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.”