There was a pro forma aspect to their search: Virgil didn’t expect to find anything meaningful, and they didn’t. The first floor was what you’d expect if somebody had just walked out, locked the door, and then died. An unwashed coffee cup on a kitchen table, a slender glass vase with three bluebells next to the cup. The bedroom revealed an adjustable bed, raised to a semi-sitting position and neatly made. A television faced two chairs, one looking like it was used every day, another looking as though it hadn’t been used for years. A basket with knitting needles and yarn in it sat next to the used chair.

“She was making another scarf for me. I’ve got about a hundred of them, they’re the only thing she knew how to knit,” Osborne said, and he began crying again.

A cat came out of a back room and looked at them.

An hour after they arrived, they were back in the street.

Zimmer said, looking at the house, “What a fuckin’ mess.”

—

Virgil stopped back at the Vissers’ to use the bathroom and then sat on the bed and called the Tarweveld Inn to see if they had any available rooms for Jenkins and Shrake. They did. When Brice had closed the church, a dozen people had checked out, and whoever answered the phone at the inn seemed both surprised and grateful that somebody might want to check in. He almost signed up for a third room for himself but decided to stay with the Vissers. Not only were they friendly, they were a source of local information.

Night was coming down. Virgil had decided he needed something real to eat, so he drove down I-90 to Blue Earth and got some decent barbecue and California sweet corn.

Back at his room, he got out a legal pad and drew circles on it for a while, trying to figure out a rationale for shooting two out-of-towners, and then a well-known and well-liked local.

He could think of only one: the calculated killing of Glen Andorra to get the tool he needed—the rifle—and then two more to establish a pattern that would appear random, and then Osborne, to accomplish some unknown task while appearing to be the third in a random sequence. If that were the case, the shooter might take down one more to draw attention away from Osborne, the real target.

Of course, there might not be a rationale if the shooter were simply nuts. Maybe he’d been drawn to shooting at people at the church simply because that’s where a crowd could be found; or maybe he hated the idea of something miraculous happening there that hadn’t reached him.

He’d have to dig around, disturb the community, if he were going to flush out a crazy man. If the shootings had a solid motive, he had one question to ask:

Who benefits?

—