5
OVERNIGHT, THEY HEARD NOTHING from the lookouts by the river. At first light, Johnson ran two more guys up the river, and retrieved the ones who’d spent the night in the blind. They were surprisingly pleased with themselves, though they’d seen nothing relevant. Like back in National Guard days, they said.
While Johnson was managing the watch, Virgil was heading north. The morning was cool, but promising more hotness. He turned off 26 onto NN. A black Suburban, the kind that members of the Ruffed Grouse Society tended to drive, was parked near the bridge; Virgil pulled up behind it, got out, and met two cowboy-looking guys with guns.
“Virgil,” said Gomez, touching the brim of his ball cap.
“I thought you were too high up to do this yourself,” Virgil said.
“I am, but I like to spend some time with my underlings, to demonstrate that I’m just like one of them, the salt of the earth, though far more important,” Gomez said. He bent a thumb at his underling. “George Blume.”
Blume said, “His salt-in-the-wound thing don’t always work,” as they shook hands. He looked up at the ridge: “We’d be heading for that notch up there? About . . .” He read a bunch of numbers off a piece of paper.
“I can show you, but I’m no damn good with a GPS,” Virgil said.
“Anybody see you going in yesterday?” Gomez asked.
“No, but I’m sure quite a few people saw my truck,” Virgil said.
“I don’t think this’ll work, but we paid money for them, might as well use them,” Gomez said. He popped the back of the Suburban and took out two magnetic door signs that said: “U.S. Geological Survey.” He stuck them to the doors of the Suburban.
“Probably cause more trouble than if you just had a sign that said ‘Feds,’” Virgil said. “Anyway, I got a rope and some water. . . . You gonna stay up there awhile, or just look?”
“Today, just look,” Gomez said. “Be back in an hour, if we don’t get shot.”
—
THEY DIDN’T GET SHOT. They went in the same way that Virgil and Johnson had, taking care not to leave tracks or disturb foliage. When they got to the sheds, Gomez put his nose in the air and sniffed and said, “Yeah . . . this is the real thing.”
Blume put his pack down, took out a set of lock picks, and picked the lock on the first shed in about nine seconds. They went in and looked around, found three two-head gas burners and a lot of glassware, along with five large polypropylene carboys full of purified water. The second shed held raw materials, mostly in gallon jugs, while the third shed held some basic tools—a chain saw, axes, a couple of cans of gasoline—along with a table, a radio, two decks of cards (one pornographic), and three plastic chairs.
When they’d locked the sheds back up, they looked at the rubbish dump, and Gomez took some more photographs.
“All right,” he said. “A nice little commercial lab. And you could manufacture other shit in here, if you wanted, and knew how. They got all the glass they’d need to make acid.”
They left the same way that Johnson and Virgil had, after making a long detour along the game trail at the crest of the hill toward the mouth of the valley, checking out whatever houses were visible. Virgil pointed out Zorn’s place, which they marked with their GPS.
They continued down the trail, to the mouth of the valley. “Looks like that ATV track goes right down the hill to the highway,” Blume said, looking down the hill through a pair of compact binoculars.
As they were making their way back, a dog started to bark, and then several more. Virgil couldn’t make out exactly where they were, but they seemed to be across the valley from the hill they were on.
“Sound mournful, more than excited,” Gomez said.
“If they’re gonna be taken out to medical laboratories, they’ve got good reason,” Virgil said.
They were back at the cars an hour and a half after they left. Gomez said that the watchers would be dropped off after dark in the evening, and before dawn in the morning. And, he said, they had another asset.
“It’s considered kinda top secret, but I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t go shooting any shotguns up in the sky.”
“You gotta drone?”
“Shhhh . . .”
—
THEN, AS OFTEN HAPPENED on sophisticated, hot-running, high-energy investigations, nothing happened for four days.
Rather, something happened, but only after Virgil did a lot of fishing, talked on the phone to Frankie, went to a 3-D archery range with Johnson, and tried to avoid phone calls from Davenport, in which he was not always successful—but nothing related to his two separate cases.
