“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 nevertell,” Sawyer said. They both agreed that the initials on the target were “BD.”
