“So let’s take Jude and a rival out. Where do we go from there? The guns interested me. The murder weapon was the Thirty-Eight Special. It had Williams’s DNA on it so everyone assumed it came from his car, the Subaru.”

“What we thought, yes.”

“But in the trunk there was only ammo for a nine-mil and a three-eighty. Okay, Williams might’ve also had a Thirty-Eight Special. Many dealers collect guns—”

“Like baseball cards.”

Shaw frowned. “Like what?”

She looked over his face. “You don’t know about baseball cards?”

“No.”

In the wilderness enclave where Shaw and his siblings were raised, their father—given to bouts of paranoia—would not allow television, much less the internet, on the property. Shaw had very few cultural points of reference, particularly sports.

Malloy explained that her own father collected them. “I inherited about five thousand. I keep hoping to meet a man who’ll appreciate them.”

Filing that in the bottom drawer, Shaw continued, “So, sure, Williams might’ve had the Smittie. But the odds of having three guns—and one without a couple of boxes of ammo in the trunk?”

“Twenty percent.” Malloy was apparently getting into the percentage game.

“I can live with that. So, here were my assumptions. One, the gun wasn’t Williams’s and it wasn’t Jude’s. Two, Williams was top end in the business. He wouldn’t come to Hanson Valley for a penny-ante deal. He’d be carting a major supply, planning to meet dozens of clients and suppliers. Remember, he was pissed off that the kids were late. Probably meant he had other meetings.”

She nodded.

“So my theory was: somebody at the quarry found his car and popped the trunk. Saw a mother lode of meth, fent, Oxy. Who knows how much? A hundred K? More?”

“And it was this ‘somebody’ who brought the Smith and Wesson with him?”

“That’s right.”

“You suspected Travis.”

“He was the front-runner. He was a meth addict and that’s a hard life. You hang in bad places, you’re on the street, hustling. Likely he’d have bought himself a cold gun or two. I put it at seventy percent.”

She shook her head. “Why don’t they have to add up to a hundred?”

Shaw repressed a sigh. “Okay. There’s a race, bunch of runners. Sam’s one of the best. He’s got a ninety percent chance of winning. Fred’s good, he’s got a sixty percent chance of winning the race, and Tom has a fifty percent chance of winning. But things can intervene. A cramp, a pulled muscle. There’s always the unexpected factor.

“Remember, Erik was with him, and his father was belligerent. Had his son told him that something had happened at the quarry?”

“And Travis threatened him to keep quiet about it?”

“Exactly. So Travis was the prime suspect.”