While they were waiting on the warrant, Zimmer sent six deputies to knock on doors, asking about anyone seen on the streets at the time of the shooting. They got seven names. All but one of them were elderly, only one of them had anything that looked like a rifle, and that might have been a cane or a crutch, and none of them were in a place where they could see the shooting outside the church.

When Virgil heard that one man had something that could have been a gun, he went to talk to the witness. She’d seen a neighbor with something that might have been a cane, but she reported it because it was gunlike. Virgil went to talk to the man, who showed him the cane, and said, “I’ve had it for five years. Who told you it looked like a gun? Was it Wilson? That old bat never liked me.”

As they walked away from the house, Virgil said to the deputy, “One guess.”

“He didn’t do it.”

“You got it. And Wilson is an old bat.”

They were operating on the basis of what eyewitnesses had seen, or thought they’d seen. Virgil kept in mind that of all the kinds of witnesses to crime, eyewitnesses were often the least reliable. They had two at the scene who actually saw Osborne get hit—and they thought the shots came from very different directions. Did either have a good idea of where the shooter had been? On reflection, Virgil thought it was about eighty for to twenty against.

“Goddamnit,” Virgil muttered.

The deputy said, “Exactly.”

They were standing at an intersection directly west of the business district. Virgil could see a dozen houses from where he stood, and perhaps eight of them were occupied. If he didn’t get the shooter, give it five years and only four would be.

The deputy was like an earworm: lots of questions, none of them helpful.

“Now what?” he asked, as if he expected Virgil to pull a solution out of his ass.

Virgil didn’t. He started back toward Main Street, and said, “I dunno.”

—

A sheriff’s deputy was taking statements, and he followed Virgil into the Skinner & Holland back room, where Virgil dictated a statement into the deputy’s digital recorder. When that was done, Virgil called his nominal boss, Jon Duncan, in St. Paul, and told him about the killing.

“I need a little more intensity down here than I’ve got,” he said. “Could you free up Jenkins and Shrake?”

“I can have them down there tomorrow,” Duncan said.

“I’ll see if I can get them a motel room.”

—