“They talked about that,” Rose said. “I heard them. She said it was too gloomy and cold in winter, but he hated driving her back and forth every year. After the apparitions, when she came back up here, she mentioned that she might be selling. Nothing definite, but she was thinking about it. If the Virgin came back, she was not going to miss it.”

When Rose ran out of new information, Ford asked Virgil, “You think Barry killed his mom for the inheritance?”

“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “There are some reasons to think he didn’t—but we’ve been looking for a motive, and a million dollars is a powerful motive.”

—

Out in the street again, Jenkins asked, “What are we going to do? You want to go talk to him?”

“Not tonight. I need to do some research on this house, make some phone calls. See if she owns it, for one thing. See how much the farm sold for . . . I’d like to know what I’m talking about when we go back to Osborne.”

“I can probably find out about the farm sale from my girlfriend, but that won’t be until nine o’clock tomorrow,” Holland said.

“Do that,” Virgil said. “We’ll meet in the back of the store at nine.”

“It’s already past midnight, so make it ten o’clock,” Jenkins said. “We oughta drive over to Fairmont and check on Shrake again, and get a decent breakfast. I can’t look at another one of those potpies.”

“Okay,” Virgil said. “Skinner and Holland at ten.”

“What about Button and Good?” Jenkins asked.

Virgil asked, “What if we cut them loose?”

Jenkins nodded. “That’s what I’d do. I mean, we could do a mountain of paperwork to get them on a bullshit charge, but they did give us something interesting. I think we at least broke even.”

“Scare them and let them go,” Virgil said.

—

They were on the move at 8:30 the next morning. Virgil called the BCA computer specialist and gave him Margery Osborne’s name and Florida phone number and asked him to find out what he could about the house.

They stopped at a Subway on the way to the hospital to pick up a sandwich for Shrake, who they found in a much-mellowed mood—possibly because one of the nurses had a mouth that matched his and because she’d given him a back scratch and early-morning lotion rub. And, of course, because Jenkins had smuggled in the foot-long Italian BMT.

“Wish I’d been there,” Shrake said about the chase the night before, as he gnawed through the sandwich. “I got a feeling we turned a corner. Has that feel.”

“There is the bow hunter problem,” Virgil said. “I believed Osborne when he said he didn’t have a bow.”