“I dunno,” Dexter said. “He left before I did. The thing is, he was almost done shooting when I showed up. He probably left ten or fifteen minutes later; I was there for another hour. You know what I’d do?”

“What?”

“I’d check to see if there’s a new showerhead. If there isn’t . . . then . . .”

“Got it,” Virgil said.

Virgil opened his mouth to ask another question, but there was a commotion out in the store, and then the young woman who’d been behind the cash register burst in and shouted, “They shot somebody! They shot—”

—

Virgil nearly knocked her down as he ran out the door. He saw people looking down toward the church, and a body in the street, and a woman shrieking, then people running away. He twisted around wildly, as though he were winding himself up, looking for somebody also running, but alone, or a car or van speeding away. There were at least a couple of dozen people on the street, but they were in clusters, nobody who looked like a possible shooter.

He ran to the body—an older woman, arms sprawled out on the street—stooped over her, and knew immediately that she was dead. He could see both the entrance and exit wounds; she’d been shot though the rib cage, behind her arm on one side, with the bullet exiting in front of her biceps on the other, probably passing directly through her heart.

Holland had run up behind him, a horrified look on his face, and Virgil shouted, “Keep everybody back—way back—and call the sheriff,” and then he sprinted down toward the business district, as best he could in cowboy boots, looking for anything that seemed wrong.

There were people on the street, coming out of Mom’s Cafe and the few open businesses, some now looking down toward the church and pointing, cluttering up his line of sight, and a few shouting or running back into the stores. The shot hadn’t come from there, he thought, or the people would all be running, or milling around, looking for the shooter . . . so it must have come from behind the business buildings. But from which side?

He could go left or right; he glanced back and realized that one side was as good a possibility as the other. He went right because the yards and houses on that side were more of a jumble, with more foliage for concealment, than on the left side, and because the Smits’ house was on that side. He was breathing hard now. He still had his pistol with him, since he’d been carrying it when he visited the Nazis, and he slipped it out of its holster and ran behind the first of the businesses.