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.”