A Stillness in Bethlehem(87)

“Why not?” Gregor asked.

“Because he knows what he’s doing,” Stuart said. “He was in Nam, too, about two years before I was. Came back with an itch for target practice but not as bad as mine. He’s got the Marlin and about six other rifles including a thirty-ought-six he takes up to Canada hunting. He’d never have left the rifle out there like that. He’d have known better.”

“Where does he keep it?” Gregor asked.

Franklin Morrison answered. “He’s got a rack over his fireplace, just like the ones you see in house magazines. Got a nice house, too, just off Main Street, around the corner from the News and Mail. Local stone.”

“Does he lock the guns in the rack?”

“No,” Franklin said. “Nobody does that kind of thing around here. Nobody gets their things stolen around here as a general rule. Or they didn’t used to.”

“Old Linda Holt has one, too,” Stuart said. “She’s our resident grand old countrywoman. Came up from Boston about twenty years ago and got more native than the natives. She’s seventy-nine. She used to use a Remington Model 7 but it got too much for her.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

“I keep trying to match rifles to the people I saw last night,” Stuart said, “and I just can’t do it. I run one of the food stalls. I was standing right outside the bleachers when the play was over last night, and I must have seen a dozen people I knew. Sharon Morrissey. Amanda Ballard. Betty Heath. Amanda’s shot a rifle or two in her life. She’s come out here with Peter for rifle practice. And I know Sharon Morrissey can shoot because she’s always winning things at the county-fair booths in the summer. As for Betty Heath—I think if you showed her a gun, she’d probably scream.”

“Mmm,” Gregor Demarkian said again.

They were all looking at him. Even Bennis, who should have known better, had her head cocked as if she expected him to produce a pearl of wisdom or the perfect solution to the entire mess, wrapped up in ribbons and tied up in bows. Instead, his mind was caught on a couple of snags.

He stirred in his chair, did his best to sound like a Great Detective with the solution already in hand and a secret agenda to his questions and said, “Are the two things contradictory? The rifle is stashed in a way that no one who knew anything about rifles would stash it—which, for your information, is the same way we found the other rifle stashed last night—anyway, there it is, stashed by an amateur, and there the—the bodies are—hit by someone who must have been familiar with firearms.”

Stuart Ketchum looked startled. “Why?” he demanded.

“Why what?” Gregor asked him.

“Why did he have to be familiar with firearms?”

Now it was Gregor’s turn to be confused. Since it was such a familiar feeling in this case, he didn’t mind. “Because he’s so consistently accurate,” he said. “Always, every time, he hits his victims in exactly the same places.”

“How do you know he’s aiming at those places?” Stuart asked.

Gregor countered. “How do you know he’s not?”

Stuart Ketchum threw up his hands. “Well, hell,” he said. “If he’s so good he can aim and hit the shoulder and the throat every last blasted time, why hit the shoulder and the throat at all? Why not hit the heart? Why not hit the head? The way he’s been going about it, he’s been damned lucky one of his victims hasn’t shown up alive.”

“Now, Stuart,” Franklin Morrison said.

But Stuart Ketchum wasn’t listening. His winter jacket hung from a peg hammered into the wall near the wood stove. He grabbed it, stuffed it under his arm and started out a door at the back.

“Where are you going?” Gregor asked him.

“Show you something,” Stuart Ketchum said. Then he turned back to the room, looked at Bennis and said, “You’ll be perfect. Come on out to the yard.”

“Come on out to the yard and do what?” Bennis asked.

Stuart wasn’t waiting for her, either. He was standing in the back doorway, holding the door open and motioning them all through.





2


They had to go through the gun room to get to the backyard. Gregor looked it over and decided that Stuart Ketchum had been telling the literal truth. If a gun had been missing from this collection, Stuart would have known about it. The guns were not only all in racks, but labeled and sorted according to type and caliber. The military collection took up one wall and each of the guns in it had been secured to the rack with a frame lock. Gregor saw a pair of Mausers that looked old enough, and in good-enough condition, to be worth serious money. He decided that Stuart locked them up less because they were dangerous than because they would be tempting to steal for sale. The other rifles were not locked up, not even now, after one of them had gone missing and been involved in the shooting deaths of two people.