During the first three days, he kept trying to spot a drone, but never did; Gomez reported that the barking dogs were definitely on the south hill, that the dogs sounded large, and that there were quite a few of them. So Johnson had been wrong about the location.
On the fourth day, two skaters who took their boards out to County A to challenge the big downhill east of Clancy Conley’s cabin spotted his body in the ditch on the side of the road.
The sheriff called Virgil, and Virgil took off for the crime scene. On the way, Davenport called. “I’m on the way,” Virgil said, before Davenport could say anything.
And after he’d rung off, it occurred to Virgil that life was becoming complicated. He was juggling a dognapping ring, a meth lab investigation, and a murder. Trippton, it seemed, had a little darker underbelly than he’d been prepared for. He’d better have a serious talk with Davenport about it, sooner rather than later.
—
SHERIFF PURDY and four deputies were waiting at the ditch where Conley had landed. Conley’s body was already inside a black body bag, although the bag had not yet been zipped up. Virgil spent no time looking at Conley’s face, because a face that had spent four days in a wet ditch in the middle of August was not an attractive sight; he did spend a few seconds contemplating the exit wounds on Conley’s chest.
One of the deputies, whose name was Paul Alewort, and who did crime-scene processing, said, “Shot three times in the back. We hauled him out of there because there wasn’t a single damn thing we’d get out of that ditch that would mean anything. Only thing that was really unexpected when we pulled him out was a ‘clunk’ sound when we put him on the bag. I looked, and he was packing a revolver, an old .38, six rounds. We bagged it.”
“Maybe he was worried about something,” Virgil said, looking at the ditch. “Find any brass from the shooter?”
“Haven’t really started looking yet,” Alewort said.
Virgil said, “If he was running up the hill, and was shot by one guy in a car or truck, coming up from behind him, the shells would have ejected into the truck. So you won’t find any brass. If he was running down the hill, and was shot in the back by a guy who was coming toward him, and stopped to shoot him in the back, then the shells will be on the road up ahead a ways. Unless he was shot by a P6 or P38 or a mirror-image .45, which would be wonderful, because they’d probably be the only ones for a hundred miles around, and somebody would know about them. Those are the two choices, unless you believe there were two men in the vehicle, and the passenger did the shooting.”
“What if it was somebody in the woods who ambushed him?” Purdy asked.
“Probably not,” Virgil said. “Looks to me like the bullets came straight through. If somebody was shooting from the side, the bullets would have come out on the far side of his chest.”
“That sounds right,” Alewort said. “I don’t believe he was shot with a pistol. I’ll leave it to the ME to say for sure, but it looks to me that he was shot with a rifle and hollow points. Lot of damage on his chest. Maybe by somebody who fired a burst. The bullet wounds are in a perfect spaced stripe right across the middle of his back, two inches apart.”
“You think .223?” Virgil asked.
“That?
??s what I’m thinking,” Alewort said. “It’s unlikely we’ll ever recover any of the slugs, but there’s small entries and big exits—a rifle-class weapon, and .223s are a dime a dozen around here.”
“Anybody selling three-shot-burst conversion kits?”
Purdy shook his head. “Not that I know. There was a guy in Trippton making silencers a couple of years ago, but the BATF shut him down.”
“He still around?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah. He’s selling turkey fryers now.”
“You can make a living selling turkey fryers?”
“Never thought about it,” Purdy said. “But off the top of my head, I’d say no. His wife works, though.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Virgil said. “Who else should I talk to?”
—
VIRGIL GOT an exceptionally short list: Buster Gedney, the turkey-fryer salesman; Viking Laughton, Conley’s employer at the Republican-River; Gary Kochinowski, owner of the bar where Conley drank; and Bill Don Fuller, who rented Conley the trailer where he lived.
