Virgil answered the same way, but added, “You know what? He says he knows why nobody heard those shots. And why all those people got shot at the same time. He said he’d tell me if I’d let him off the hook on the assault. I wouldn’t do that. But he figured it out in five minutes, and I kinda believed him.”

The other three looked at one another, all frowning, then Skinner said, “If that dumbass figured it out . . .”

Fischer said, “I keep telling you, he’s not a dumbass. He probably did figure it out. If he did, then I say let him out. That’s more important than—”

Holland shook his head. “No. He’s going down.”

“What we gotta do here is crowdsource it. Ask around,” Skinner said. “If he figured it out in five minutes, somebody else will even if we can’t. We could get Danny Visser to put it up on the town blog.”

Virgil said, “We can do that. We need to find that out. Our real problem is, right now we don’t have anything to work with. We know where the killer got the gun and the suppressor and the ammunition, and none of that helps. The crime scene people aren’t giving us any help, because they’re like us—they got nothing to work with. If we knew why he was always shooting at four-fifteen, if we knew why we can’t hear the shots . . . then we’d know something serious.”

—

The priest, George Brice, stuck his head into the room, saw Virgil, and stepped inside. “I heard you were back here, and I wondered if you’re getting anywhere? People are unhappy that we’ve closed the church. I won’t reopen it until we have a handle on what’s happening . . .”

Virgil: “We don’t know enough yet.”

He explained about the gunshot problem and the 4:15 shootings, and Brice looked from one to the other, and then said, “I can tell you why that is—though I didn’t think of it until this second.”

“What?” Virgil asked.

“We’ve got these big speakers up in the bell tower,” Brice said. “Recordings of the bells of Notre-Dame. We start playing the bells at four-fifteen, for three minutes. The call for the four-thirty Mass.”

They all stared at him, then Virgil slapped himself on the forehead, and said, “Duh.”

Holland said, “We should have thought of it. But we’ve been playing the bells every day since Christmas. They’re louder than heck, but I don’t even hear them anymore.”

“Same with me,” Skinner said, and Fischer nodded.

“The bells would cover the gunshots for anyone near the church, and he wouldn’t fire until he heard them. The bells determined the time. I thought I’d figured out something important, but I hadn’t,” Virgil said. “We really are back to square one.”

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