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.

“I don’t know the last time that was opened, but it’s been a while. When we retarred the roof—that was, mmm, five years ago?—we did it with ladders from the outside,” Bilbija said.

Virgil climbed the ladder anyway, got the hooks loose, and when he pushed up on the hatch a double handful of dust rained down on his hair and shoulders.

He managed to heave the hatch up onto the roof and climbed outside. When he looked at the hatch, he decided Bilbija was right: the thing hadn’t been opened in years, and part of the problem with pushing it open was that it had been tarred shut.

On the other hand, the roof had good sight lines to the places where the shooting victims had been standing. When Virgil walked around the roof, he found the second floor was built over half the structure, with the back half dropping to a single story. If someone had a short ladder—not even a stepladder but one of the three-step stools used to reach high cupboards—he could have climbed onto the back roof, then used the stool to climb to the top. Getting down would be even faster, if it had become necessary to flee. He could have gone from roof to roof with no more than a three-foot drop.

If the shooter climbed up and down the back of the building, between the wall and the dumpster by the kitchen door, he might even do it unseen.

Virgil put it down as a possibility. The roof didn’t show any footprints, discarded DNA-laden cigarette butts, a book of matches from a sleazy nightclub, an accidentally dropped driver’s license, or any other fictional possibilities, so he went back down the hatch and pulled it shut.

“Find anything?” Bilbija asked.

“A nice view, but . . . no.”

“Didn’t think you would,” Bilbija said. “Say, you want a beer or a quick shot to keep you going? I got a nice rye.”

* * *

—

Virgil declined the offer and worked his way back up Main Street, this time behind the stores on the west side, and found a more complicated situation, a mix of mostly ramshackle prewar houses and small businesses, some of them in converted houses. The ProNails place had a dusty, handwritten “Out of Business” sign in a window, but Auto Heaven, Buster’s Better Quality Meats, and Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment were still operating; nobody had heard a shot fired.

Because of the way the houses and businesses were mixed, there were multiple spaces and slots between hedges and behind fences where a rifleman could have hidden. Virgil was lining up a theoretical shot down toward the churches when a man’s voice called, “Hold it right there! I got a gun on you!”

Virgil raised his hands: “I’m a cop. Don’t shoot.”

A heavyset man in a blue T-shirt and a ragged pair of Dickies coveralls stepped out from behind a garage twenty feet away. He was maybe fifty, balding, with a wind-eroded face. He was aiming an ancient twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun at Virgil’s stomach. “Cop, my ass.”

“Call the sheriff, ask him. Call the mayor. My name is Flowers, I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” Virgil was talking fast and trying to keep his voice from shaking, not entirely successfully.

The guy looked less certain in his resolve but didn’t drop the muzzle of the gun; from Virgil’s point of view, the twin bores of the shotgun looked about the size of apples. Instead, the man half turned his head and shouted, “Laura! Call down to the store and ask somebody if they know a cop named Flowers.” To Virgil he said, “Keep your hands up.”

Virgil kept his hands up, and said, “Point the gun somewhere else.”

“Bullshit.”

“You pull that trigger and you’re gonna spend the rest of your life in Stillwater prison for killing a cop,” Virgil said. “I’ve identified myself, and if you don’t point the gun somewhere else, I’m gonna bust you for aggravated assault, and that’s a minimum of five years. Now, point the fuckin’ gun somewhere else.”