He had figured out where the rifle would be because of something Demp had said about impacts and trajectories, and also because it was the only solution that made sense. A rifle isn’t a handgun. A handgun can be stored in a pocket and walked around in public with impunity. Since no one can see and no one can know, no one will suspect. Gregor couldn’t imagine anyone tromping around the park last night with a Browning .22-caliber semiautomatic Grade I rifle. Dozens of people would have seen him and commented on him, even if there had never been a shooting. Someone would have called a cop. The only explanation that made sense was that the rifle was never out in the open at all, and that meant looking for places it could be hidden. Gregor’s first impulse had been to look in the bleachers, under the benches, in the stands. Then he had realized that that explanation was almost as bad as the first one. What was the killer going to do, whip this big heavy rifle out from under his seat, stand up in full view of everybody and aim? Gregor thought he hated guns with good reason, one having nothing to do with the noise they made and the harm they caused. They were so damn complicated. When a killer used poison, it was easy. Drop the poison in a glass in full sight of thirty people in the lobby of an opera hall during intermission, and nobody noticed a thing.
“I kept going around and around the park in my mind,” Gregor told Bennis the next morning, going around and around her room while she sat on the antique wedding quilt that covered her bed, pinning her hair to the top of her head, “and the more I did the more I realized the whole thing would have been impossible if the rifle wasn’t already on the premises before the Nativity play ever started. For a while I thought it would have had to have been there before any of the performances started, back a couple of weeks ago, but it was definitely a bullet from Stuart Ketchum’s gun they found—”
“How could you know already it was a bullet from Stuart Ketchum’s gun?” Bennis asked, stuffing her mouth with rippled hairpins. Gregor had never been able to understand how she could speak so clearly with her mouth full of pins like that. “Don’t you have to run tests before you know what gun that bullet belonged to?”
“To be absolutely sure, of course we do,” Gregor nodded, “but I’m relying on local expertise, as the old Behavioral Sciences field book used to put it. Stuart Ketchum marks his ammunition. The spent shells had his mark.”
“Why does he do that?”
“It’s got something to do with target competitions. Don’t ask me. At any rate, there that was, so I was left with the strong possibility that the rifle had to have been put there later than I wanted it to have been, since Tisha Verek was killed with Stuart Ketchum’s rifle and that was the morning of the first day of the first week of performances of the play—”
“Well, that was before the play started,” Bennis said.
“It wasn’t enough before,” Gregor told her. “By that Monday, the park had to have had at least periodic intrusions of people, wandering around getting one thing or another done. That was certainly true yesterday afternoon, when I’ve decided the rifle must actually have been put there, assuming, as I still insist on assuming, that our killer was looking to shoot Gemma Bury in particular, and not just any stray townsperson attending the Nativity play.”
Bennis’s hair was now securely on top of her head and her mouth was still full of pins. She took the pins out and began putting them back in a small metal box that had once contained Sucrets.
“That’s a really terrible thought,” she said. “I mean that somebody could be wandering around just offing people for the hell of it. Do you think that could be true?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He’s going to too much trouble,” Gregor explained. “I don’t mean with things like hiding the rifle in those bushes. That’s premeditation, that’s all right. You get it with serial killers and you get it with the more normal kind. I mean with Tisha Verek. All the way out there on the Delaford Road. What for? If his only concern is to kill somebody in town, why not pick an old lady off on Main Street?”
“Less chance of getting caught?” Bennis supplied helpfully.
“More. Harder to get away. If you shoot at somebody on Main Street, you can ditch the rifle and hop into the nearest store, and if you’ve picked your spot and your time, nobody’s seen you and nobody’s going to suspect.”
“Because he stole Stuart Ketchum’s rifle,” Bennis said. “That was out there and then he killed the first person he came across after he got hold of it.”