“You seem to know a lot about it,” Virgil said.
Holland lifted his prosthetic foot. “Infantry, Afghanistan. I’ve seen wounds like it.”
“Why do you think it was from a second story?” Virgil asked.
“Clear sight line. Had to be on the east side because on the west side the guy would have to lean way out the window to get the shot off. At that time of day, there are people on the sidewalks and on the street, crossing . . . lots of movement. I think the guy’s picking out people who are headed for the church but are standing still, waiting for traffic, when he pulls the trigger. And it occurred to me last night that maybe he isn’t trying to kill them.”
“Or maybe he’s so far out there that he’s shooting center of mass and hitting low,” Zimmer suggested. “Maybe he’s five hundred yards out, doesn’t have the elevation on his scope quite right. Maybe on that first shot he was holding on Coates’s chest and hit his leg instead. Adjusted the scope to hit higher but didn’t know what he was doing, gave it two or three clicks instead of five or six, was holding on Rice’s chest but still hit her in the hip. With a woman like Miz Rice, there aren’t more than about eight to ten inches between a ball joint shot and a heart shot.”
“Lot of maybes in there,” Holland said. “I keep thinking psycho in a sniper’s nest.”
“’Cause you were in the Army,” Zimmer said. “Say he’s on the second floor—you’re saying that he climbs down from there after shooting and carries his rifle to his car and drives away, and nobody sees him?”
Holland scratched his chin. “I can tell you he didn’t leave the gun behind or any brass. Me and Don . . .” He turned to Virgil. “Don’s the deputy I was working with . . . Anyway, me and Don went over those open places inch by inch, and there aren’t any guns hidden up there. Then we got all the store owners to open up the closed places, and there wasn’t anything there, either. We even stomped around looking for loose floorboards, and so on, where something might have been hidden. The only hidden thing we found was a porno magazine from 1952. The kind where the guy wears black socks.”
“Are there any witnesses still around?” Virgil asked.
Holland nodded toward the curtain. “Skinner was coming across the street to work when Rice got hit. He was one of the first to get to her. When Coates got hit, Father Brice was standing on the church steps, looking right at him. Brice’s been coming down once or twice a week from St. Paul; he’ll be here tomorrow.”
“I’ll want to talk to them,” Virgil said. To Zimmer: “Suppose Wardell’s right—a .223, a long way out. But when he looked, he didn’t find any brass. If the guy was in a hurry to leave his spot, he wouldn’t want to be fumbling around, looking for the shells. I’m thinking it might not be a semiauto. He could be shooting a bolt-action, which would be more accurate than most semiautos, and would be quite a bit more rare. Maybe you could check gun stores for bolt-action .223s? And maybe for suppressors?”
Zimmer nodded. “We’ll start right now. Probably not more than a dozen places between the Cities and here, not more than another dozen between here and Des Moines.”
“If he’s shooting from a car, he wouldn’t have to worry about any of that,” Holland said. “He could be shooting anything from anywhere, and shooting from inside a car would muffle the shot.”
“Like those Washington, D.C., snipers,” Virgil said.
“I was thinking about those guys, but they were travelers . . . I believe this is gonna be a local guy,” Holland said. “Somebody who knows his way around downtown, somebody people know, somebody who wouldn’t be out of place if he was seen.”
“If we get him, it’s because we’ll have figured out one thing,” Virgil said. “That’s why—why is he doing it?”
“Unless he’s nuts,” Zimmer said. “Then there’s no ‘why’ that you can figure out.”
“That’s the nightmare,” Virgil said. “We don’t want to go there yet.”
3
Virgil, Holland, and Zimmer talked a while longer—Virgil asked whether there were any known anti-Catholic bigots around town, but neither one of them knew of any. Zimmer mentioned that a couple of Nazis lived out in the countryside and were known to have .223 black rifles, but Zimmer said, “They’re, basically, play Nazis. I’ve known both of them since they were born, and they’re a couple of dumbasses.”
“Doesn’t take a real smart guy to pull a trigger,” Virgil said.
“No, but they have to get away after they pull it,” Zimmer said. “Neither one of those guys could elude his way out of a cocktail lounge.”
“If nothing else comes up, I’ll take a look at them,” Virgil said.
“Call before you do that, and I’ll have a deputy go along. They do have those guns,” Zimmer said.
As they were leaving the back room, Holland said, “I’ll introduce you to Skinner before you leave. He saw Miz Rice get shot.”
“This was the kid who was driving around town with his girlfriends and an open beer when he was twelve?”
“You gotta make some allowances for Skinner,” Holland said. “He’s sort of . . . a genius.”
“A genius who runs a cash register?”
“He’s a high school senior, part owner of the store, and he’s pulling down eighteen hundred dollars a week working weekends only. He generally goes to school during the week,” Holland said. “How much were you making when you were seventeen and going to school?”
“Shoot, I’m not making that much now,” Virgil said.
Holland said that Skinner was the only child of the town hippie. The identity of Skinner’s father was not precisely known; his mother, Caroline, admitted that there were several possible candidates.
