“So go apply at Target, I hear they’re hiring,” Virgil said. He wasn’t much interested in any complaints, given what had happened to the subjects of her research: he thought of Will Bacon stuffed under the stage.
“You’ve gotten a little testy since this morning,” Sawyer said.
“Yeah, well . . .” He gestured at the truck.
Kerns was sprawled faceup across the passenger-side seat, his legs bent awkwardly backward into the foot well. One eye was a mass of dried blood, and the blood had poured out of the hole and down his face. He looked worse than Bacon had. Something about missing eyes, Virgil thought with a shudder. A small-frame .38 caliber hammerless revolver lay on the seat next to his leg.
While Kerns was on the passenger seat, a bullet hole went out the driver’s-side window, and the window was spattered with blood and shards of bone. All of the body tissue had dried: Kerns had been dead for a while.
“When do you think he was shot?”
She shook her head: “Last night? Seems like a good bet.”
Virgil turned back to Purdy and said, “We’re both thinking the same thing. Somebody shot him. That’s no suicide.”
Purdy said, “We’ve got to stop this shit.”
Virgil nodded and said, “The guy who shot him was inside the truck, probably in the passenger seat. Kerns was either talking to him or turned his face to him just as the killer pulled the trigger, and that knocked the hole in the window. The killer dragged Kerns into the passenger seat, then ran around to the other side, got in, drove the truck here, and walked away.”
“That’s what we think,” Sawyer said. “Since the killer was in both seats, there’ll be DNA. We’ll sample everything in sight.”
Purdy said, “Kerns lived by himself. We’ve got a car outside his house, but we haven’t been inside it yet.”
“Let’s go over there, then. . . . But give me a minute.” Virgil got a flashlight from his truck and looked through the heavily smoked windows on Kerns’s camper-back. Kerns had packed up, ready to run—two big suitcases, a duffel bag, and a half-filled plastic garbage bag lay in the back. The garbage bag interested Virgil.
Virgil said to Sawyer, “Since the back is isolated from the front, where the shooting happened, maybe we could open the back. I want to look in that garbage bag.”
“The keys are in the ignition, but I don’t want to touch them, because the killer had to use them, at least to turn the engine off,” Sawyer said.
“You got a pry bar?” Virgil asked Purdy, looking at the lock on the camper-back doors. “This lock isn’t too much.”
“Be right back,” Alewort said.
He came trotting back a moment later with a crowbar, and after some screwing around in which Alewort tried not to do much damage, Jenkins took the bar from him, jammed it in the crack between the door and the frame, and yanked the door open, breaking the lock loose. “There you go.”
Virgil took some vinyl gloves from Sawyer and used them to pick up the end of the garbage bag. The video camera was inside.
“Excellent,” he said. But when he pulled it out, the memory card was gone. “Shoot. Okay, guys, the number one thing we’re looking for now is the memory card.” He hastily corrected himself: “The memory cards, they’re CompactFlash cards, two of them. They’re red and black, I don’t know, maybe an inch and a half square. We find them, we break everything open.”
“Could be in his pockets,” Alewort suggested.