Virgil told them, and Johnson said, “Shit!” and Clarice said, “Oh, God...”
“Why would somebody kill her?” Johnson asked. “You already talked to her, right? You said she didn’t know anything.”
Clarice said, as Virgil was pulling on his parka, “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with Gina.”
“Pig’s eye,” Johnson said.
“Maybe she knew something but didn’t know she knew it,” Virgil said. “Or maybe she found something out.”
—
On the way down the hill, Virgil decided that if Moore had found something out, she would have called him almost immediately. She hadn’t—so it was something else. Maybe something she’d hidden, something involving Fred Fitzgerald. He’d stop at Moore’s place, he decided, but if there was nothing that he needed to do immediately, he was going to jack up Fitzgerald as fast as he could find him.
Bea Sawyer... He fumbled out his cell phone and called her.
“What?”
“Bea, did you go back to St. Paul?”
“No, I’m at Ma and Pa Kettle’s resort. So’s Don. In a separate room.”
The implication there, that she and Don might be suspected of sharing a room, sidetracked Virgil’s whole line of thought for a few seconds, and she prompted him with, “So, what’s up?”
“We’ve got another murder,” Virgil said. “Apparently, in the last half hour or so.”
“Ah, poop. Give me the address... Is it still snowing?”
“Yeah, about the same.” Virgil took the piece of notepaper out of his pocket, turned on the overhead light, and read it to her.
“We’ll get there as quick as we can. If you get there first, keep people away from the body.”
“I will. Thanks, Bea.”
—
Virgil got to Moore’s house four or five minutes later. There were six sheriff’s cars in the street, two at either end of the block with their flashers going. Virgil was waved through, parked,and hustled up to the house. A cop on the front porch told him that Margot Moore was lying in the doorway and directed him around to the back.
Purdy and another deputy were in the kitchen with two stricken-looking women; both were crying off and on, seated over the beginnings of a Scrabble game. As though God had taken him by the hair and twisted his head to make him look, Virgil noticed that one of the words spelled out in the game was “MURDER,” seventeen points, the “M” and “E” on triple letter scores.
Purdy said, “Good, you’re here. C’mon.”
He led the way through a short hallway into the living room, where Moore’s body was flat on its back, three small bloody holes in the middle of the forehead, along with dime-sized powder burns. The crime scene crew would tell him better, but it appeared to Virgil that the gun had been only inches from Moore’s forehead when she was shot.
He looked at the body for a moment, growing increasingly pissed off, then told Purdy, “Keep everybody away—our crime scene crew is on the way.”
“Okay.”
Virgil walked back to the kitchen, pulled out a chair, got the womens’ names, and said, “Tell me what happened.”
They told him, with details—but no good details.
Sandy Hart said, “She went to answer the doorbell. I was trying to figure out a word—”
“So was I,” Belle Penney said.
Hart continued, “—and we heard her open the door. There was this sound; it sounded like somebody clapping hands, like she’d gotten a FedEx or something. We both heard a kind ofclunking sound—we told Jeff about it—we think it might have been her, falling down, but we didn’t know that...”
“We heard the door close,” Penney chipped in. “We were sitting here, looking at the board, and after a minute or two, when Margot didn’t say anything and didn’t come back in, I called to her. I said, ‘Margot? You’re up.’ She still didn’t say anything, so I got up and walked in there, into the front room, and saw her on the floor, and saw her head... I started screaming...”