“Tough for the kid,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, but growing up here, in Wheatfield, who you are is more important than who your old man was. Everybody knows Skinner and that he’s a good guy.”
“Except your former cop,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, well, I believe he was excessively focused on . . .” He glanced at Virgil as he trailed off.
“The law?” Virgil suggested.
“Don’t get all stuffy about it,” Holland said.
* * *
—
Holland took over the cash register, and Skinner trailed Virgil outside.
The kid pointed up the street. “She was standing at the corner, waiting to cross to the church. Wearing a green jacket and black pants. I was walking up to the store when I saw her get hit. I don’t know, maybe because that Coates guy got shot, and I had it in my mind, but as soon as I saw it, I knew she was shot. She jerked sideways, and then she made this noise, not a scream, more like she was calling out to somebody, and then she fell over, and tried to crawl . . .”
“You didn’t hear the shot?”
“Nope, not a thing. Anyway, I ran up to her, and she was bleeding bad, and she said, ‘Somebody shot me . . . Somebody shot me . . .’ I had a newspaper under my arm, and me and another guy pressed some folded paper over the holes in her hips. And I saw this guy I knew, and told him to call the hospital at Fairmont, to get an ambulance down here. They took her to Fairmont, and then Fairmont called the Mayo in Rochester, and they flew her there on the Mayo chopper.”
A good-looking, forty-something woman walked by and winked at Skinner, who said, “Hey, Madison.”
She said, “Skinner . . . Don’t be a stranger.”
Virgil looked at her for a second as she walked away, then checked out Skinner’s face, which was a picture of innocence, before wrenching himself back to the original topic. “Do you remember which way Rice was facing when she got hit?”
“Yeah, I talked about that with Wardell. She was looking across the street at the church, but I couldn’t tell you if her hips were square to the street or she was square to the church—that’s a big difference in terms of where the bullet would’ve
come from and where it wound up.”
“All right.”
“Then me and Wardell were talking about whether the shooter was up high or level with her,” Skinner continued. “The thing is, if she had a little more weight on one leg than the other, it would have cocked her hip one way or the other—so you can’t tell where the shooter was. I can tell you that the bullet hit the ball of her joint on the entry side but not on the exit side. On the exit side, it was lower.”
“You seem to have thought about it quite a bit,” Virgil said.
Skinner nodded. “I don’t ever see people getting shot. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. It’s got me worried, Virgil. The town’s got a good thing going, and I’d hate to see some nutball mess us up. One or two more shootings and we’re toast.”
“Why’d you stick newspaper in the wounds?”
“Untouched by human hands, or any other hands, or even germs,” Skinner said. “That newsprint pulp comes out of a big vat and gets ironed out flat and rolled up on a reel, and then it’s printed on, so the inside of a newspaper is about as sterile as a bandage.”
“How do you know that?”
“Went on a tour of a paper plant when I was at Scout camp. The guide told us.”
“So, tell me about the Nazis.”
“Aw, don’t waste your time on them. It’s two guys and their girlfriends, and they don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of,” Skinner said. “They decided they wanted to be somebody, get somebody to pay attention to them, so they signed up to be Nazis and got themselves a couple of pit bulls. They’re not exactly harmless, but bar fights are really more their style. The Nazis, not the pit bulls.”
“Then they’re seriously stupid.”
“Yeah, they are that. They used to work over at the elevator, but after they signed up to be Nazis they got fired. Now they all live on welfare. They didn’t shoot anyone, though. The shooter is somebody smarter.”
“Got any ideas?”
Skinner scraped his lower lip with his upper teeth, then said, “No. It could be somebody who doesn’t like what’s happened to the town since the apparitions, but I can’t think who that would be. If maybe there are a couple of people like that, none of them would be crazy enough to go around shooting people. You have to understand—I know every single person who lives here. Not counting the visitors.”
“You think it’s a visitor?”
“Could be. When I lie in bed and try to think of a person I know, who could be doing this, I come up with a total blank. We got our assholes, we’ve got a couple of goofs, some people angry from watching Fox News . . . but it seems to me that it has to be something more than a goof.”
“Like what?” Virgil asked.
“Don’t know. It’s like an oxymoron: random shootings for a reason,” Skinner said. “Gonna have to think more about it. The two people who got shot, Rice and Coates, don’t have any connections. Nothing at all. Didn’t know each other, didn’t come from the same place, Coates isn’t even a Catholic. The only thing they have in common is the fact that they were shot and where they were shot. That could mean the shooter has a particular spot he likes to go to and is maybe sighted in at a specific range.”
“I told Wardell and the sheriff that we need to figure out why people were shot . . .”
“That’s exactly right, Virgil,” Skinner said. “If you can figure that out, we’ll know who’s doing it. Unless he’s some outsider religious nut and he really is crazy. But how would he know the town well enough to find a spot and not be seen or even caught? People here notice if you drop your Sno Ball wrapper on the ground. That he can get away with shooting people . . .”
Skinner shook his head.
