* * *
—
The house to the left of Van Den Berg’s was vacant. An elderly man answered the door of the house to the right, blinking through Coke-bottle glasses, and Virgil identified himself, and asked if the old man had noticed any activity around Van Den Berg’s house the night before.
“What happened, somebody kill him? Or did he kill somebody else?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you’re that cop who’s been investigating the murders . . . So which is it?” the old man asked.
“Somebody killed him,” Virgil said. “Stood at the front door and shot him in the heart. Did you hear a shot about eleven o’clock last night?”
“I don’t know, but something woke me up. Don’t know what it was. I don’t sleep so good anymore, so I was pissed off about that. I was awake when he drove away, and I was still awake when he came back. His goddamn garage door sounds like a cement truck making a dump.”
“You heard him go and then come back?”
“That’s right. I sleep downstairs now, because, if I sleep upstairs, one of these days I’d come tumbling down ass over teakettle, and that’d be it for me. I’d lay there and suffer until I died of thirst, since nobody comes to visit me anymore. They’re all dead, anybody who might come. Anyway”—he scratched his bald head—“what was I saying? Oh, yeah. I sleep downstairs, so I not only heard him but saw his headlights sweep across the walls.”
“And that was about eleven o’clock?”
“Damned if I know. It was dark. I laid there for a long time awake, and it didn’t get light, so it was sometime in the middle of the night.”
“Think anybody else might have heard the shot?”
“Well, Louise Remington lives across the street. If anybody had her nose between the curtains, she’d be the one.”
* * *
—
Louise Remington, who appeared to be as old as the old man, slept at the far end of her house, away from the street. Like the old man, she’d been awakened by a sound she couldn’t exactly identify, but it was almost exactly 11 o’clock. “I looked at my clock when I woke up. Later on, I heard a car go out, and then come back not long after that, but I didn’t look at my clock. I read my magazine for an hour or so, and the car came back while I was reading, so it wasn’t gone long.”
* * *
—
The houses on both sides of Remington were lived in, but nobody was home at either. Virgil thought, If the car both came and went sometime after 11 o’clock, then the killer was probably driving it.
He walked back across the street to Van Den Berg’s, put on another set of vinyl gloves, lifted the garage door, lifted the back hatch of the Jeep, and immediately saw a small, thread-like line of blood that was feathered on one side, as if something had been dragged over it when it had already partially dried.
Something like a body. Maybe the crime scene crew would actually find something useful, Virgil thought.
If the shooter used Van Den Berg’s Jeep, then he probably walked to the house. And he hadn’t known Van Den Berg well enough to know about the ankle monitor. That was the first bare inkling of good news: a beginning picture of the killer. He closed the Jeep’s hatch and the garage door, and called Sawyer again.
“Where are you?”
“Turning off I-90. We should be there in ten minutes,” she said.
“Good. I’ve been talking to neighbors, and I have reason to believe that Van Den Berg’s own car was used to move his body. We need to process the car, and the sooner, the better. This is the first thing we’ve got that I believe the killer touched, other than the body.”
“You’ve been messing with my crime scene some more, haven’t you?”
“Of course not,” Virgil lied. “I’ve been too busy interviewing the neighbors, and they say they heard the garage door go up and down about the time Van Den Berg was killed and moved. When you get here . . .”
“We’ll look first thing,” she said.
* * *
—
Sawyer and her partner, Baldwin, got out and looked at the garage door, then Baldwin asked Virgil, “Tell the truth. Did you touch that door?”
“Yeah, but I was wearing gloves.”
“Still, wouldn’t have done a lot of good for any fingerprints on it,” Baldwin said.
“You know how many times prints have helped me with a case? I can count the times on an imaginary finger,” Virgil said.
“Be quiet, and get the door open,” Sawyer said.
Inside the garage, the two crime scene specialists did a walk-around before touching the car, then Baldwin said, “Whoa!” and, “Bea, I think Virgil was telling the truth, for a change. He didn’t mess with the crime scene.”
“How so?”
“Because if he’d messed with the crime scene, he probably would have seen this .223 shell on the floor and picked it up.”
Virgil said, “What?” and he and Sawyer walked around the car and looked where Baldwin was pointing: a brass .223 shell had rolled against the garage’s outer wall. “Let me get my camera,” Baldwin said.
* * *
—
Five minutes later, Sawyer had inserted a five-inch steel turkey lacer into the end of the shell to pick it up, and they examined the case under a bright beam of an LED flashlight. “Nothing I can see,” she said.
Virgil said, “There’s a partial.”
“There’s no partial.”
“Yes, there is, and I’m going to put the word out that I’ve got a partial,” Virgil said. “And that I bagged it, and that I’m carrying it around town with me.”
Sawyer said, “That, mmm, could be dangerous if the killer . . .”
“I need something to happen,” Virgil said.
“You might want to wear a vest under that T-shirt,” Baldwin suggested. “This guy is supposedly a long-distance shooter.”
Virgil ignored the advice. “Listen, you guys got your fuming wand with you?”
“Yes, but we don’t have a print yet,” Baldwin said.
“You will,” Virgil said.
Virgil drove to Bob Martin’s house, the elderly gunsmith. He was home. “I need an empty .223 cartridge, and I need you to keep your mouth shut about me needing it,” Virgil said.