Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(39)

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.”



* * *



—

They were two hours beyond the shooting when Zimmer retrieved Osborne’s purse from a deputy, got her keys, and, when the warrant arrived, he and Virgil drove down to Osborne’s house. “One of my guys spotted Barry Osborne coming out of the funeral home. Said he’s pretty screwed up, but he said he’d come back this way. If he’s not at the house now, he’ll be there soon.”

When they pulled up in front of the Osborne house, an older white Econoline van was sitting in the driveway, and Zimmer said, “I guess he’s here.” The van said “Steam Punk” on the side, in peeling vinyl letters, along with an image of a carpet steamer.

When they knocked on the front door, they heard a man croak, “Come in,” and they went through door and found Barry Osborne sitting in the front room in a fifties leather chair, his feet up on a nonmatching ottoman. His eyes were red from crying and rubbing, and when he saw Zimmer, he said, “This is awful.”

“I know, Barry. You have any idea who’d do this?”

Osborne was in his forties or early fifties, a fleshy, pink-faced man whose hair was going white; he wore a gray golf shirt and jeans and gym shoes with white ripple soles. “I don’t,” he said. “I don’t know who’d do a crazy thing like this. Everybody loved Mom. They loved her.”

“How often was she down at the church?” Virgil asked.

“Every day,” Osborne said. “She went every day, and stayed until they closed up. She was down in Florida when the Virgin appeared. She hates the cold up here, but she came back and went every night, hoping to see her. Every night. She believed the Virgin was coming back. She believed the church in Wheatfield had been chosen for a special mission.”

He pushed himself out of his chair; his golf shirt had pulled out of his pants, and he shoved it back in with one hand, then wandered over to the front window and looked out, and said, “I gotta get out of this place. I walked in the door and saw her sitting there, in her chair by the TV, five minutes ago. I jumped, and she was gone.”

“That happens,” Virgil said. “It’s a pretty well-known psychological phenomenon, after a tragedy like this.”

“Really? She’s not a ghost, is she? She turned to look at me.” Tears started running down his face.

Virgil: “She’s not a ghost. You’ll see her image when you glance at a place where you’re used to seeing her, and you’re off guard. Like looking at her chair when you first come into a room. It happens to a lot of people.”

Osborne said, “Okay,” and wiped the tears away with the heels of his hands, and asked, “You guys need to see something?”

“I don’t know . . . If she left something that might indicate that she thought she might be in danger . . .”

“She was scared about the shootings. She was there when that guy got shot. What’s-his-name, from Iowa. She talked about it all the time, but she didn’t think anyone would ever shoot her. She still kept going to church. I told her maybe she shouldn’t, but she wasn’t going to miss it, the Virgin appearing again.”