Virgil didn’t. He started back toward Main Street, and said, “I dunno.”
* * *
—
A sheriff’s deputy was taking statements, and he followed Virgil into the Skinner & Holland back room, where Virgil dictated a statement into the deputy’s digital recorder. When that was done, Virgil called his nominal boss, Jon Duncan, in St. Paul, and told him about the killing.
“I need a little more intensity down here than I’ve got,” he said. “Could you free up Jenkins and Shrake?”
“I can have them down there tomorrow,” Duncan said.
“I’ll see if I can get them a motel room.”
* * *
—
They were two hours beyond the shooting when Zimmer retrieved Osborne’s purse from a deputy, got her keys, and, when the warrant arrived, he and Virgil drove down to Osborne’s house. “One of my guys spotted Barry Osborne coming out of the funeral home. Said he’s pretty screwed up, but he said he’d come back this way. If he’s not at the house now, he’ll be there soon.”
When they pulled up in front of the Osborne house, an older white Econoline van was sitting in the driveway, and Zimmer said, “I guess he’s here.” The van said “Steam Punk” on the side, in peeling vinyl letters, along with an image of a carpet steamer.
When they knocked on the front door, they heard a man croak, “Come in,” and they went through door and found Barry Osborne sitting in the front room in a fifties leather chair, his feet up on a nonmatching ottoman. His eyes were red from crying and rubbing, and when he saw Zimmer, he said, “This is awful.”
“I know, Barry. You have any idea who’d do this?”
Osborne was in his forties or early fifties, a fleshy, pink-faced man whose hair was going white; he wore a gray golf shirt and jeans and gym shoes with white ripple soles. “I don’t,” he said. “I don’t know who’d do a crazy thing like this. Everybody loved Mom. They loved her.”
“How often was she down at the church?” Virgil asked.
“Every day,” Osborne said. “She went every day, and stayed until they closed up. She was down in Florida when the Virgin appeared. She hates the cold up here, but she came back and went every night, hoping to see her. Every night. She believed the Virgin was coming back. She believed the church in Wheatfield had been chosen for a special mission.”
He pushed himself out of his chair; his golf shirt had pulled out of his pants, and he shoved it back in with one hand, then wandered over to the front window and looked out, and said, “I gotta get out of this place. I walked in the door and saw her sitting there, in her chair by the TV, five minutes ago. I jumped, and she was gone.”
“That happens,” Virgil said. “It’s a pretty well-known psychological phenomenon, after a tragedy like this.”
“Really? She’s not a ghost, is she? She turned to look at me.” Tears started running down his face.
Virgil: “She’s not a ghost. You’ll see her image when you glance at a place where you’re used to seeing her, and you’re off guard. Like looking at her chair when you first come into a room. It happens to a lot of people.”
Osborne said, “Okay,” and wiped the tears away with the heels of his hands, and asked, “You guys need to see something?”
“I don’t know . . . If she left something that might indicate that she thought she might be in danger . . .”
“She was scared about the shootings. She was there when that guy got shot. What’s-his-name, from Iowa. She talked about it all the time, but she didn’t think anyone would ever shoot her. She still kept going to church. I told her maybe she shouldn’t, but she wasn’t going to miss it, the Virgin appearing again.”
“Did she do emails or Facebook, or that kind of thing?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, sure. I can show you,” Osborne said. “You gotta get this guy. You gotta get him.”
* * *
—
Margery Osborne had her own Facebook page, and Barry Osborne had her sign-on information. She had written a hundred posts, at least, about the Marian apparitions, and had saved reactions from her forty-six hundred followers. Zimmer, looking over Virgil’s shoulders, asked, “You think one of them . . . I mean, Facebook is sort of known for crazies . . .”
“I don’t know, but I’ll scan it all tonight,” Virgil said. “It’s hard to believe that somebody from Idaho or Ohio would drive out here to shoot her.”
Zimmer turned to Osborne, and asked, “When the Iowa guy was shot . . . how close did the shot come to your mom? Did she say where she was in the crowd?”
Osborne scratched his cheekbone, and then, “Well, I know she was close. Right there. But if you’re asking six feet or ten feet or one foot, I don’t know. Maybe some of the other people who were there could tell you.”
Zimmer to Virgil: “What if this guy wasn’t all that good a shot at all, that the first two tries were accidents? What if he was going for Marge and missed her and hit that Coates fellow?”
“It’s a thought,” Virgil said. “But what about the second shot?”
“Mrs. Rice . . . she sort of looked like Margery,” Zimmer said. “I mean, not her face so much, but her general build. They were both pretty average height and a little heavy.”
“Mom kept trying to lose weight,” Osborne said. “I think maybe she . . . fantasized about finding another man. My dad died years ago, so it’s been a while since she had a real companion.”
Virgil asked Osborne, “We’d like to look through your mom’s bedroom a bit, and around where she worked.”
“Sure. The whole first floor. I’ve got the second floor. She spent most of her time on Facebook and doing emails, and then she watched television. She did cook, but, lately, mostly microwave stuff. She was down at the church every evening.”
There was a pro forma aspect to their search: Virgil didn’t expect to find anything meaningful, and they didn’t. The first floor was what you’d expect if somebody had just walked out, locked the door, and then died. An unwashed coffee cup on a kitchen table, a slender glass vase with three bluebells next to the cup. The bedroom revealed an adjustable bed, raised to a semi-sitting position and neatly made. A television faced two chairs, one looking like it was used every day, another looking as though it hadn’t been used for years. A basket with knitting needles and yarn in it sat next to the used chair.
“She was making another scarf for me. I’ve got about a hundred of them, they’re the only thing she knew how to knit,” Osborne said, and he began crying again.