Masilla noted the presence of Viking Laughton and Randolph Kerns during some of the meetings with school officials. The discussion was moderated by Rogers, who tried to keep responsibility as fuzzy as possible, while delivering the goods, which was required by the deal.
They were still hard at it when Virgil’s phone rang. He glanced at it, intending to let the call go, but saw it was from Buchanan County’s Sheriff Purdy. He said, “Gotta take this. Let’s recess for one minute.”
He answered while he was headed for the hall. Purdy said, “We found Randy Kerns.”
“Where is he?”
“Sitting in his truck, off Thunderbolt Road.”
“When you say sitting . . .” That sounded bad.
“Looks like he shot himself,” Purdy said. “Bullet went through his head and the driver’s-side window.”
“Ah . . . God.”
“You coming down?”
“I’m up in Winona. I’ll be down as fast as I can get there. Don’t touch anything.”
“We knew you’d say that, so we haven’t,” Purdy said. “I see a couple of gun suicides every year, somewhere in the county. This one is somewhat unusual.”
“Why is that?”
“Never seen a guy shoot himself in the eye.”
—
VIRGIL EXCUSED HIMSELF, Jenkins, and Shrake from the meeting: “We will resume soon.”
Rogers asked, “When?”
“Don’t know. We have another murder related to the first three. That’s four murders,” Virgil said. “There’s not going to be much judicial mercy here. If I were you, I’d try to tighten up that deal with the AG.”
—
WHEN THEY GOT BACK to Trippton, they went down Thunderbolt Road past the town prostitute’s house—she was standing on her porch, looking down the road, and when she saw Virgil’s truck coming, pointed him farther on down. There was a turnout where the road bent closest to the Mississippi, a lovers’ lane, perhaps, and three sheriff’s cars were parked in the dirt circle, along with a couple of unmarked trucks. Purdy was there, talking with Alewort, his crime-scene guy, and they were all facing a narrow overgrown track that apparently led down to the river. Virgil could see the grille of a truck down through the brush, and Beatrice Sawyer, his own crime-scene investigator, looking in the passenger-side window.
Alewort said, “We didn’t touch, just called Beatrice in, except that I was worried about blood and bone and brain tissue soaking further into the dirt outside the truck, where it’d be harder to recover, so I thought I’d go ahead and start that process.”
“That’s fine,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, well, it was pretty interesting, is what it was, just like that shot-in-the-eye thing,” Alewort said. “There was no blood or bone or brain matter. Not that I could find. Or Beatrice, either. And there should have been, there’s plenty of it on the window, around the gunshot hole.”
“So what you’re saying is,” Jenkins offered, “this guy Kerns shot himself through the eye, blowing his brains out, and then drove over here from somewhere else.”
“That would be one interpretation,” Alewort said.
Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake walked down the track. Virgil said, “Hey, Bea.”
Sawyer said, “What with that Black Hole case, and now your two here, I’m getting pretty goddamned tired of looking at dead bodies.”