Deadline(34)
Gedney looked at him sideways and said, “I didn’t know all the legal stuff about silencers. Really, I’m telling the truth. I had a friend—didn’t turn out to be much of a friend—comes over and gives me a burned-out silencer, and asks if I could build one like it. Well, it was a challenge, and I got a little machine shop, you know, so I built one for him. I guess the word got around.”
“You ever build a silencer for an M15?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know. I don’t know much about guns. I’d mostly duplicate the things, right down to a thousandth of an inch. They call them suppressors, the gun guys do. They’d already have one, but it’d be shot out, or something, and I’d duplicate it. Never really saw the guns. That’s why I thought it was okay—see, these guys already had permits. At least, that’s what they told me. I told all this to the agents at the BATF.”
“Any of the gun guys ask you to work on the trigger assembly? Say they needed something fixed, or . . .”
A woman came out the side door of the house and called, “Buster? Who’s there?”
“Oh . . . this is an agent with the state police. Virgil Flowers, right?”
She came up, a tall, thin woman, who was nervously rolling her hands together. Buster said to Virgil, “This is my wife, Jennifer.”
“Buster’s all done with that silencer business,” she said. “He sells turkey fryers now—”
“I’m investigating the murder of Clancy Conley,” Virgil said. “Have you heard about it?”
“About ten minutes ago,” Jennifer said. To her husband, “Jennifer One just called and told me. It’s awful. They found his body in a ditch.” To Virgil: “What does this have to do with Buster?”
“I’m checking out something about the gun that was used,” Virgil said. “Excuse me for a minute, I’ll be right back.”
He walked out to his truck, got an iPad out of the seat pocket, brought it back, went out to the ’net, Googled “What does a three-shot burst kit look like?” and showed the pictures to Buster.
Buster’s Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times and he muttered, “No, no, never seen anything like that. Not that I recall.” He was so bad at it that Virgil expected a flag to pop out of his ear, on a stick, saying, “I’m lying.”
“You’re sure?”
“I don’t want to mess with guns anymore,” Buster said. “The BATF guys said the next time I do it, I could go to jail.”
“Do you have one yourself?” Virgil asked. “An M15. An AR15?”
“We don’t have any guns,” Jennifer said. “We don’t even have a BB gun.”
“That’s a pretty nice machine shop,” Virgil said. “That come from making the silencers?”
“No, no. Not at all. My business is mostly with farmers and car dealers, looking to get parts duplicated. Like, a farm busts a part on a combine . . .”
His wife waved him silent and asked, “What about Clancy Conley? You getting anywhere with that?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact,” Virgil said. “The killer wasn’t very sophisticated, we already got a bunch of leads. I figure to close it out by the end of the week.”
“What kind of leads?” she persisted.
“Can’t really talk about that,” Virgil said. “But with the crime-scene stuff we have now . . . Well, I better leave it at that.”