He ran down the street in the new direction, looking for somebody to talk to; after four hundred yards, he came to a cornfield, but the streets around him were empty, and the cornfield, with its ankle-high crop, looked like it stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The second deputy jogged up to him, and asked, “What do you want to do?”

Virgil shook his head. “I dunno. I really don’t.”

—

Zimmer had arrived at the scene of the shooting, and the first thing he said to Virgil was, “Margery Osborne. I’ve known her my entire life. A nicer, more harmless lady you never met. When you find this sonofabitch, Virgil, I want you to kill him.”

They both looked at the puddle of blue plastic tarp in the street, and Virgil said, “Get somebody to move her out of there. Crime scene won’t have anything to work with. Get some photos and move her.”

“One of my deputies knows her son. I’ll have him do the notification. You see anything down the street?”

“Not a goddamn thing,” Virgil said. “There’s no place to hide down there, either. If that corn was two feet higher . . . But it’s not.”

“Could be a swale in the field,” Zimmer said.

“Could be, but he’d have to stand up, sooner or later, and then he’d be as obvious as a scarecrow in winter. And if we went in there, he’d have no way to get away. He’s smarter than that. The other possibility is, the witness is wrong. Or maybe he’s right but misinterpreted what he saw. Maybe the shot came from exactly the other direction.”

They both looked that way, down another long street, which also dead-ended at a cornfield.

“Fuck me,” Zimmer said. “I’m going to send a couple of guys into that cornfield anyway. To look.” He did just that, but they found no sign of anyone walking through the field.

—

Zimmer and his deputies had been talking to the witnesses before Virgil got back, and none of them had heard a gunshot. Virgil had never fired a gun with a suppressor, but he’d been involved in a couple of cases where they’d been used and had heard them fired—and they were loud. Nothing like in the movies, where they were a nearly silent PHUT!

More important than the loudness, though, was the quality of the suppressed sound. From a distance, unless you knew what you were hearing, they didn’t sound like a gunshot. The sound was fuller, more that of a muffled bass drum than that of a snare drum.

The question became, did you hear an unusual sound? Did you hear that distant bass drum? He couldn’t find anyone who would say he had. He wasn’t even sure a suppressor was being used—Clay Ford, the gun nut, had said the rifle barrel wasn’t threaded for one.