“I’ll tell you something, Skinner. Anybody who snipes innocent people is seriously unbalanced even if he believes he has a reason,” Virgil said. “Most people won’t even shoplift for fear of getting caught. Shooting people? You’re dealing with a nut even if there’s a payoff somewhere.”
Skinner nodded. “I’ll think about that, too.”
* * *
—
Virgil walked Skinner up to the corner where Rice was shot and then down the street where Coates was hit. They talked about possible angles, but if you made the simplest assumption, that both were square to the street, then the shots would have come from the general area of the business district. If their hips were turned one way or the other, the shots could have come from behind any business on either side of Main Street or from a residential area farther back.
“I need to look at a satellite photo,” Virgil said, “to try to narrow things down. Will you be around?”
“Until five, at the store. We got a girl that comes in and takes it to eight o’clock, when we close. I’ll give you my cell number. If you need anything, call me.”
* * *
—
They exchanged cell phone numbers—Virgil gave Skinner his direct number on the off chance that Skinner actually might think of something—and then Virgil went out to his truck and got his iPad. A Google Earth satellite photo gave him a solid overhead shot of the town. It had been taken in the winter, with no leaves on the trees, so he had an unobstructed view of the street layout.
Assuming that both victims had either been standing more or less square to the street or turned slightly one way or the other, Virgil configured a slice of pie extending from the points where the victims were standing down to the business district.
Only a half dozen houses fell within the pie slice, as well as a number of auto- or farm-related shops and services. One section of the slice that included Rice didn’t include Coates. Virgil thought that probably eliminated that area. If the sniper successfully got away from his first position, why wouldn’t he go there again?
* * *
—
Time for a walk-around.
Virgil spent two hours working his way up and down the Main Street shopping area. There were twenty storefronts on the block-long business district. All of them had apartments or storage on the second floor, and a half dozen of them were being rehabbed as short-term housing for visiting pilgrims. The carpenters and other construction workers quit at 4 o’clock, according to one store owner, which made Virgil think that might have restricted the time that the sniper had to shoot—it had to be after 4.
Virgil climbed the stairs to two of the units being renovated. The entire length of Main Street stretched out below him, and he could easily see both ends of town, fading into newly plowed rolling black prairie, and the church steeples, which were the highest points in Wheatfield. He could clearly see where the two victims had been standing. There were several solid positions—windowsills, framing for walls—where a rifle could have been supported. There hadn’t been much wind the day before—at least, not in Mankato—and a quiet day would help with accuracy.
The building owner had climbed the stairs with him to the second apartment, watched him calculate the distances and angles. “Even on a quiet day, it’d take some good shooting,” Virgil told the owner, whose name was Curt Lane.
Lane said, “Hang here one second,” and he turned and ran down the stairs; he was back a minute later with a golf range finder. He handed it to Virgil, and said, “Put the crosshairs on the spot they got shot and push the button on top.”
Virgil did and got two hundred and forty yards for Rice and two hundred and seventy for Coates. “Good shooting,” he said. “Our guy might not be just a regular nut, he might also be a gun nut. Know anybody like that?”
“There are a lot of gun guys in town, there not being a lot else to do,” Lane said. “You go out to the old quarry and shoot you some soda bottles, or there’s a sportsman’s club a few miles farther out. Most all the guys hunt, and quite a few of the gals.”
Virgil nodded, then looked up and down the street. Two-thirds of the parking spaces were taken, and he could
see perhaps twenty people out walking. “If the shooter was up here, you’d think somebody would have heard the shot.”
“I would have,” Lane said. “I’m right downstairs. You say the guy was shooting a .223? I hunt up north, where rifles are legal, and I know what a .223 sounds like. Guys up there deer hunting let go a half dozen shots—POP-POP-POP-POP-POP-POP!—most likely a .223 or an AK. They’re loud. Not a big boom like a .30–06, but you’d hear them for a few blocks anyway.”
“As far as I can find out, nobody heard anything,” Virgil said.
“Don’t know what to tell you, except maybe he was a lot farther out,” Lane said.
“I hope so,” Virgil said. “If he’s local and he’s shooting from a thousand yards, or something, we’ll spot him pretty quick. Not many people are that good, and the ones who are are known.”
* * *
—
When he’d worked his way down one side of Main Street and up the other, Virgil walked around behind the buildings, first on the east side, then on the west. The east side was bricked in with commercial buildings: a Goodwill store, housed in an unpainted metal hobby barn, Burden’s Tractor & Implement, a car wash, the brick Fraternal Order of the Eagles, which was mostly a bar with a rooftop that might have provided a sniper’s nest, and STM Wine & Spirits. The Eagles club wasn’t open, but Virgil saw somebody walking around inside and banged on the door until Goran Bilbija pulled it open an inch, and said, “We’re closed.”
Virgil identified himself, and Bilbija let him in and pointed to a stairway that led to a second-floor office and storage room. Virgil looked in both, but neither had a window that a sniper could have shot out of. A ladder, bolted to the wall, led to the roof, with a hatch held in place by heavy hooks, the kind seen on barn doors.
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