“What?” Purdy asked.
“He was home from work, and went for a run, but didn’t bring his laptop home. At the same time, he has a pretty complete workstation here. That’s . . . odd.”
“Probably left it at work,” Purdy said. “Ask Vike about it.”
“Mmmm.” Virgil thought, Vike.
“Wouldn’t have an Internet connection out here—no cable, and the only satellite dish is for TV,” Alewort said.
They moved back outside, not to mess up the place any more than they already had, and Virgil told Purdy, “I’ll get in touch with the people on the list. You should send a couple deputies around to talk to neighbors, see if any of them heard gunfire in the last few days.”
“I’ll do that,” Purdy said. “Call me when you get done with the interviews, and we’ll trade information.”
Before he left, Virgil gave Purdy and Alewort a lecture on tires and tire swings.
“You see this?” he asked. “You know what this is?”
“A tire swing?” Alewort guessed.
“Good guess, but wrong,” Virgil said. “It’s a mosquito hatchery. If you were to hire a really expensive engineer to design a mosquito hatchery, he’d spend a couple million bucks and come up with a used tire. They are sturdy, they are protective—no mosquito fish, no purple martins getting in, no bats—they collect water, and because they’re black, they absorb the sun’s rays and keep the water warmer than it might otherwise be. Unless you’re in the middle of a drought, you cannot find a tire laying out on a riverbank or hanging from a tree that doesn’t have water inside it, and mosquitoes.”
“Well . . . thank you for that,” Purdy said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
—
BACK IN HIS TRUCK, Virgil hauled his laptop out of the back, plugged in the memory card, called up the Lightroom program. Lightroom began loading the contents of the card, and a moment later Virgil was looking at eighty photographs of a computer screen with a different bunch of numbers on each of them, but nothing that identified where it was from, or what the numbers meant. Johnson’s office sawmill was only about a mile away, and he had a decent-quality printer, so Virgil drove over and walked into the office.
Johnson was out in the woods, but his girlfriend, Clarice, was there, and she made prints of the photos: “That’s an Excel spreadsheet, but I can’t tell you what’s on it. It’s about expendables. The codes will go out to the various products. The last part might be diesel fuel.”
Virgil looked down at the meaningless lists and asked, “How’d you figure that out?”
“Because there’s a category called DF, and then there’s some numbers on the right which is about what we pay for wholesale diesel fuel for the trucks,” she said. “Maybe a little higher, but close.”
Virgil underlined the DF category and Clarice, leaning over the counter, tapped one of the photos—“He was being sneaky about it. You never did say who took these.”
“No, I didn’t,” Virgil said. “But it was Clancy Conley, who was found shot to death in a ditch over on Highway A. Been dead a few days.”
“Really,” she said.
“You don’t seem shocked.”
“Didn’t really know him,” she said. “But maybe I am a little shocked.”
“You said he was being sneaky. Why do you think he was being sneaky?”