Apel was back an hour after he left, and Virgil had the body wire on the back room table. He pointed at it—a thin, black box, two inches by two inches, and a half inch thick, with the microphone wire trailing out of one corner—and said, “We’ve worked this out. We want you to confront Ann. First of all, we want you to ask about Glen . . .”

Apel was wearing a loose, button-front Carhartt work shirt. They taped the box to his back, above his belt, and trailed the wire around his body and pinned the dime-sized microphone under his shirt next to a buttonhole. Virgil checked the receiver/recorder to make sure it worked, rechecked the battery, and finally rehearsed Apel on the confrontation.

“I can do it,” Apel said. “This thing with Glen: I thought something might be going on, but not with him. I thought maybe she had something with one of the guys she’d met on a worksite. I knew we were coming apart . . .”

He went on for a while, and Virgil and Jenkins heard him out, then sent him on his way.

As he was going out the door, Jenkins said, “On your way home, think about Ann and Andorra gettin’ it on. Think about the details of it. It’ll be hard, but you ought to be majorly pissed by the time you arrive. You want to have a real head of steam when you get there . . .”

—

Virgil and Jenkins would set up in Jenkins’s rental car, parked on the street around the corner from the Apels’ house. The receiver/recorder worked best within a hundred feet of the microphone and transmitter. On the way over, Jenkins said, “You’re plotting something. Is there more going on than I know about?”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to talk about it because I’m probably wrong, and then you and Shrake would make fun of me until I got something even worse on you guys.”

Jenkins thought about that. “What if you’re not as clever as you think you are?”

“Then, uh, we go home without solving this case.”

When they left Skinner & Holland, they told Apel to wait five minutes before he followed them. Five minutes after they parked, Apel turned into his driveway and parked in front of the garage. “Here we go,” Jenkins said.

As he walked up to the house, carrying a grocery sack, Apel said, “I hope you can hear me.”

“We can,” Virgil said, though Apel couldn’t hear him.

—

They heard the door opening, and Ann Apel said, “Took you long enough. Where’ve you been?”

“I got a story about that. Let me put the frozen stuff away.”

Refrigerator door opening, paper and plastic rustling, then Ann: “What’s going on?”

After a lengthy pause, Apel asked, “How long were you fuckin’ Glen? Huh? How long was that going on?”

“What! I don’t know what . . .”