“Fact is,” Purdy said, “Conley was not well liked, because he was a drunk and an addict of some kind. A pill head, would be my guess. That made him cranky and aggressive. Every time we busted somebody for anything more than disturbing the peace, he’d be looking around for police misbehavior.”
“He thought of himself as an investigator?”
“He did. Nobody else did. He couldn’t investigate his way out of a convenience store. I mean, the guy could fall in a barrel of titties and come out suckin’ his thumb.”
“Girlfriends?”
“I heard he’d pay the town prostitute on occasion, but that’s all I know.”
“Who’s the town prostitute?” Virgil asked.
Purdy’s eyes shifted away, and he rubbed the side of his nose, as though trying to decide how far he could trust Virgil. Finally he said, “Wendy McComb, but don’t you dare tell her I called her a prostitute, ’cause she’s a nice girl,” Purdy said. “Say you understand that she and Conley were friends.” He thought about it for another moment, then added, “Least he wasn’t queer.”
Virgil added her to the list in his notebook, along with a description of where she lived, which Purdy said would be better than an address.
“I’ll tell you what,” Purdy said, scratching his ass and looking around the quiet valley, “I think it’s about seventy-five percent what we got here is somebody who shot him because . . . he wanted to try out his gun on a human being. You know what I’m saying?”
“Unfortunately, I do,” Virgil said. “But you better pray that’s not the case, because if it is that kind of guy, he’ll be really hard to catch, and he’ll do it again.”
He didn’t say it, but at the back of his head he clicked back to the earlier thought about Trippton’s underbelly. Given even the little that he knew—newspaper reporter, pill head, what looked like a pretty efficient murder of a man not well liked, who patronized prostitutes, even if they were nice girls—he had a feeling that the killing wasn’t random.
—
THEY WALKED up the road and spent fifteen minutes looking for brass, but didn’t find any: the conclusion was, the shells had been ejected into the killer’s vehicle. Alewort said he’d walk a few deputies back into the woods, to look around obvious sniping stations, but he didn’t think they’d find anything.
They were walking back to the cars when a deputy called, “Hey.” They turned, and he was pointing into the gravel in the middle of the road. “Here’s one. A shell.”
They went to look, and found a crushed .223 shell. They scuffed around in the gravel for a few minutes and found another one. Virgil said, “The car came up in front of him, and the guy stopped, stepped out of his car, and shot him in the back,” Virgil said. “Treat those shells carefully—we might still get a print or DNA off them.”
—
THEIR NEXT STOP was Conley’s trailer, which sat in a rough patch of dirt at the edge of a hill, with oak trees on three sides and a cornfield on the other; a pretty site, with an opening through the trees down into the valley below. An old tire swing hung from one of the oaks, but looked as though it hadn’t been swung in for years.
A car sat in the circle of dirt, a ten-year-old Subaru Legacy station wagon. They opened it with a key from a key ring found in Conley’s pants pocket, looked inside, and found an extensive collection of road maps, a few unpaid bills, four crumpled white bakery bags with no bakery inside, two ice scrapers, one broken, and an empty, dusty Old Thompson American Whiskey bottle in the one-pint size.
Alewort examined the bottle and said, “I didn’t know he’d fallen that low.”
Nothing in the car suggested a reason for an assassination. They were closing it up when a sheriff’s car rolled into the yard, and a deputy got out: “Talked to Vike,” he said. “He thought Conley was off on a toot—hadn’t heard from him for a few days, and was going to come up and look around for him, but hadn’t gotten around to it.”
“All right,” Purdy said. “Though it’s a long time not to be more curious.”
“He said Conley was gone for more than a week on a couple occasions, and always came back,” the deputy said. “And he’d started drinking again, after being off booze for a good while.”
“Loose way to run a business,” Virgil said.
The deputy said, “Vike told me that they were running ahead on copy, and he really didn’t need more until next week.”
