Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(17)

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—

Outside, the deputy said, “Another guy’ll be here in a minute. I don’t know if I can go back in there until we air it out.”

“Let me give you some Vicks,” Virgil said.





5


Zimmer stood in the kitchen, his nostrils slick with Vicks, and looked at Andorra’s body with disgust: “He was a good ol’ boy, and that’s no way to end up, all rotten and falling apart.”

“I talked to my boss, and he’s sending down the crime scene crew, so we gotta stay out of there,” Virgil said. All the deputies had wanted a look. “They probably won’t be here until late.”

Zimmer nodded, and said, “I’ll keep a couple of cars in the yard until they finish up and we move the body. You think he killed himself? Or somebody did it for him?”

“Looks like suicide, but if he wasn’t murdered, it’d be a hell of a coincidence,” Virgil said. “I wanted to ask him about long-range shooters.”

Behind them, two deputies came up the stairs, carrying the collie in a blanket they’d stripped off a second-floor bed. They’d folded it like a hammock, with the dog slung inside. One of the cops had a sack of dog treats in his car and he fed peanut butter–flavored cookies to the collie, who ate them slowly, but wanted another. And another.

“Motherfucker who’d lock a live dog down in the basement,” Zimmer said. “I don’t think Glen would do that if he decided to kill himself. He’d at least let the dog outside. If Glen was murdered . . . Well, I can understand shooting somebody, but why would you do that to a dog?”

“If it’s the Wheatfield shooter, we already know he’s an asshole,” Virgil said. “I don’t think a dog would mean much to him.”



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Zimmer looked back at Andorra’s body, waved toward it, and asked, “Suppose he was murdered. This tell you anything? The whole . . . you know . . .”

“The shooter probably came out to the range regularly enough that Glen knew what he was shooting. I’ll say in passing that the Nazis used to come out here until Glen kicked them out, though that doesn’t prove anything,” Virgil said. “I think the gun on the floor will turn out to be the weapon that killed him.”

“In my experience, people who like military stuff are attracted to 1911 .45s. Nazi people.”

“Still not proof,” Virgil said. “Besides, they might be more attracted to Lugers or something German. You also have to consider that Glen didn’t like those guys—but he let the killer come right into his TV room. Working backwards from that, I’d say that the shooter was somebody he knew fairly well and who shot him because he knew that Glen had seen him sighting a .223. Or knew he was a good shot with a .223. Also, the guy had a big handgun, which means he’s not a casual target shooter. He likes guns, and he probably has several.”

“There are fourteen thousand people in Lamy County, half of them women. And of the other half, half of them are too young or too old and feeble to pull this off. That leaves about thirty-five hundred male suspects, and we can eliminate most of them by reading through the phone book and saying no,” Zimmer said. “That ought to get us down to a few hundred.”

“I’d bet that one of your deputies knows the shooter personally and knows that he has some guns,” Virgil said. “Ask them. Ask who they think it could be.”

Zimmer nodded. “I’ll do that. And I gotta find Glen’s son. My wife thinks he lives up in the Cities somewhere.”

“Glen didn’t have a wife?”

“Divorced. My wife thinks his ex lives in Seattle.”

“Maybe I should be talking to your wife,” Virgil said.

“I don’t think you’re ready for that,” Zimmer says. “You’d need several years of preparation.”



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—

Virgil’s boss, Jon Duncan, called to say that the crime scene crew was loading up, but it’d be 7:30 before they made it down. Virgil locked the doors of the house with a key he found in a kitchen cupboard, turned the scene over to the deputies, telling them that he’d be back at 8, and warned them not to go inside.

The dog was gone, loaded into one of the sheriff’s SUVs and taken to a shelter. “Hope he’s not too far gone. You let a dog go too long without water and it kills his kidneys,” Zimmer said. “That’s a good mutt. I’d take him myself if I didn’t already have three.”



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Virgil caught Willie Nelson singing “Stardust” on the satellite radio on his way back to town; listened and thought about how far the song was from the afternoon’s death scene. He needed something to eat before what would be a long night but stopped at the Vissers’ to take a shower and change clothes to get the stink of the dead man off him. As he was parking, a battered Jeep pulled up to the front of the house, and Wardell Holland got out.

“I heard,” he said. “Must’ve been ugly.”

“Still is,” Virgil said. “You know anybody who can operate a .45?”

Holland rolled his eyes up, thinking, then said, “Nope. Haven’t had them in the Army for quite a long time, but they were always a popular gun, so I’m sure there are some around. Bob Martin—he lives over on Walnut—does some gunsmithing, he might know.”