Inside the garage, the two crime scene specialists did a walk-around before touching the car, then Baldwin said, “Whoa!” and, “Bea, I think Virgil was telling the truth, for a change. He didn’t mess with the crime scene.”

“How so?”

“Because if he’d messed with the crime scene, he probably would have seen this .223 shell on the floor and picked it up.”

Virgil said, “What?” and he and Sawyer walked around the car and looked where Baldwin was pointing: a brass .223 shell had rolled against the garage’s outer wall. “Let me get my camera,” Baldwin said.

—

Five minutes later, Sawyer had inserted a five-inch steel turkey lacer into the end of the shell to pick it up, and they examined the case under a bright beam of an LED flashlight. “Nothing I can see,” she said.

Virgil said, “There’s a partial.”

“There’s no partial.”

“Yes, there is, and I’m going to put the word out that I’ve got a partial,” Virgil said. “And that I bagged it, and that I’m carrying it around town with me.”

Sawyer said, “That, mmm, could be dangerous if the killer . . .”

“I need something to happen,” Virgil said.

“You might want to wear a vest under that T-shirt,” Baldwin suggested. “This guy is supposedly a long-distance shooter.”

Virgil ignored the advice. “Listen, you guys got your fuming wand with you?”

“Yes, but we don’t have a print yet,” Baldwin said.

“You will,” Virgil said.

Virgil drove to Bob Martin’s house, the elderly gunsmith. He was home. “I need an empty .223 cartridge, and I need you to keep your mouth shut about me needing it,” Virgil said.

“The first is easy, the second is harder,” Martin said.

“Yeah, well, if you don’t keep it shut, you could hurt the town even worse than it already has been.”

Martin agreed to keep his mouth shut, retrieved an empty shell from his workbench, and said, “Listen, Virgil, I think I know what you’re planning to do and I don’t like it.”

“About keeping your mouth shut,” Virgil said, “I wouldn’t mind if you told your friends I came over and fingerprinted you and cleared you when I compared your print to a picture that I had on my cell phone . . . that I got off this shell . . . You gotta lie sincerely.”

“I can do that . . . But, jeez, Virgil, you gotta be careful.”

—

When Virgil got back to Van Den Berg’s house, Sawyer and Baldwin were examining the streak of blood in the back of the Jeep.

“That nails down the Jeep transporting the body,” Sawyer said.