Virgil walked over, and asked, “Suicide?”
“Don’t believe so. The way the slug went through his head, he was leaning away from it, but the shot came in level. We found the bullet hole in the wall, hit a stud. We can dig it out.”
“Brass?”
“One shell. Like you’d get in a suicide.”
“But no note, or anything?”
“Eh, I wouldn’t say not anything. Andorra was divorced, as I understand it, and his ex-wife lives a long way from here. But, he was still sexually active. There’s a box of condoms in the top drawer of his bedroom dresser, a Trojan Super Value Pleasure Pack, hundred-count. Looks like there are about sixty of them left . . . so forty or so were used for protection, unless he was sponsoring a balloon festival.”
“How about the sheets?”
“The sheets are absolutely fresh and unmarked. In my opinion, too fresh and unmarked. It looks like the last thing he did before blowing his brains out, or getting his brains blown out, is that he changed the sheets.”
“Which you normally wouldn’t do before eating a bullet.”
“Can’t tell. Maybe he was naturally neat. Some suicides get all dressed up for the act because they don’t want their bodies to be disrespected.”
* * *
—
Don Baldwin, Sawyer’s partner, stuck his head out the door, and said, “I thought I heard you, Virgil. Another interesting one, huh?”
“I’ve been hearing about it from Bea,” Virgil said. “How you doin’, Don?”
“Got something to add. I should probably tell Beatrice first, you know, so everything stays in the proper bureaucratic channels.”
“Oh, for God’s sakes, Don, what is it?” Sawyer asked. Before he could answer, Sawyer told Virgil, “I’ve got him finishing the scan of the house.”
“Down in the basement, there’s a workbench with a canvas bag full of gun-cleaning tools, earmuffs, and a partial pack of handgun targets,” Baldwin said. “There are four boxes of .45 shells in the bag, two partially used. There’s also a gun safe. I opened it, and there’s a custom slot for a handgun that isn’t there but which would fit a .45 perfectly.”
“Then that’s probably his own gun on the floor,” Virgil said.
Sawyer said, “If that is the case and it’s not a suicide, it brings up the question of how the killer got hold of the gun.”
“Could have just come back from the range with the killer,” Virgil said.
Baldwin said, “There also appears to be a missing rifle. There are two shotguns on one side of the safe, one with a two-power scope, probably a slug gun for deer hunting, the other a twelve-gauge pheasant gun. There’s a .30–06 on the other side, and then an empty slot that looks used, but the barrel would be too slender to be a shotgun. Did I mention that there’s a box of .223 FMJ shells in that range bag?”
“Ah, shit,” Virgil said. “The .223 we’re looking for belonged to Andorra. The guy came here, killed Andorra, and took the rifle.” Everything that Virgil had imagined about the shooter sighting the gun on the range and killing Andorra because Andorra had seen him doing it went out the window.
“Andorra must’ve known him pretty well, then,” Sawyer said. “But how did the range bag end up down in the basement while the gun came back up with the killer?”
Virgil considered the question, shook his head, and said, “I can think of eight different ways that could happen—and there’s no way to know which one to pick.”
“Give me one,” Sawyer said.
Virgil shrugged. “They came in with their guns, Andorra leaves the bag on the kitchen counter, they go into the dining room to chat, the guy goes back out to the kitchen like he’s getting a drink of water, gets the .45, comes back, and shoots Andorra. Then he’s smart enough to try to confuse us—he takes the bag downstairs so it looks like Andorra had to go down to get it and bring the gun back up.”
“Nobody’s that smart,” Baldwin said.
“Well, who the fuck knows,” Virgil snapped. “Besides, we’ll never figure it out, so why worry about it?”
“’Cause I like mysteries,” Baldwin said. He added, “I’m going back down there.”
“Tell him what you said about the rubbers,” Bea said.
Baldwin said, “Oh, yeah. They suggest that he’s seeing a woman of child-bearing age, and since forty-two of them are missing, he’s seeing her with some frequency. You wouldn’t buy a box of a hundred if you were using one a month.”
“Could also be seeing an older woman with an STD, but I’m siding with Don on this one,” Bea said.
“No sign of a name for her? Cards, notes . . . ?”
“Not that we’ve found so far,” Sawyer said.
Baldwin turned to go back down to the basement, and Virgil shouted after him, “Hey, Don!”
Baldwin shouted, “What?”
“Were any of those targets used?”
“No. No used targets.”
Sawyer asked, “Is that important?”
“Well, the range is a homemade one. There are a couple of trash barrels down there that I suspect Andorra emptied. Right now, they’re almost full, like they haven’t been emptied in a while,” Virgil said. “People throw used targets into them. I wonder if there’d be any .45 targets in there?”
“I got some nice thick rubber gloves, if you want to go look,” she said.
“I probably should,” Virgil said. “Have you gotten to his wallet yet?”
“Yeah. Nothing there of interest.”
“Was there a magnetic key card?”
“A plain blue one. Do you know what it’s for?”
“Probably for the gate to the shooting club. Let me borrow it . . .”
* * *
—
Virgil got the key card and the rubber gloves and drove back out to the range. The sun’s disk was sitting right on the tree line: he wouldn’t have much time. He drove through the gate and over the top of the rise and found that he was alone.
He drove to the pistol range, found what appeared to be new targets sitting at the top of the nearly full trash barrel. The targets had been gathered in a stack and then folded over before they were dropped in the barrel. Each target showed more than a dozen shots, grouped in a smaller-than-palm-sized space near the center. The occasional target showed individual holes that suggested the shooters had been using 9mm, or .38 caliber and .22 caliber, handguns. Virgil thought the targets may have been used by the couple he’d seen. Not bad shooting, if they were doing rapid-fire self-defense work.
He started digging through the trash, pulling it out and dropping it on the ground. There were used targets, water and soft-drink bottles and cans, empty ammo boxes, a couple of pizza boxes, sandwich wrappers from Subway, and two black plastic bags of the kind used to pick up dog poop. The deeper he got, the soggier he found the contents, from the intermittent rainstorms.
Some of the targets had names on them; most did not. He was nearly to the bottom of the can when he pulled out three that he would bet had been shot with a .45. There were other possibilities—a .40 caliber would make a hole only slightly smaller, and a .44 would be almost indistinguishable from a .45—but the .45 was by far the most common, and they knew that Andorra had one.
He set the targets carefully aside for processing by the crime scene people. There had been a couple of layers of cans and bottles above the .45s, but there were six targets that had been above those with the .45 holes.
They were soggy, but he could see that they were shot full of 9mm or .38 holes, and on one of them he could make out the initials “BD.”
Whoever BD was, Virgil thought, may have been shooting around the time the .45 holes got punched.
If God were on his side anyway.
* * *
—
The range had fallen into twilight by the time he left. He drove back to Andorra’s house, gave the targets to Sawyer and Baldwin for analysis. “Doubt that we’ll get much, but you can never tell,” Sawyer said. They both agreed that the initials on the target were “BD.”