“Yeah, well . . . that’s about all I got. Did you know the dead woman?”

“Yes, I did. She was on the parish council. She was devout and levelheaded; she was even taking a computer course in Spanish. And she was the main source of funding for the repairs and cleanup. Oh, bother, we’re going to miss her.”

* * *

—

Virgil was thinking “Oh, bother” was something that he hadn’t heard since a maiden aunt had said it years ago, and Brice looked nothing like her. Clay Ford jaywalked toward them, trailed by Rose, the woman who’d been living with the Nazis. Ford nodded at Brice, and said to Virgil, “I heard about Margery. I told you something about Glen’s rifle that was wrong.”

“Yeah?”

Ford said, “It’s equipped with a suppressor. For sure. Rose was downtown when Margery got shot, and she ran and told me. She didn’t hear a shot, and nobody else did, either. I couldn’t figure that out, but I’d handled that rifle and there was no suppressor, and no way to mount one. Then, I thought, it’s got a heavy varmint barrel, and it could be threaded for a suppressor, so I asked myself, where would Glen get that done? The answer was, over at Mark Ermand’s machine shop in Fairmont. I called Mark, and, sure enough, Glen got it threaded a couple of months ago, which probably means the suppressor was on its way. It takes most of a year to get one, to get all the paperwork done, but if he was threading the barrel . . . he probably had it or was about to get it. I never saw it.”

“Thank you,” Virgil said. “That somewhat answers the question about nobody hearing any shots.”

“Interesting shooting, though,” Ford said.

The priest said, “I suppose,” with a certain tone.

“Not what I meant,” Ford said. “What I meant was, this guy shot two strangers, one in the leg and the other in the hip. Now he’s getting zeroed in. I suspect he knows how to shoot, but he hasn’t been able to practice. He’s been afraid to take it out and shoot it. Maybe because people would recognize him. And maybe the gun, too, if they saw it.”

“Hints at what we thought: he’s from here,” Holland said.

“And he might have been aiming to kill Miz Osborne all along,” Ford said. “First two strangers are shot, like practice for the main event. Then, when he can be confident with the gun, when he knows the gun and scope, who does he kill? Miz Osborne. Why would you kill somebody like her? There are enough assholes—sorry, Father—hanging around the church, you’d think he’d shoot somebody that nobody liked. But he didn’t. He’s got a reason for shooting her.”

“Madman,” Brice said. “We’re not talking about somebody operating on the common wavelength.”

Skinner had walked up while Ford was talking, said to Virgil, “I heard,” and to Ford, “You’re making some good arguments.”

“He’s local, for sure,” Ford insisted. “Glen wouldn’t have gotten shot by a stranger, would he? How would the guy know what kind of guns he’d get? Maybe the guy wasn’t exactly from Wheatfield, but he’s from somewhere around here, and he probably knew Glen well enough that he knew about the suppressor.”

Virgil: “I don’t know.”

Holland came up. “What are you going to do?”

“Gotta think about it,” Virgil said. “I know a lot of stuff, but I haven’t had a chance to sort it out.”

“Thinking is good,” Skinner said. To Holland: “I found us a taco truck, but we might not need it. Marge getting killed, that could kill the town as dead as she is.”

* * *

—

Osborne lived at the other end of town, a two-minute drive, and Virgil and Zimmer talked about whether they needed to get a search warrant to enter her house. Neither of them knew.

“The problem is, she lives with her son—his name is Barry—and so we’d be going into his house, too,” Zimmer said. The son was with his mother’s body, Zimmer added, which was on its way to a funeral home in Blue Earth, for transfer later in the day to the medical examiner’s office in St. Paul.

“We better call him,” Virgil said. “I don’t want him in the house before we have a chance to look at it.”

“Seems unlikely that there’d be anything there . . . if this was another random shooting,” Zimmer said.

“We don’t know it was ‘random.’ It’s different, because she was killed,” Virgil said. “I gotta check her stuff.”

“Better get a warrant, then,” Zimmer said. “I got a judge who could have one here in an hour. I’ll call him. And I’ll have somebody talk to Barry.”

* * *

—

While they were waiting on the warrant, Zimmer sent six deputies to knock on doors, asking about anyone seen on the streets at the time of the shooting. They got seven names. All but one of them were elderly, only one of them had anything that looked like a rifle, and that might have been a cane or a crutch, and none of them were in a place where they could see the shooting outside the church.

When Virgil heard that one man had something that could have been a gun, he went to talk to the witness. She’d seen a neighbor with something that might have been a cane, but she reported it because it was gunlike. Virgil went to talk to the man, who showed him the cane, and said, “I’ve had it for five years. Who told you it looked like a gun? Was it Wilson? That old bat never liked me.”

As they walked away from the house, Virgil said to the deputy, “One guess.”

“He didn’t do it.”

“You got it. And Wilson is an old bat.”

They were operating on the basis of what eyewitnesses had seen, or thought they’d seen. Virgil kept in mind that of all the kinds of witnesses to crime, eyewitnesses were often the least reliable. They had two at the scene who actually saw Osborne get hit—and they thought the shots came from very different directions. Did either have a good idea of where the shooter had been? On reflection, Virgil thought it was about eighty for to twenty against.

“Goddamnit,” Virgil muttered.

The deputy said, “Exactly.”

They were standing at an intersection directly west of the business district. Virgil could see a dozen houses from where he stood, and perhaps eight of them were occupied. If he didn’t get the shooter, give it five years and only four would be.

The deputy was like an earworm: lots of questions, none of them helpful.

“Now what?” he asked, as if he expected Virgil to pull a solution out of his ass.