—
WHEN THEY FINISHED with the deputy, Virgil, Purdy, and Alewort walked over to the trailer and as Alewort opened the door, he said, “Now, I want y’all to keep your hands off the stuff inside: I need to process it, unless it’s something that just can’t wait.”
The interior was not well kept, but wasn’t a complete shambles, either. They went through it, with Alewort opening a few cabinets at Virgil’s request—he used a screwdriver with a tip that had been bent ninety degrees, and filed as thin as a razor blade. The tool allowed him to open the cabinets without touching or disturbing anything, and Virgil decided he needed a tool just like it.
One of the cabinets was lockable, but unlocked. Inside, one of the cheaper Canon DSLR cameras sat on a book, with a couple of lens cases stacked behind it. Virgil noticed the book title—an explanation of the latest Macintosh operating system. “Do the camera right away—I want to look at the memory card,” he told Alewort.
“Hell, just take it—we’re not gonna get anything off it,” Alewort said.
Virgil thought that himself, so he took the camera and slung it over his shoulder. On the way out, he noticed another thing that he hadn’t seen on the way in—sitting on a kitchen chair, half under the table, was a plastic computer stand, of the kind used to lift a laptop to eye level, while the user typed on a keyboard at hip level. Virgil wouldn’t even have known what it was, if he hadn’t once had one himself. He reached under the edge of the kitchen table and felt an under-desk keyboard tray. He pulled it out and found a Logitech wireless keyboard and wireless mouse; the keyboard was a Mac version.
“What?” Purdy asked.
“He was home from work, and went for a run, but didn’t bring his laptop home. At the same time, he has a pretty complete workstation here. That’s . . . odd.”
“Probably left it at work,” Purdy said. “Ask Vike about it.”
“Mmmm.” Virgil thought, Vike.
“Wouldn’t have an Internet connection out here—no cable, and the only satellite dish is for TV,” Alewort said.
They moved back outside, not to mess up the place any more than they already had, and Virgil told Purdy, “I’ll get in touch with the people on the list. You should send a couple deputies around to talk to neighbors, see if any of them heard gunfire in the last few days.”
“I’ll do that,” Purdy said. “Call me when you get done with the interviews, and we’ll trade
information.”
Before he left, Virgil gave Purdy and Alewort a lecture on tires and tire swings.
“You see this?” he asked. “You know what this is?”
“A tire swing?” Alewort guessed.
“Good guess, but wrong,” Virgil said. “It’s a mosquito hatchery. If you were to hire a really expensive engineer to design a mosquito hatchery, he’d spend a couple million bucks and come up with a used tire. They are sturdy, they are protective—no mosquito fish, no purple martins getting in, no bats—they collect water, and because they’re black, they absorb the sun’s rays and keep the water warmer than it might otherwise be. Unless you’re in the middle of a drought, you cannot find a tire laying out on a riverbank or hanging from a tree that doesn’t have water inside it, and mosquitoes.”
“Well . . . thank you for that,” Purdy said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
—
BACK IN HIS TRUCK, Virgil hauled his laptop out of the back, plugged in the memory card, called up the Lightroom program. Lightroom began loading the contents of the card, and a moment later Virgil was looking at eighty photographs of a computer screen with a different bunch of numbers on each of them, but nothing that identified where it was from, or what the numbers meant. Johnson’s office sawmill was only about a mile away, and he had a decent-quality printer, so Virgil drove over and walked into the office.
Johnson was out in the woods, but his girlfriend, Clarice, was there, and she made prints of the photos: “That’s an Excel spreadsheet, but I can’t tell you what’s on it. It’s about expendables. The codes will go out to the various products. The last part might be diesel fuel.”
Virgil looked down at the meaningless lists and asked, “How’d you figure that out?”
“Because there’s a category called DF, and then there’s some numbers on the right which is about what we pay for wholesale diesel fuel for the trucks,” she said. “Maybe a little higher, but close.”
Virgil underlined the DF category and Clarice, leaning over the counter, tapped one of the photos—“He was being sneaky about it. You never did say who took these.”