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 Virgiclass="underline" “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.”
7
The 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.”