She shrugged, dug into her salad. "This is his second term. Most sheriffs have to get over the third-election hump. That's just the way it is, I guess. You've pissed off enough people to get fired, if they're not so impressed that they feel obligated to vote for you."

"They're not impressed?"

"They were, until the murders," she said. "Jimmy runs a good office, he's fair with his deputies. Now, he's got these murders and he's not catching who did it."

"Did he tell you that?" Virgil asked.

"Common knowledge," she said. She picked a raw onion ring out of her salad and crunched half of it, and pointed the crescent-moon remainder at Virgil. "Everybody knows everybody, and the deputies talk. Nobody's got any idea who did the shooting."

"Who do you think did it?"

"It's just a goddamn mystery, that's what it is," she said. "I know every single person in this town, and most of the relationships between them, and I can't think of anybody who'd do something like that. Just can't think of anybody. Maybe…" She trailed off.

"Maybe…"

She fluffed her hair, like women do sometimes when they think they're about to say something silly. "This is really unfair. The newspaper editor, Todd Williamson, has only been here for three or four years, so I know him less than I know other people. So maybe, before he came here, there was some knot in his brain that we can't see because we didn't grow up with him."

"That's it?" Virgil asked.

"That's it," she said.

"That's nothing," Virgil said.

"That's why I said it's unfair. But I lie in bed at night, going through everybody in town over the age of ten, figuring out who could have done this. Maybe…"

"What?"

"Could we have some little crazy thrill-killer in the high school? Maybe somebody who had some kind of fantasy of killing somebody, and for some reason picked out the Gleasons? You read about that kind of thing…"