“And he might have been aiming to kill Miz Osborne all along,” Ford said. “First two strangers are shot, like practice for the main event. Then, when he can be confident with the gun, when he knows the gun and scope, who does he kill? Miz Osborne. Why would you kill somebody like her? There are enough assholes—sorry, Father—hanging around the church, you’d think he’d shoot somebody that nobody liked. But he didn’t. He’s got a reason for shooting her.”

“Madman,” Brice said. “We’re not talking about somebody operating on the common wavelength.”

Skinner had walked up while Ford was talking, said to Virgil, “I heard,” and to Ford, “You’re making some good arguments.”

“He’s local, for sure,” Ford insisted. “Glen wouldn’t have gotten shot by a stranger, would he? How would the guy know what kind of guns he’d get? Maybe the guy wasn’t exactly from Wheatfield, but he’s from somewhere around here, and he probably knew Glen well enough that he knew about the suppressor.”

Virgil: “I don’t know.”

Holland came up. “What are you going to do?”

“Gotta think about it,” Virgil said. “I know a lot of stuff, but I haven’t had a chance to sort it out.”

“Thinking is good,” Skinner said. To Holland: “I found us a taco truck, but we might not need it. Marge getting killed, that could kill the town as dead as she is.”

—

Osborne lived at the other end of town, a two-minute drive, and Virgil and Zimmer talked about whether they needed to get a search warrant to enter her house. Neither of them knew.

“The problem is, she lives with her son—his name is Barry—and so we’d be going into his house, too,” Zimmer said. The son was with his mother’s body, Zimmer added, which was on its way to a funeral home in Blue Earth, for transfer later in the day to the medical examiner’s office in St. Paul.

“We better call him,” Virgil said. “I don’t want him in the house before we have a chance to look at it.”

“Seems unlikely that there’d be anything there . . . if this was another random shooting,” Zimmer said.

“We don’t know it was ‘random.’ It’s different, because she was killed,” Virgil said. “I gotta check her stuff.”

“Better get a warrant, then,” Zimmer said. “I got a judge who could have one here in an hour. I’ll call him. And I’ll have somebody talk to Barry.”

—