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“Where was this? That you saw him?”

“Right in the middle of town, across the street from the QuikTrip. Right where the high school lawn comes down to Main Street.”

“You didn’t really think he might have been peeping in somebody’s window?”

“Oh, no. No. He wasn’t that kind of guy. But when I think about it now, it seems like something was going on.”

—

W
HEN
V
IRGIL LEFT
F
ULLER,
he drove up Main Street to look at the QuikTrip and the high school. Trippton was built on a series of river terraces that rose step-like from the water. The high school was built on the fourth terrace up, above Main Street, which was on the second terrace. The school had a wide sloping front lawn, with a big concrete walk and concrete steps leading up to the early twentieth-century brick building. A four-by-eight red, white, and blue sign on the front lawn said: “Vote ‘Yes’ on the new High School Sports Arena bonds.”

The QuikTrip was on a corner, on a street that dead-ended at Main Street. If Clancy had parked across from the QuikTrip, he’d either been down in the residential neighborhood behind the QuikTrip or at the high school. Virgil made a mental note: find out if Clancy really did have some friends that he hung out with at night, and if so, where they lived.

Next stop was at G&Ts, a bar on Main Street, three blocks up from the high school. The owner, Gary Kochinowski, had gone to La Crosse to watch the Loggers play baseball, but his wife, Tammy, was working the bar.

“What an awful thing—everybody’s talking about it,” she said. She hadn’t seen Clancy in several weeks, she said, and then only on the street. “He don’t come in anymore, since he quit. It’s a shame, because this was his whole social life, right here.”

“When he was drinking, how bad was he?”

“Oh, he got drunk from time to time, but he wasn’t like a full-blown alcoholic,” she said. “I mean, he was an alcoholic, but it wasn’t like he was a stumbling drunk. We never found him in the gutter. Gary would drive him home every once in a while, but most of the time he could drive himself. He used to say he’d like to drink more, but he couldn’t afford it.”

“Be a lot cheaper to buy his own bottle.”

“Well, that’s the thing that kept him from being a stone-cold alkie—he didn’t do that. He didn’t get a bottle and sit home and drink it. If he was going to drink, he wanted to talk to people.”

“Did he talk to anyone in particular?” Virgil asked. “Were some people better friends than others?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that. There were just a bunch of regulars who’d come in every night, and he’d come in and shoot the breeze and sip through four or five rounds . . . and go home.”

“Did he ever mention anything about a big story he was working on?”

“Not to me, but you might check with Gary when he gets back. Gary talked to him more than I did, but like I said, we haven’t seen him for a while.”

“Huh.”

“Not helping you much, am I?”

“Everything helps a little,” Virgil said. “It’s putting it all together that’s hard. A couple people told me he’d gone back to drinking, but now a couple more have said that he didn’t.”

“I think we would have heard about it if he had,” Tammy said.
“That kind of thing gets around, and pretty quick, in a small town. If he was drinking again, I think he would have done it here.”

—

H
IS LAST STOP
was at Buster Gedney’s house, a small two-bedroom place crowded close to the river, right on the leading edge of the second step of the floodplain. In a bad flood year, the property might take on some water. A sign in the front yard advertised a blockbuster sale on turkey fryers, with another sign stuck on the bottom of the first that said: “We Beat All Internet Prices.”

Buster was around at the side, in a garage full of power lawn mowers, a short, pale man with thinning hair. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with three pens in the chest pocket, and jeans. When Virgil called out to him, he stood and wiped his hands on an oily rag and asked, “Looking for a fryer?”

“No, I’m a cop, I came to talk for a couple of minutes. . . .”

Virgil introduced himself, and asked about the silencers.

Gedney shook his head. “Man, I quit that.”

“I heard.”

“I don’t do silencers. Honest to God, those government guys scared the hell out of me. I do lawn mowers. That’s all I do now—lawn mowers.”

“You can make as much money on lawn mowers as on silencers?”

“Damn right you can. These idiots can’t get their mowers to start, so they take them out to the landfill and go to Home Depot and buy another one. Ninety-nine percent of the time, all they need is a new gas filter and clean the gas line, maybe put a new air
filter in, sharpen up the blade. Takes me fifteen minutes, and they’re good as gold. Ten dollars in parts and a little knowledge, and you’ve got a fifty-to-hundred-dollar lawn mower. Of course, some of them, it’s a different story. This one . . .” He touched a newer-looking blue mower with his toe. “This one, guy changes the oil, forgets to put the plug back in, the oil drains out, he fires it up, and three minutes later the engine blows. All it’s good for now is parts.”

“I didn’t know about the lawn mowers. I was told you were a machinist,” Virgil said. He waved his hand at the back of the garage. Virgil didn’t know much about machine shops, although he’d once investigated a case where a machine shop had been cleaned out on a weekend by machinery thieves. He knew enough to recognize the CNC lathe and a nice mill in the back of the garage.

