“One step ahead of me, you mean,” Virgil said.

—

Virgil got on his phone. Calling the crime scene crew back to town was a waste of time, but it was a part of the routine—and, after all, they had spotted the .223 shell at the Van Den Berg crime scene. That hadn’t amounted to anything, except fingerprint bait, but it might have.

The sheriff showed up, took a peek at the body, shook his head, and said, “Where are you?”

“Same place we’ve always been. There’s something going on that we don’t see, Karl. The guy is taking risks, but there’s a reason for it. It’s not just some crazy guy. I would bet that he’s finished killing because he’s achieved what he set out to do, whatever that is. He’ll get rid of that gun now, and that’ll make it a lot harder to get him into court.”

“No suspects at all?”

“Well . . . there’s the guy who lived behind him: Davy . . . Apel? He’s close enough to have snuck over, and he admits that he’s got a bow. Says he doesn’t have a gun, though . . . We have no motive.”

“Maybe some kind of feud?”

“Apel does have feuds . . . but Osborne let the killer in his house, and turned his back on him at the dinner table. That doesn’t sound like an enemy. That sounds like a friend.”

—

They talked for a few more minutes, then Zimmer left. Virgil went back into the house with Jenkins, eased past the body, and the two of them spent a half hour looking for anything that might give them a hint of who the killer might be—or even a hint that Osborne was worried.

Osborne’s cell phone was on the kitchen counter. It was password-protected but also had Touch ID. Jenkins said, “You once told me how you used a dead guy’s finger to open up a phone. I mean, we got a dead guy. And a finger . . .”

Virgil looked at the phone, the body, and Jenkins—in that order. “Bea would have a spontaneous hysterectomy if she found out.”

“I ain’t telling her . . .”

“We could handle both the finger and the phone with paper towels . . .”

They did that. Because of his prior experience, Virgil began with Osborne’s right index finger. Nothing happened. He tried the right thumb, and the phone opened up. He and Jenkins hovered over the “Recents” list, which had three calls that morning, and a half dozen the day before. Virgil wrote them down, then they shut off the phone and placed it back on the kitchen counter.

“What Bea doesn’t know won’t hurt us,” Jenkins said.

In the next few minutes, they learned that Osborne had called the Fairmont funeral home twice that morning, and there was a third call, earlier, at 8 o’clock, to a rug-cleaning client out in the countryside.