They were back at the cars an hour and a half after they left. Gomez said that the watchers would be dropped off after dark in the evening, and before dawn in the morning. And, he said, they had another asset.
“It’s considered kinda top secret, but I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t go shooting any shotguns up in the sky.”
“You gotta drone?”
“Shhhh . . .”
—
THEN, AS OFTEN HAPPENED on sophisticated, hot-running, high-energy investigations, nothing happened for four days.
Rather, something happened, but only after Virgil did a lot of fishing, talked on the phone to Frankie, went to a 3-D archery range with Johnson, and tried to avoid phone calls from Davenport, in which he was not always successful—but nothing related to his two separate cases.
During the first three days, he kept trying to spot a drone, but never did; Gomez reported that the barking dogs were definitely on the south hill, that the dogs sounded large, and that there were quite a few of them. So Johnson had been wrong about the location.
On the fourth day, two skaters who took their boards out to County A to challenge the big downhill east of Clancy Conley’s cabin spotted his body in the ditch on the side of the road.
The sheriff called Virgil, and Virgil took off for the crime scene. On the way, Davenport called. “I’m on the way,” Virgil said, before Davenport could say anything.
And after he’d rung off, it occurred to Virgil that life was becoming complicated. He was juggling a dognapping ring, a meth lab investigation, and a murder. Trippton, it seemed, had a little darker underbelly than he’d been prepared for. He’d better have a serious talk with Davenport about it, sooner rather than later.
—
SHERIFF PURDY and four deputies were waiting at the ditch where Conley had landed. Conley’s body was already inside a black body bag, although the bag had not yet been zipped up. Virgil spent no time looking at Conley’s face, because a face that had spent four days in a wet ditch in the middle of August was not an attractive sight; he did spend a few seconds contemplating the exit wounds on Conley’s chest.
One of the deputies, whose name was Paul Alewort, and who did crime-scene processing, said, “Shot three times in the back. We hauled him out of there because there wasn’t a single damn thing we’d get out of that ditch that would mean anything. Only thing that was really unexpected when we pulled him out was a ‘clunk’ sound when we put him on the bag. I looked, and he was packing a revolver, an old .38, six rounds. We bagged it.”
“Maybe he was worried about something,” Virgil said, looking at the ditch. “Find any brass from the shooter?”
“Haven’t really started looking yet,” Alewort said.
Virgil said, “If he was running up the hill, and was shot by one guy in a car or truck, coming up from behind him, the shells would have ejected into the truck. So you won’t find any brass. If he was running down the hill, and was shot in the back by a guy who was coming toward him, and stopped to shoot him in the back, then the shells will be on the road up ahead a ways. Unless he was shot by a P6 or P38 or a mirror-image .45, which would be wonderful, because they’d probably be the only ones for a hundred miles around, and somebody would know about them. Those are the two choices, unless you believe there were two men in the vehicle, and the passenger did the shooting.”
“What if it was somebody in the woods who ambushed him?” Purdy asked.
“Probably not,” Virgil said. “Looks to me like the bullets came straight through. If somebody was shooting from the side, the bullets would have come out on the far side of his chest.”