Deadline(23)
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THEY WALKED up the road and spent fifteen minutes looking for brass, but didn’t find any: the conclusion was, the shells had been ejected into the killer’s vehicle. Alewort said he’d walk a few deputies back into the woods, to look around obvious sniping stations, but he didn’t think they’d find anything.
They were walking back to the cars when a deputy called, “Hey.” They turned, and he was pointing into the gravel in the middle of the road. “Here’s one. A shell.”
They went to look, and found a crushed .223 shell. They scuffed around in the gravel for a few minutes and found another one. Virgil said, “The car came up in front of him, and the guy stopped, stepped out of his car, and shot him in the back,” Virgil said. “Treat those shells carefully—we might still get a print or DNA off them.”
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THEIR NEXT STOP was Conley’s trailer, which sat in a rough patch of dirt at the edge of a hill, with oak trees on three sides and a cornfield on the other; a pretty site, with an opening through the trees down into the valley below. An old tire swing hung from one of the oaks, but looked as though it hadn’t been swung in for years.
A car sat in the circle of dirt, a ten-year-old Subaru Legacy station wagon. They opened it with a key from a key ring found in Conley’s pants pocket, looked inside, and found an extensive collection of road maps, a few unpaid bills, four crumpled white bakery bags with no bakery inside, two ice scrapers, one broken, and an empty, dusty Old Thompson American Whiskey bottle in the one-pint size.
Alewort examined the bottle and said, “I didn’t know he’d fallen that low.”
Nothing in the car suggested a reason for an assassination. They were closing it up when a sheriff’s car rolled into the yard, and a deputy got out: “Talked to Vike,” he said. “He thought Conley was off on a toot—hadn’t heard from him for a few days, and was going to come up and look around for him, but hadn’t gotten around to it.”
“All right,” Purdy said. “Though it’s a long time not to be more curious.”
“He said Conley was gone for more than a week on a couple occasions, and always came back,” the deputy said. “And he’d started drinking again, after being off booze for a good while.”
“Loose way to run a business,” Virgil said.
The deputy said, “Vike told me that they were running ahead on copy, and he really didn’t need more until next week.”
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WHEN THEY FINISHED with the deputy, Virgil, Purdy, and Alewort walked over to the trailer and as Alewort opened the door, he said, “Now, I want y’all to keep your hands off the stuff inside: I need to process it, unless it’s something that just can’t wait.”
The interior was not well kept, but wasn’t a complete shambles, either. They went through it, with Alewort opening a few cabinets at Virgil’s request—he used a screwdriver with a tip that had been bent ninety degrees, and filed as thin as a razor blade. The tool allowed him to open the cabinets without touching or disturbing anything, and Virgil decided he needed a tool just like it.
One of the cabinets was lockable, but unlocked. Inside, one of the cheaper Canon DSLR cameras sat on a book, with a couple of lens cases stacked behind it. Virgil noticed the book title—an explanation of the latest Macintosh operating system. “Do the camera right away—I want to look at the memory card,” he told Alewort.
“Hell, just take it—we’re not gonna get anything off it,” Alewort said.
Virgil thought that himself, so he took the camera and slung it over his shoulder. On the way out, he noticed another thing that he hadn’t seen on the way in—sitting on a kitchen chair, half under the table, was a plastic computer stand, of the kind used to lift a laptop to eye level, while the user typed on a keyboard at hip level. Virgil wouldn’t even have known what it was, if he hadn’t once had one himself. He reached under the edge of the kitchen table and felt an under-desk keyboard tray. He pulled it out and found a Logitech wireless keyboard and wireless mouse; the keyboard was a Mac version.