Deadline(105)

            “Let me show you the guy’s blood,” Virgil said.

            Sawyer had already been up to Bacon’s secret apartment, but had not begun processing it, waiting for Virgil to show up and tell her what had happened. He pointed out the brass from the shooter’s gun, and his own brass, and his blood, and the shooter’s. The shooter’s had already been sampled by Alewort, but he’d carefully left enough for a second sample.

            The blood made Sawyer happy: “With your description, we can nail down precisely what happened, all the technical details, right down to who did the shooting and when. Take a little time, but we can do it. We need to get into Kerns’s house, get some samples off his bed, but there seems to be some problem with that.”

            “I’ll talk to the sheriff.”

            —

            VIRGIL TALKED TO PURDY, who said he was working with a judge on the county court, but the judge was reluctant to issue a warrant. “I did my tap dance, and he says he’ll give us a warrant, as soon as we can, quote, Give me one single piece of evidence that he was involved.”

            “We’ll get it—I could get it this afternoon,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a guy I can squeeze, I think. If I get it, I’ll call you.”

            —

            WITH THE CRIME-SCENE crew occupied, Virgil, Shrake, and Jenkins dropped Jenkins’s Crown Vic at the cabin and headed north on Highway 26 to Winona.

            —

            MASILLA, ODER OCCUPIED a restored four-story redbrick warehouse-style building on the corner of Walnut and E. Third, between the Merchants bank on one side, and a car repair place across the street; inside it was glass, exposed wooden beams, and hanging stairways. The interior of the building was blocked by thick glass doors; two receptionists sat at a curving Plexiglas desk out front. Virgil, dressed in jeans, a black sport coat, cowboy boots, and a new pumpkin-colored T-shirt from the band Pup, with a pale white bandage on top of his head, led the way in; Jenkins and Shrake, both in overly expensive gray suits with silvery-gray neckties and sunglasses, moved in at his elbows.

            Virgil said to the receptionists, “We’re here to see Fred Masilla.” He dropped open his BCA identification. “We’re with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

            In the silence that followed, Shrake leaned toward them and said, “Apprehension.”

            One of the receptionists said, “Let me see if Mr. Masilla is in.”

            “Oh, he’s in,” Shrake said.

            The receptionist made a call, then hung up and said, “Somebody will come down to get you.”

            A painting hung from the wall on the visitor’s side of the reception desk, an impressionistic oil of a dozen or so colorful river barges parked in an upriver pond, surrounded by red and yellow autumn foliage. Shrake put his nose three inches from it, studied it, then turned to Jenkins and asked, “Where do they get this shit?”

            “Well, you know, impressionism has become a technique that you learn about in magazines, rather than an exploration of light,” Jenkins said. “Slap a little pretty paint around a canvas, sell that sucker. I’d call this late Monet. Very late.”

            “Yeah. So late he’s dead and buried,” Shrake said.

            One of the receptionists, a thin woman with short black hair and tight eyeglasses, said to Virgil, “I really like Pup.”

            The other woman, a carefully coiffed blonde with daylight pearls, said, “They somewhat rock, but they’re a little too . . . out there . . . for me.”

            Virgil didn’t know what to say, but was saved when an elevator dinged, a door opened, and a woman stepped out and asked, “You’re BCA officials?”