He turned back to Buster. “Go online and take a long look at the three-shot burst kit. If you remember seeing one of them, or even an individual piece of one, give me a call. And, Buster . . . if you remember something, you can’t just let it go and hope for the best. You’d be implicated. This is a first-degree murder. Somebody’s going to jail for thirty years, no parole. By the end of the week.”
7
THE SCHOOL BOARD MET that night at Jennifer Barns’s house, after Jennifer Gedney called and asked for an emergency meeting. She recounted Virgil’s sudden appearance at her house and said, “I spent an hour after supper looking this man up on the Internet. I am telling you, he is dangerous. He is the man who caught those Vietnamese spies a few years ago, and remember those three teenagers who were driving around killing people? He had that case, too, and those people who were trying to buy that sacred stone from Israel? That was him. He says he has several leads, and I believe him, else how did he get to our door? He is a killer, and I’m scared to death.”
Vike Laughton told them about Virgil’s visit to his office. He was less impressed: “Here’s the thing, folks. From what I could tell, he’s got almost nothing. What he’ll do is run around town and tell everybody that he’s breaking the case, when what he’s trying to do is play us off each other.”
“You think he knows that there’s more than one person involved?” asked Jennifer Barns.
“There’s no way he could know that, and nothing he said to me suggested that he did,” Laughton said.
Randy Kerns, the shooter, said, “I’ll tell you up front, I made a mistake with the gun. I used one of Buster’s burst kits, and I’ll bet that’s how he got to Buster—they figured out the shot pattern, and asked themselves, ‘Where could you get a burst kit?’ and they remembered about him making those suppressors. But if everybody keeps their mouths shut, we’ll be okay.”
They all looked at each other, and Larry Parsons asked, “What’s a burst kit?”
“Mechanical gizmo that lets you fire off three shots with one pull of the trigger,” Kerns said.
Jennifer Barns: “So everybody just stay calm. Don’t talk about it, don’t ask about it.”
Jennifer Gedney said, “Buster’s worried. He thinks Flowers might send him to prison for making the burst kits. If Flowers digs around enough, he’ll find out that Buster made some of them. I don’t know what Buster would do, then.”
Again, a quick, silent exchange of faces, then Kerns said, “You’ve got to keep track of Buster, then. If he gets too weird about it . . .”
Jennifer Gedney said, “What? You’re going to kill him, too? That’s absurd.”
Delbert Cray, the financial officer, said, “It’s not logically absurd, though I have to admit that it would probably cause this Flowers to focus on Buster’s various links.”
“None of the links would point to us—they’d point to people who bought the burst kits,” Jennifer Barns said. “Randy bought one, but nobody knows that, except Buster, and if something happened to Buster before he could give Flowers a list . . . the threat is sealed off.”
“Could figure out a way to make it look like an accident, or a suicide,” Kerns said. “Buster’s kinda old, and not in that good a shape. Two of us guys could get him out in his workshop, grab him and hang him without bruising him up. . . . I’d want to do some reading about it, and about DNA, before we did it. But it could be done.”
Jennifer Barns said, “You want to put that in the form of a motion?”
“So moved,” Kerns said.