He kicked her again, and she cried out, and as she crawled back through the door, he kicked her in the butt, and said, “Come back, and I’ll fuck you up. You tell your Skinner and Holland the same thing. They fuck with me, I’ll fuck with them. Now, get the fuck out of my yard.”

Fischer managed to get to her feet. Her hip burned like fire, and she hobbled back to her house, crying as she went. At her house, she looked at herself in the mirror and began to weep, for her nine years, for her hopes that she’d have two or three bouncing babies by now. Maybe she wept even a little for Larry.

12

Virgil woke early but lay in bed, thinking about Sherlock Holmes and that whole Holmes thing—that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, must be the truth. What Holmes never admitted was that there is a vast universe of the possible, and sorting through all the possibilities is often impossible. Holmes would have been better off, Virgil thought, working with the Flowers Maxims:

If it’s criminal, it’s either stupid or crazy.

Stupid people usually have guns, crazy people always do.

In a choice between stupid and crazy, first investigate the stupid, because stupid is more common than crazy.

In many cases, stupid is also more dangerous than crazy. You could sometimes talk to crazy, but there’s no dealing with stupid.

None of the above is always true.

Having established that the criminal was most likely dumb—with exceptions—the question became, how was he avoiding detection? A rifle shot actually makes two loud noises: the boom or bang caused by the exploding gunpowder and the loud crack when the bullet breaks the sound barrier.

When he was in the Army, in Serbia, Virgil had once spent some time in the pits below the targets on a rifle range. He was six hundred yards out from the shooting line and became familiar with the difference between a muzzle blast and a supersonic crack. The two sounds were separate and distinct. The passing bullet produced a crack—some people described it as ZINGGGG! or WHIZZZZ!—that was quite loud, followed by the hollow boom of the muzzle blast. On the other hand, the ZINGGGG! didn’t sound like what most people thought of as a gunshot.

Other than Bram Smit, the old man with the shotgun, nobody had reported either one, and Smit had said the noise he heard sounded like a muffled thud—somebody dropping a shoe overhead. The muzzle blast would be attenuated by the suppressor, but it would still be loud. There must be other ways to muffle a shot, though—and that might be the thud that Smit had reported.

Maybe, Virgil thought, other witnesses actually had heard the shots but hadn’t recognized them for what they were.

If they had heard them at all . . .