Osborne rolled his eyes. “Of course not. I could have hired the Wheatfield hit man to do the job for me. Then I wouldn’t even have had to watch a bullet blow her heart out.”

“Barry . . .” Virgil began. He stopped, and took another direction. “Let me run out to the truck for a minute. I’ll be back.”

He was back in a minute, bringing the fingerprint kit with him. “This will probably clear you for good,” he told Osborne. “You might have heard that we got a print off a cartridge shell. We might normally need a warrant, but if you’re innocent . . .”

“Everybody in town heard,” Osborne said. “I’m innocent. Bring it on.”

After that comment, they didn’t have to, but Virgil printed him anyway, rolling all ten of Osborne’s fingers on a blank white piece of dress shirt cardboard. He compared Osborne’s prints to one of his own, taken from the cartridge Virgil had gotten from Martin, the gunsmith. After inspecting the prints, he said to Jenkins, “Nothing here.”

“Worth a look, though,” Jenkins said.

Osborne: “So I’m clear?”

“At this point,” Virgil said.

—

They tried jerking him around for a while longer but he didn’t jerk easily because, Virgil thought, he was innocent. Back on the sidewalk, Jenkins said, “What was that whole fingerprint thing about?”

“As far as the killer knows, we’re still printing people. The print’s still out there. If Osborne spreads the word around, maybe the killer will come back.”

“Real fuckin’ smart,” Jenkins said. “Next time, he’ll shoot you in the fuckin’ head.”

“You got any better ideas?” Virgil snapped.

“Yeah, I do. What we’ve got is a wonderful, classic, free-floating motive: two million bucks. That apparently didn’t inspire anybody to kill her? I don’t believe it. It’s involved, somehow,” Jenkins said. “We got that subpoena; let’s go look at her bank accounts. See if there’s something we haven’t thought of. Maybe somebody else wanted to get money out of her.”

“That’s a possibility,” Virgil said. “I wonder if there’s anything in Florida? If maybe she committed to something down there that wasn’t going to happen . . . But, nah. That’s weak. How’s a Florida guy gonna fit in up here? With a gun? How would he know about Andorra?”

“It’s weak, but it’s something,” Jenkins said. “We need to think about Florida and go look at her accounts.”

—