“Oh, I wouldn’t exactly say that,” Lee Greenwood protested.
“The only reason you wouldn’t is because you don’t have the sense God gave the rear end of a mule.” There was a small gate between the desks and the narrow front of the room. Franklin pushed it open and motioned Gregor inside. “Come take a look at the world’s most expensively outfitted hick cop shop. We got computers. We got labs. We got nationwide information hookups. We got anything you care to name, and the day those two women died I was sitting here feeling sorry for myself because we never got to use any of it. I’m seventy-two years old and I still don’t know a damn thing about a damn thing.”
Gregor looked around at the interior of the office, at the desks and the computer terminals, at the paper scattered around. What this police department needed was people. A dispatcher. A clerk. Somebody to take care of the paperwork housekeeping. He drew out a desk chair and sat down in it.
“Do you have a mobile crime unit?” he asked Franklin Morrison.
Franklin Morrison laughed. “I’ve got an MCU any station in New York City would die for. I’ve got a lab—”
“A lab?”
“Set up for fiber analysis, earth analysis, I don’t know what. Got this kid, Mary Dempsey’s oldest, goes to MIT on scholarship now. When I need something done, I pay him and he comes down and does it.”
“Do you need the lab often?” Gregor couldn’t imagine Bethlehem as a hotbed of crime. He couldn’t imagine Bethlehem as a hotbed of anything, except the terminally colonial.
But Franklin Morrison was nodding. “Traffic accidents,” he was saying. “And at least one outbreak of cabin fever every February, some asshole gets snowed in up in the hills and gets tanked up and decides life isn’t worth living. We could ask the staties to run the tests for us, but what for?”
“Rather not ask the staties for anything,” Lee Greenwood put in.
Franklin Morrison scratched his head. “Of course, sometimes the staties are useful. Like with these shootings here. I think we’d have had no end of trouble with those if we hadn’t had the staties standing by, ready to step in. They took the heat, if you get what I mean.”
“They did the tests and they made the pronouncements and whatever they said, it wasn’t your fault.” Gregor nodded. “But I’m surprised. I’d have thought you’d want to use that lab of yours when you had the chance.”
“We did,” Lee Greenwood said.
Gregor raised an eyebrow at Franklin Morrison and watched the chief blush.
“We didn’t tell anybody about it,” Franklin Morrison said, “but we ran the same tests here the staties ran down-state. Just to be sure, if you get what I mean.”
“Just to be sure of what?” Gregor demanded.
Lee Greenwood jumped in. “Franklin thought the state police were leaping to conclusions before they had any real evidence,” he said, “and I know what he meant, because I sort of felt that way, too. They hardly looked at anything at all before they decided we had hunting accidents.”
Gregor looked from Lee Greenwood to Franklin Morrison and paused. “Did you find anything different from what they found? Did you find any reason to doubt their conclusions?”
“No,” Lee Greenwood said.
Franklin Morrison had been standing near the gate he’d let Gregor in through. Now he pulled out a chair and sat down, moving his bulk carefully, and propped his feet up on an open desk drawer. In some men, that would have constituted attitude. In Franklin Morrison, Gregor thought, it was fatigue. Franklin Morrison was an old man. His feet hurt.
“Tisha Verek,” Franklin said, “was shot at nine-forty-one on the morning of Monday, December second, with a Browning .22-caliber semiautomatic Grade I rifle we now know belonged to Stuart Ketchum, son of Dinah Ketchum, who was also shot that morning but with a Marlin Model 70P Papoose—which also happens to be a semiautomatic and also happens to be a twenty-two, but a twenty-two long. Meaning the ammunition would not have been interchangeable. Anyway, both women were hit twice, once in the shoulder and once in the neck. We have a time for Tisha Verek because her husband says he saw her fall. We don’t have one for Dinah Ketchum because she wasn’t found until hours later, but we do have her schedule for the day, and the possibility is that she was shot close to the same time Tisha Verek was.”
“Are twenty-twos what people use to shoot deer?” Gregor asked.
“They’re a little light, but women use them sometimes. And flatlanders will use anything. We had the kid run the tests and the staties ran the tests, but I knew that Browning bullet just by looking at it. Stuart has a whole collection of guns out there. He puts in a lot of target practice and he likes to have company.”