the killer is.”

Virgil: “Okay, who is it?”

“Let me start by saying this. All that evidence you had against me? You were right about it,” Apel said. “It all points to me, but I didn’t do any of it. You know where I was when Margery got shot . . . But you were right about the money. Margery Osborne probably had enough money for me to get paid off. That’s the only way I’d get it back.”

Holland: “So, you shot her, Davy?”

“Not me,” Apel said.

A few seconds passed before the penny dropped.

Virgil: “Are you telling us your wife . . .”

“I don’t know. I really don’t, but . . . maybe. Maybe. I’m a little scared right now because I’m the last guy standing between her and all that money, and I believe she knows I’m thinking about her.”

“But you have no proof, other than what you believe?”

“I know somebody who’ll tell you that Ann was sleeping with Glen Andorra, not that there was much sleep involved.” He explained about Trudy at Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment.

“Your wife bow-hunts?” Jenkins asked.

“Damn right, she does. She’s good at it, too. She goes after turkeys and gets one most every year.”

“All right, that’s interesting,” Virgil said. “You think . . . she might shoot you?”

“Well, is it possible that she killed Glen for his gun? Glen wouldn’t have been crazy enough to go through with what she was planning, so she got rid of him? But I don’t really know. She hasn’t said anything. I didn’t see any signs . . . But Ann and I haven’t been in the best shape the last few years, so maybe I wouldn’t see it. I don’t think it’d bother her much if I went away. But—” He put his hands together, his fingers under his chin, as though he were praying, and finally said, “I don’t know. I might be wrong. I might be wrong about all of it.”

—