Deadline(22)

            “That sounds right,” Alewort said. “I don’t believe he was shot with a pistol. I’ll leave it to the ME to say for sure, but it looks to me that he was shot with a rifle and hollow points. Lot of damage on his chest. Maybe by somebody who fired a burst. The bullet wounds are in a perfect spaced stripe right across the middle of his back, two inches apart.”

            “You think .223?” Virgil asked.

            “That’s what I’m thinking,” Alewort said. “It’s unlikely we’ll ever recover any of the slugs, but there’s small entries and big exits—a rifle-class weapon, and .223s are a dime a dozen around here.”

            “Anybody selling three-shot-burst conversion kits?”

            Purdy shook his head. “Not that I know. There was a guy in Trippton making silencers a couple of years ago, but the BATF shut him down.”

            “He still around?” Virgil asked.

            “Yeah. He’s selling turkey fryers now.”

            “You can make a living selling turkey fryers?”

            “Never thought about it,” Purdy said. “But off the top of my head, I’d say no. His wife works, though.”

            “I’ll talk to him,” Virgil said. “Who else should I talk to?”

            —

            VIRGIL GOT an exceptionally short list: Buster Gedney, the turkey-fryer salesman; Viking Laughton, Conley’s employer at the Republican-River; Gary Kochinowski, owner of the bar where Conley drank; and Bill Don Fuller, who rented Conley the trailer where he lived.

            “Fact is,” Purdy said, “Conley was not well liked, because he was a drunk and an addict of some kind. A pill head, would be my guess. That made him cranky and aggressive. Every time we busted somebody for anything more than disturbing the peace, he’d be looking around for police misbehavior.”

            “He thought of himself as an investigator?”

            “He did. Nobody else did. He couldn’t investigate his way out of a convenience store. I mean, the guy could fall in a barrel of titties and come out suckin’ his thumb.”

            “Girlfriends?”

            “I heard he’d pay the town prostitute on occasion, but that’s all I know.”

            “Who’s the town prostitute?” Virgil asked.

            Purdy’s eyes shifted away, and he rubbed the side of his nose, as though trying to decide how far he could trust Virgil. Finally he said, “Wendy McComb, but don’t you dare tell her I called her a prostitute, ’cause she’s a nice girl,” Purdy said. “Say you understand that she and Conley were friends.” He thought about it for another moment, then added, “Least he wasn’t queer.”

            Virgil added her to the list in his notebook, along with a description of where she lived, which Purdy said would be better than an address.

            “I’ll tell you what,” Purdy said, scratching his ass and looking around the quiet valley, “I think it’s about seventy-five percent what we got here is somebody who shot him because . . . he wanted to try out his gun on a human being. You know what I’m saying?”

            “Unfortunately, I do,” Virgil said. “But you better pray that’s not the case, because if it is that kind of guy, he’ll be really hard to catch, and he’ll do it again.”

            He didn’t say it, but at the back of his head he clicked back to the earlier thought about Trippton’s underbelly. Given even the little that he knew—newspaper reporter, pill head, what looked like a pretty efficient murder of a man not well liked, who patronized prostitutes, even if they were nice girls—he had a feeling that the killing wasn’t random.