A woman was sitting on the street, with a couple of other people, and she called, “Me . . . She was talking to me . . .”
The first man said, “So she was turned, and the bullet must have come from that way . . .”
He pointed down a street that ran at a right angle to Main.
The woman sitting on the street said, “I don’t think so. I think it came from over there.” She pointed to the business district.
The deputy was rolling a blue plastic tarp over the body, and Virgil called to him, and when he came over Virgil said, “I need to talk to these two people some more, so keep them close. And ask around and see if you can find more eyewitnesses. People who actually saw her get hit.”
“Where are you going?”
“One guy thinks the shot came from down there,” Virgil said, pointing. “I’m going to run down there, see if I can find anyone who saw anything. Get on your radio and tell Zimmer we need more people, we have to comb the neighborhood.”
“Already got people on the way,” the deputy said. He looked up the street. “Here comes one now.”
Virgil looked that way and saw a sheriff’s car coming, in a hurry, from the direction of the Interstate.
“When he gets here, send him down after me,” Virgil said. “Make sure the witnesses stay close.”
He ran down the street in the new direction, looking for somebody to talk to; after four hundred yards, he came to a cornfield, but the streets around him were empty, and the cornfield, with its ankle-high crop, looked like it stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The second deputy jogged up to him, and asked, “What do you want to do?”
Virgil shook his head. “I dunno. I really don’t.”
* * *
—
Zimmer had arrived at the scene of the shooting, and the first thing he said to Virgil was, “Margery Osborne. I’ve known her my entire life. A nicer, more harmless lady you never met. When you find this sonofabitch, Virgil, I want you to kill him.”
They both looked at the puddle of blue plastic tarp in the street, and Virgil said, “Get somebody to move her out of there. Crime scene won’t have anything to work with. Get some photos and move her.”
“One of my deputies knows her son. I’ll have him do the notification. You see anything down the street?”
“Not a goddamn thing,” Virgil said. “There’s no place to hide down there, either. If that corn was two feet higher . . . But it’s not.”
“Could be a swale in the field,” Zimmer said.
“Could be, but he’d have to stand up, sooner or later, and then he’d be as obvious as a scarecrow in winter. And if we went in there, he’d have no way to get away. He’s smarter than that. The other possibility is, the witness is wrong. Or maybe he’s right but misinterpreted what he saw. Maybe the shot came from exactly the other direction.”
They both looked that way, down another long street, which also dead-ended at a cornfield.
“Fuck me,” Zimmer said. “I’m going to send a couple of guys into that cornfield anyway. To look.” He did just that, but they found no sign of anyone walking through the field.
* * *
—
Zimmer and his deputies had been talking to the witnesses before Virgil got back, and none of them had heard a gunshot. Virgil had never fired a gun with a suppressor, but he’d been involved in a couple of cases where they’d been used and had heard them fired—and they were loud. Nothing like in the movies, where they were a nearly silent PHUT!
More important than the loudness, though, was the quality of the suppressed sound. From a distance, unless you knew what you were hearing, they didn’t sound like a gunshot. The sound was fuller, more that of a muffled bass drum than that of a snare drum.
The question became, did you hear an unusual sound? Did you hear that distant bass drum? He couldn’t find anyone who would say he had. He wasn’t even sure a suppressor was being used—Clay Ford, the gun nut, had said the rifle barrel wasn’t threaded for one.
George Brice stayed with the body until it was moved to an ambulance. The deputies pushed the crowd back, and a volunteer fire department tanker truck washed away the puddle of blood. And then Brice walked over to Virgil, and said, “I’m going to close the church until you find the killer. There’ll be some complaints, but we can’t keep doing this.”
Virgil nodded. “Good idea. I’ll have the guy in a week. He’s here, somewhere, and there aren’t that many candidates.”
Brice said, drily, “I admire your confidence.”
“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.”
* * *
—