Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(40)

“Did she do emails or Facebook, or that kind of thing?” Virgil asked.

“Oh, sure. I can show you,” Osborne said. “You gotta get this guy. You gotta get him.”



* * *



—

Margery Osborne had her own Facebook page, and Barry Osborne had her sign-on information. She had written a hundred posts, at least, about the Marian apparitions, and had saved reactions from her forty-six hundred followers. Zimmer, looking over Virgil’s shoulders, asked, “You think one of them . . . I mean, Facebook is sort of known for crazies . . .”

“I don’t know, but I’ll scan it all tonight,” Virgil said. “It’s hard to believe that somebody from Idaho or Ohio would drive out here to shoot her.”

Zimmer turned to Osborne, and asked, “When the Iowa guy was shot . . . how close did the shot come to your mom? Did she say where she was in the crowd?”

Osborne scratched his cheekbone, and then, “Well, I know she was close. Right there. But if you’re asking six feet or ten feet or one foot, I don’t know. Maybe some of the other people who were there could tell you.”

Zimmer to Virgil: “What if this guy wasn’t all that good a shot at all, that the first two tries were accidents? What if he was going for Marge and missed her and hit that Coates fellow?”

“It’s a thought,” Virgil said. “But what about the second shot?”

“Mrs. Rice . . . she sort of looked like Margery,” Zimmer said. “I mean, not her face so much, but her general build. They were both pretty average height and a little heavy.”

“Mom kept trying to lose weight,” Osborne said. “I think maybe she . . . fantasized about finding another man. My dad died years ago, so it’s been a while since she had a real companion.”

Virgil asked Osborne, “We’d like to look through your mom’s bedroom a bit, and around where she worked.”

“Sure. The whole first floor. I’ve got the second floor. She spent most of her time on Facebook and doing emails, and then she watched television. She did cook, but, lately, mostly microwave stuff. She was down at the church every evening.”

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?



* * *



—

Though it was late, he pulled up the emails sent by Clay Ford and the Nazis, lists of people who could support their alibis. With a bit of luck, he got through to all of them. And both Ford and the Nazis were cleared. It wasn’t absolutely definitive, but unless something else pointed to them, Virgil was willing to accept their alibis.



* * *



—

Before he went to sleep, Virgil contemplated God and His ways, an effort to make sense out of the chaos that cops regularly encounter. Sometimes, the act of rigorous contemplation led to new paths of investigation. But not on this night.