“Well, gun stuff, for one,” said Swagger. “I believe he’s prepping up a .338 Lapua Magnum shot. Those rifles are damned expensive, and they’re prized by people with passionate urges to shoot from a long way out. It’s a small community. Someone—me, I guess—ought to canvass it and see if anything has happened and left tracks in that community.

“I also—not sure of the legality here—but it’s a community serviced by just a few retail outfits, some mail order only, some brick-and-mortar, and the gear is very specific, very well made, very expensive, mostly from specialized machine shops. He—or somebody—would have to make some purchases to get him set up. Can we monitor or question those limited outlets, again looking for unusual patterns? Also, there’s a series of competitions where fellows shoot over a mile. I don’t think he’ll be competing, but those boys might have picked something up—rumors, odd patterns of purchase, questions coming in from an odd source, stuff like that. It could all lead us to Juba through a different route.”

“That’s good. Don’t you think that’s good, Mr. Gold?”

“I do, yes.”

“Other than that,” Swagger continued, “I remember that Mrs. McDowell said he was not a great one for improvising. So I think it’s fair to assume that now that he’s on the run, he’ll try to get back to his plan as quickly as possible. He only knows we know about him, but he has no idea the extent to which we’ve penetrated. He will get back on schedule.”

“Okay, lay out the schedule. As you see it.”

“I believe he has to find an area with at least a mile of clear space to get zeroed in. He has to work with his reloading program until he’s satisfied he’s found a load that will get him on target from the appropriate distance with the appropriate killing velocity still left in the bullet. He’s got to shoot and score five hundred times so he’s comfortable. I also think at a certain point he’ll move on to living targets. He’ll want to see what the bullet does. He might find an accurate load and bullet, but not be pleased with its penetration and expansion powers, and know, from that, that if he don’t hit heart or lung, the boy he’s shooting at will probably survive. So he’s got to have a bullet that deforms or mushrooms or bursts into splinters and cuts everything to ribbons. No point coming all this way, spending all this money, time, and energy, only to knock whoever-it-is down for a two-day stay in the hospital. He’s got to know he’s got a one-shot kill package. So he’ll shoot at something alive from this distance, and somehow we might be able to connect by finding such a site.”