She was twenty feet away, and she said, “No, no, I came out of my house... I just came out, I didn’t hear anything... Has there been another one?”
Virgil turned away and ran back to the street behind the businesses, and ran even farther out... He thought he must be six or seven hundred yards from the scene, and there was nothing moving.
He ran toward the scene of the shooting, swerved when he came to the house where the old man with the shotgun lived, kicked open the gate, and banged on the back door.
Laura Smit looked at him from well back in the house, then hurried to the door and pulled it open.
“Did you hear a shot? Is Bram here? Did either of you—”
“I didn’t hear a thing; I was using the vacuum,” she said. “Bram isn’t here, he went to the SuperValu over in Blue Earth.”
“Goddamnit,” Virgil said, and he spun around and ran out to Main Street, where people were still looking down toward the church. Virgil hurried over to the largest group, and said, “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Did anyone hear a shot a few minutes ago?”
Nobody heard anything, everybody had questions, which Virgil ignored, and he ran farther up Main, away from the shooting, asking everyone in the street. He couldn’t find anyone who’d heard the shot.
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?”