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.”

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.”

T
HE 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.

Bob Owens, the senior board member, said, “Two murders are way worse than one. It makes it clear that something is going on. Right now, as far as Flowers knows, Conley was shot by some crazy, out looking to kill somebody.”

“That’s true,” said Jennifer Houser. “I think we should hold in reserve the whole idea of killing Buster. It’s too drastic a measure, for what we know right now.”

Jennifer Gedney asked, “What if something happened to Flowers?”

“Another possibility,” Kerns said. “The rumor around town is that he came here to investigate some dognappings, and the victims
are telling him that the dognappers live up Orly’s Creek. If he was to get shot, the BCA would send somebody else down, and maybe a whole bunch of people, but if there was something that pointed at the dognappers . . .”

“Like what?” Owens asked. “I can’t think of what it would be.”

“Maybe because you only had one second to think about it,” Kerns suggested. “With a little more time, we could come up with something. He hangs out with Johnson Johnson. Maybe Johnson could get an anonymous tip about the dogs that takes them out somewhere, looking for dogs, and Flowers gets killed. That links it to the dogs, and not to Conley.”

“So moved,” said Jennifer Gedney.

“I’m sorry, but that sounds way, way too complicated. We have to have something better than that,” said Jennifer Houser. “But I’ve got a question for Jen Three. If we voted to kill Buster . . . would that be a problem?”

“Well, yes,” Jennifer Gedney said. “Not an emotional problem, or anything like that, it’s just that I think it would only focus attention. I’d vote against killing him because it seems too extreme right now. Later? Maybe not.”

Laughton grinned and said, “The marriage is maybe not as solid as it could be?”

“Just looking at him makes me tired,” Jennifer Gedney said. “All those wrenches. And he’s covered with oil most of the time.”

“All right,” said Henry Hetfield, the superintendent of schools, looking down over his steel-rimmed glasses. “We’ve got a lot on our plates right now. Here is what I’d suggest: we table the motions to
kill Buster and Flowers, with the understanding that they could be brought back before the board if Buster gets too shaky—Jen Three, you’ll have to monitor that—or Flowers gets too close. But we also instruct Randy to do what he can to monitor Flowers, and to make plans to remove one or both of them if the situation worsens.”

Jennifer Barns said, “So moved.”

“I think we have two motions already on the floor,” Owens said.

“Oh, fuck that,” Jennifer Barns said. “Let’s have a show of hands on Henry’s proposal. All in favor, raise your hands.”

All nine hands went up.

“So that’s settled,” she said. “We watch and wait, but Randy is ready to move if we need to. My personal view is, we don’t have much to fear at the moment.”

“As long as Flowers doesn’t find out about the story that Clancy was working on,” Jennifer Gedney said.

“If we even get a sniff of that . . .” She looked at Kerns, who nodded.

Vike Laughton spoke up: “Flowers originally came here to investigate dogs, and he thinks they might be up Orly’s Creek. I have heard, and I’d suspect a couple more of you have, that those people are cooking some meth up there. Anybody else hear that?”

Jennifer Barns said, “Where’d you hear that?”

“Well, from Conley, actually. He was a pill-popper, as you all know,” Laughton said.

Jennifer Houser said, “I heard that. Just a rumor, but I heard it.”

Jennifer Barns asked, “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I was just wondering if there is any way we might tie Conley’s
death to the Orly’s Creek people. Drug users. A drug shooting. Something going on there . . .”

“How’d we do that?” Owens asked.

“I don’t know. We could think of something,” Laughton said. “I don’t think it’s healthy, though, to have Flowers focused on Conley and his job, or what he might have been looking into.”

“Well, if you think of something, let us know,” Owens said.

“I will do that,” Laughton said.

Barns said, “All right. Let’s go on home, folks. And Jen Three—keep an eye on Buster.”

—

A
S THEY WERE
going out the door, Laughton asked Kerns, “How difficult would it be to, mmm, take a look at one of those Orly’s Creek hillbillies?”

“You mean, shoot one? It’s pretty dark there, houses are up from the road. Lots of pullouts along the creek. It’d be ideal for an ambush, except for one thing—there’s only one way out. That could be handled . . .”

“One of the people up there, he’s a gangster who used to ride with the Bad Seed. Roy Zorn. You see him around town. If something should happen to him that was . . . consonant . . . with what happened to Clancy, Flowers would have to take that connection pretty seriously, I would think.”

“You don’t want to talk to the board about it?” Kerns asked.

“No. They’re too shook up right now. Making motions, calling for votes,” Laughton said. “Like Jen Three. She swings from ‘No killing’ to ‘Let’s kill Flowers.’ Killing Flowers would be insane,
except for the most desperate circumstances. No—what we need is Flowers alive and well, and pointed in totally the wrong direction.”

“Let me do some research,” Kerns said.

“Things are moving fast . . .”

“Won’t take long.”