“You’ve gotten a little testy since this morning,” Sawyer said.
“Yeah, well…” He gestured at the truck.
Kerns was sprawled faceup across the passenger-side seat, his legs bent awkwardly backward into the foot well. One eye was a mass of dried blood, and the blood had poured out of the hole and down his face. He looked worse than Bacon had. Something about missing eyes, Virgil thought with a shudder. A small-frame .38 caliber hammerless revolver lay on the seat next to his leg.
While Kerns was on the passenger seat, a bullet hole went out the driver’s-side window, and the window was spattered with blood and shards of bone. All of the body tissue had dried: Kerns had been dead for a while.
“When do you think he was shot?”
She shook her head: “Last night? Seems like a good bet.”
Virgil turned back to Purdy and said, “We’re both thinking the same thing. Somebody shot him. That’s no suicide.”
Purdy said, “We’ve got to stop this shit.”
Virgil nodded and said, “The guy who shot him was inside the truck, probably in the passenger seat. Kerns was either talking to him or turned his face to him just as the killer pulled the trigger, and that knocked the hole in the window. The killer dragged Kerns into the passenger seat, then ran around to the other side, got in, drove the truck here, and walked away.”
“That’s what we think,” Sawyer said. “Since the killer was in both seats, there’ll be DNA. We’ll sample everything in sight.”
Purdy said, “Kerns lived by himself. We’ve got a car outside his house, but we haven’t been inside it yet.”
“Let’s go over there, then.… But give me a minute.” Virgil got a flashlight from his truck and looked through the heavily smoked windows on Kerns’s camper-back. Kerns had packed up, ready to run — two big suitcases, a duffel bag, and a half-filled plastic garbage bag lay in the back. The garbage bag interested Virgil.
Virgil said to Sawyer, “Since the back is isolated from the front, where the shooting happened, maybe we could open the back. I want to look in that garbage bag.”
“The keys are in the ignition, but I don’t want to touch them, because the killer had to use them, at least to turn the engine off,” Sawyer said.
“You got a pry bar?” Virgil asked Purdy, looking at the lock on the camper-back doors. “This lock isn’t too much.”
“Be right back,” Alewort said.
He came trotting back a moment later with a crowbar, and after some screwing around in which Alewort tried not to do much damage, Jenkins took the bar from him, jammed it in the crack between the door and the frame, and yanked the door open, breaking the lock loose. “There you go.”
Virgil took some vinyl gloves from Sawyer and used them to pick up the end of the garbage bag. The video camera was inside.
“Excellent,” he said. But when he pulled it out, the memory card was gone. “Shoot. Okay, guys, the number one thing we’re looking for now is the memory card.” He hastily corrected himself: “The memory cards, they’re CompactFlash cards, two of them. They’re red and black, I don’t know, maybe an inch and a half square. We find them, we break everything open.”
“Could be in his pockets,” Alewort suggested.
“We’ll look there first,” Sawyer said.
Alewort got some tape and taped the door shut, and Virgil said to Purdy, “Let’s go look at his house. Maybe the cards are there.”
“Not likely. Probably trashed them.”
“Gotta look.”
Virgil got Kerns’s address from Purdy, but on the way out to the highway, stopped at Wendy McComb’s house. She came out and leaned in the truck window and said, “So somebody shot Randy Kerns?”
“That’s what we believe,” Virgil said. “You hear anybody going past here last night or early this morning?”
“Yes. I already told the sheriff. Last night, late — after midnight — and it sounded heavy, like Randy’s truck. I listened for it coming back out, but it never did. Didn’t hear anything else, either. No shot, or anything. The thing is, you wouldn’t come down here at night unless you were coming back out the same way. The rest of the road just wanders around past nothing.”
“I’ve been down it,” Virgil said.
“Sometimes kids go down to the turnout to park, but that’s not common,” McComb said. “Too dark and spooky down there. The only ones we usually see down there are catfishermen. They’ll haul their jon boats down there, in their pickups, and throw them in the river. But that didn’t sound so much like a pickup last night — they usually rattle. And it was too late — the catfishermen are usually coming in then, not going out.”
“You never saw the truck?”
“Never did. It went past, and that was all.”
“You didn’t have any visitors at the time?” Virgil asked.
“Nope. Just me. And my gun, of course.”
“You keep the gun close, Wendy,” Virgil said. “Just in case the killer starts to worry that you might be a witness.”
As they drove out to the highway, Jenkins said, “That young lady…?”
Virgil said, “Yeah, she is. Conley, the first guy killed, was one of her clients. He left a message with her. That’s why I wound up looking in that tire swing.”
Jenkins said, “Good detectin’, there, Flowers.”
They no longer needed a warrant for Kerns’s house, since nobody else lived there, and Kerns had been murdered. Virgil was most interested in the garbage — was there any possibility that he’d simply thrown away the memory card from the camera? With Alewort’s help, he dug through every wastebasket and garbage sack in the house, as well as the garbage can in back, and found nothing.
“It was always a pretty thin possibility,” Shrake said. “It was the one thing that could hang him for sure.”
“Didn’t get rid of the camera,” Virgil said. “You’d think he would have gotten rid of them both at the same time.”
“Maybe Bea will find something in his shirt pocket.”
But Bea didn’t.
It was nearly six o’clock before Virgil, Shrake, and Jenkins walked out of Kerns’s house for the last time. They stopped to see how the work was going on Kerns’s truck, but again, it would all come down to lab work — there was nothing obvious lying about.
“No hope in tracing the pistol — or very damn little,” Sawyer told them. “I checked, and it’s seventy years old. It’s an old military model from World War Two. The shells themselves are probably twenty years old.”
“How about the keys?”
“Wiped — or the killer was wearing gloves, or used a hankie or something.”
Virgil sighed: “Why can’t this be easier?”
They were still talking when his cell phone rang. The BCA duty officer. “A kid name Muddy just called, and said you should call right back. He said you have the number.”
21
Virgil found the Ruff phone number on his cell phone’s “recents” list, punched it up, and Muddy picked up on the first ring. “Dad’s over in La Crosse with Dog Butt, and I was sort of out walking around, and guess what? D. Wayne Sharf is back.”
“Where?” Virgil asked.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on, because I was inside practicing when he got back, but now he and somebody else, a woman, are sneaking in and out of his house. I think they’re taking stuff out.”
The house had been sealed by the DEA, but “sealed by the DEA” meant that there was some tape on the doors. Everything Sharf owned, aside from a few pounds of methamphetamine, was still inside.