The house and property of Brian A. Waters were deserted. The Bureau team entered from overland, a mile away, after midnight, using night vision. No problems. A law enforcement–affiliated locksmith cracked the door easily, pointing out to Swagger that it had been cracked before, as evidenced by the toolmarks on the lock. That meshed perfectly with the assumed scenario.

Two gifted dogs quickly searched for explosives and drugs and found none. Once inside, the investigators used their infrared to discover that Brian Waters was systematic, neat, organized, thorough. His books, CDs, and DVDs, for example, lay on shelves in perfect, parade-like dress, alphabetized. There were books on American history, books on marksmanship, riflery, the history of the rifle, company histories, anything about the gun. There was no porn, nothing at all of a salubrious nature. This was a man dedicated to and caring for one thing: rifle accuracy. To that end, he had no family, though pictures of his nephews—towheaded boys frolicking in a backyard—were arranged perfectly on a shelf in the living room. They lent a certain human dimension—a little anyway—to a room otherwise without character and style. He seemed to have no tastes or eccentricities. It could have been a rental, for all the home furnishings revealed. Only his framed NRA Life Membership and certificate proving he’d gone Distingushed Expert–Rifle suggested an ego. These hung in perfect symmetry over his bed.

The killers—ISIS, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, ex–CIA contractors gone rogue, cartelistas?—had probably put a .22 bullet, suppressed, into his brain as he slept. No signs of a struggle, no signs of anything being neatened up after a struggle. The agents took his pillowcases for analysis, hoping to uncover microscopic traces of blood from the shot.

The shop could have been a museum. Again, the neatness was spooky, and it indicated why Brian Waters had never brought a woman into his life: no human being could live up to his standards of precision. Swagger noted that his many yellow boxes containing L.E. Wilson neck sizers and bullet seaters were arranged in ascending order by calibration, beginning with the humble .222 Remington, America’s first dedicated varmint cartridge, and working up to the gigantic .458 Lott elephant bouncer. But again, his neatness had tripped up his murderers and fooled them into leaving behind traces of their presence; when they’d plucked out the .338 Lapua Magnum boxes, they’d been smart enough not to leave a gap by pushing the remaining boxes together to hide the missing ones. However, they’d done so sloppily, so that the row was slightly out of whack, the boxes not perfectly dressed on one another. Waters, Swagger already knew, would never have done such a thing.