Louise Remington, who appeared to be as old as the old man, slept at the far end of her house, away from the street. Like the old man, she’d been awakened by a sound she couldn’t exactly identify, but it was almost exactly 11 o’clock. “I looked at my clock when I woke up. Later on, I heard a car go out, and then come back not long after that, but I didn’t look at my clock. I read my magazine for an hour or so, and the car came back while I was reading, so it wasn’t gone long.”

—

The houses on both sides of Remington were lived in, but nobody was home at either. Virgil thought, If the car both came and went sometime after 11 o’clock, then the killer was probably driving it.

He walked back across the street to Van Den Berg’s, put on another set of vinyl gloves, lifted the garage door, lifted the back hatch of the Jeep, and immediately saw a small, thread-like line of blood that was feathered on one side, as if something had been dragged over it when it had already partially dried.

Something like a body. Maybe the crime scene crew would actually find something useful, Virgil thought.

If the shooter used Van Den Berg’s Jeep, then he probably walked to the house. And he hadn’t known Van Den Berg well enough to know about the ankle monitor. That was the first bare inkling of good news: a beginning picture of the killer. He closed the Jeep’s hatch and the garage door, and called Sawyer again.

“Where are you?”

“Turning off I-90. We should be there in ten minutes,” she said.

“Good. I’ve been talking to neighbors, and I have reason to believe that Van Den Berg’s own car was used to move his body. We need to process the car, and the sooner, the better. This is the first thing we’ve got that I believe the killer touched, other than the body.”

“You’ve been messing with my crime scene some more, haven’t you?”

“Of course not,” Virgil lied. “I’ve been too busy interviewing the neighbors, and they say they heard the garage door go up and down about the time Van Den Berg was killed and moved. When you get here . . .”

“We’ll look first thing,” she said.

—

Sawyer and her partner, Baldwin, got out and looked at the garage door, then Baldwin asked Virgil, “Tell the truth. Did you touch that door?”

“Yeah, but I was wearing gloves.”

“Still, wouldn’t have done a lot of good for any fingerprints on it,” Baldwin said.

“You know how many times prints have helped me with a case? I can count the times on an imaginary finger,” Virgil said.

“Be quiet, and get the door open,” Sawyer said.