“I didn’t say he was screwing them. He likes them and they know it. That’s his whole secret.”
They contemplated that, then Danielle Visser said to her husband, “Let’s go get Pat. All you men can think about is Skinner liking women and what you might learn from it.”
—
When they finished dinner, Virgil drove back to Andorra’s house. Bea Sawyer was standing on the mudroom stoop when he got there, a 3M mask hanging under her chin. In addition to the crime scene van, there were two sheriff’s cars in the yard, with the deputies leaning on fenders and chatting with each other.The chances that Sawyer, the crime scene crew chief, would let a deputy into her crime scene were nonexistent.
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.
