Deadline(112)

            “We’ll look there first,” Sawyer said.

            Alewort got some tape and taped the door shut, and Virgil said to Purdy, “Let’s go look at his house. Maybe the cards are there.”

            “Not likely. Probably trashed them.”

            “Gotta look.”

            —

            VIRGIL GOT KERNS’S ADDRESS from Purdy, but on the way out to the highway, stopped at Wendy McComb’s house. She came out and leaned in the truck window and said, “So somebody shot Randy Kerns?”

            “That’s what we believe,” Virgil said. “You hear anybody going past here last night or early this morning?”

            “Yes. I already told the sheriff. Last night, late—after midnight—and it sounded heavy, like Randy’s truck. I listened for it coming back out, but it never did. Didn’t hear anything else, either. No shot, or anything. The thing is, you wouldn’t come down here at night unless you were coming back out the same way. The rest of the road just wanders around past nothing.”

            “I’ve been down it,” Virgil said.

            “Sometimes kids go down to the turnout to park, but that’s not common,” McComb said. “Too dark and spooky down there. The only ones we usually see down there are catfishermen. They’ll haul their jon boats down there, in their pickups, and throw them in the river. But that didn’t sound so much like a pickup last night—they usually rattle. And it was too late—the catfishermen are usually coming in then, not going out.”

            “You never saw the truck?”

            “Never did. It went past, and that was all.”

            “You didn’t have any visitors at the time?” Virgil asked.

            “Nope. Just me. And my gun, of course.”

            “You keep the gun close, Wendy,” Virgil said. “Just in case the killer starts to worry that you might be a witness.”

            As they drove out to the highway, Jenkins said, “That young lady . . . ?”

            Virgil said, “Yeah, she is. Conley, the first guy killed, was one of her clients. He left a message with her. That’s why I wound up looking in that tire swing.”

            Jenkins said, “Good detectin’, there, Flowers.”

            —

            THEY NO LONGER needed a warrant for Kerns’s house, since nobody else lived there, and Kerns had been murdered. Virgil was most interested in the garbage—was there any possibility that he’d simply thrown away the memory card from the camera? With Alewort’s help, he dug through every wastebasket and garbage sack in the house, as well as the garbage can in back, and found nothing.

            “It was always a pretty thin possibility,” Shrake said. “It was the one thing that could hang him for sure.”

            “Didn’t get rid of the camera,” Virgil said. “You’d think he would have gotten rid of them both at the same time.”

            “Maybe Bea will find something in his shirt pocket.”

            But Bea didn’t.

            —

            IT WAS NEARLY six o’clock before Virgil, Shrake, and Jenkins walked out of Kerns’s house for the last time. They stopped to see how the work was going on Kerns’s truck, but again, it would all come down to lab work—there was nothing obvious lying about.

            “No hope in tracing the pistol—or very damn little,” Sawyer told them. “I checked, and it’s seventy years old. It’s an old military model from World War Two. The shells themselves are probably twenty years old.”