Next, he crossed to the other side of Main, behind the storefronts. Nothing at the Eagles Club; the door was locked. He ran in widening circles and still found nothing. For the next fifteen minutes, he visited one store after another—there were only seven still open—asking if anyone had seen a man hurrying away in a long coat that a rifle could have been hidden beneath or with anything a rifle could have been concealed in. No luck.
He finally jogged back to the scene, where a single sheriff’s car was now parked. The deputy had pushed the now thin crowd well back, and Holland was standing at the edge of the circle of onlookers.
In the middle of the circle, George Brice was kneeling over the body, apparently administering the last rites, although Virgil had understood that could only be done with the living—but, then, he didn’t really know.
Holland grabbed Virgil by the arm, and said, “Not an out-of-towner this time. That’s Marge Osborne. She lives here in town. Nice lady. I don’t know who in the hell would want to do this to her . . .” A couple of tears trickled down his cheeks, and he wiped them away with the back of his hand. “Find anything?”
“Nothing, and nobody heard anything,” Virgil said. He was breathing hard, his heart thumping, the blood pounding in his ears. He looked at the deputy. “You got anything in the car that we can use to cover the body? When the priest is done?”
The deputy said, “Yeah,” and jogged over to the car and popped the trunk.
* * *
—
A man standing in the crowd called, “Hey! Hey!” Virgil looked his way. “Are you a cop?”
Virgil nodded, realized he still had his pistol in his hand, slipped it back in its holster. The man called, “Hey! I don’t think she was shot from up there, where you ran.”
Virgil went that way, and asked the man, “What do you mean?”
He pointed down the sidewalk. “I was walking up here, and when she was shot, she sort of . . . jerked. She was talking to somebody . . .”
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.”