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.”