Holy Ghost

by John Sandford

  The deputy said, “Yeah,” and jogged over to the car and popped the trunk.

  * * *

  —

  A man standing in the crowd called, “Hey! Hey!” Virgil looked his way. “Are you a cop?”

  Virgil nodded, realized he still had his pistol in his hand, slipped it back in its holster. The man called, “Hey! I don’t think she was shot from up there, where you ran.”

  Virgil went that way, and asked the man, “What do you mean?”

  He pointed down the sidewalk. “I was walking up here, and when she was shot, she sort of . . . jerked. She was talking to somebody . . .”

  A woman was sitting on the street, with a couple of other people, and she called, “Me . . . She was talking to me . . .”

  The first man said, “So she was turned, and the bullet must have come from that way . . .”

  He pointed down a street that ran at a right angle to Main.

  The woman sitting on the street said, “I don’t think so. I think it came from over there.” She pointed to the business district.

  The deputy was rolling a blue plastic tarp over the body, and Virgil called to him, and when he came over Virgil said, “I need to talk to these two people some more, so keep them close. And ask around and see if you can find more eyewitnesses. People who actually saw her get hit.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “One guy thinks the shot came from down there,” Virgil said, pointing. “I’m going to run down there, see if I can find anyone who saw anything. Get on your radio and tell Zimmer we need more people, we have to comb the neighborhood.”

  “Already got people on the way,” the deputy said. He looked up the street. “Here comes one now.”

  Virgil looked that way and saw a sheriff’s car coming, in a hurry, from the direction of the Interstate.

  “When he gets here, send him down after me,” Virgil said. “Make sure the witnesses stay close.”

  He ran down the street in the new direction, looking for somebody to talk to; after four hundred yards, he came to a cornfield, but the streets around him were empty, and the cornfield, with its ankle-high crop, looked like it stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The second deputy jogged up to him, and asked, “What do you want to do?”

  Virgil shook his head. “I dunno. I really don’t.”

  * * *

  —

  Zimmer had arrived at the scene of the shooting, and the first thing he said to Virgil was, “Margery Osborne. I’ve known her my entire life. A nicer, more harmless lady you never met. When you find this sonofabitch, Virgil, I want you to kill him.”

  They both looked at the puddle of blue plastic tarp in the street, and Virgil said, “Get somebody to move her out of there. Crime scene won’t have anything to work with. Get some photos and move her.”

  “One of my deputies knows her son. I’ll have him do the notification. You see anything down the street?”

  “Not a goddamn thing,” Virgil said. “There’s no place to hide down there, either. If that corn was two feet higher . . . But it’s not.”

  “Could be a swale in the field,” Zimmer said.

  “Could be, but he’d have to stand up, sooner or later, and then he’d be as obvious as a scarecrow in winter. And if we went in there, he’d have no way to get away. He’s smarter than that. The other possibility is, the witness is wrong. Or maybe he’s right but misinterpreted what he saw. Maybe the shot came from exactly the other direction.”

  They both looked that way, down another long street, which also dead-ended at a cornfield.

  “Fuck me,” Zimmer said. “I’m going to send a couple of guys into that cornfield anyway. To look.” He did just that, but they found no sign of anyone walking through the field.

  * * *

  —

  Zimmer and his deputies had been talking to the witnesses before Virgil got back, and none of them had heard a gunshot. Virgil had never fired a gun with a suppressor, but he’d been involved in a couple of cases where they’d been used and had heard them fired—and they were loud. Nothing like in the movies, where they were a nearly silent PHUT!

  More important than the loudness, though, was the quality of the suppressed sound. From a distance, unless you knew what you were hearing, they didn’t sound like a gunshot. The sound was fuller, more that of a muffled bass drum than that of a snare drum.

  The question became, did you hear an unusual sound? Did you hear that distant bass drum? He couldn’t find anyone who would say he had. He wasn’t even sure a suppressor was being used—Clay Ford, the gun nut, had said the rifle barrel wasn’t threaded for one.

  George Brice stayed with the body until it was moved to an ambulance. The deputies pushed the crowd back, and a volunteer fire department tanker truck washed away the puddle of blood. And then Brice walked over to Virgil, and said, “I’m going to close the church until you find the killer. There’ll be some complaints, but we can’t keep doing this.”

  Virgil nodded. “Good idea. I’ll have the guy in a week. He’s here, somewhere, and there aren’t that many candidates.”

  Brice said, drily, “I admire your confidence.”

  “Yeah, well . . . that’s about all I got. Did you know the dead woman?”

  “Yes, I did. She was on the parish council. She was devout and levelheaded; she was even taking a computer course in Spanish. And she was the main source of funding for the repairs and cleanup. Oh, bother, we’re going to miss her.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil was thinking “Oh, bother” was something that he hadn’t heard since a maiden aunt had said it years ago, and Brice looked nothing like her. Clay Ford jaywalked toward them, trailed by Rose, the woman who’d been living with the Nazis. Ford nodded at Brice, and said to Virgil, “I heard about Margery. I told you something about Glen’s rifle that was wrong.”

  “Yeah?”

  Ford said, “It’s equipped with a suppressor. For sure. Rose was downtown when Margery got shot, and she ran and told me. She didn’t hear a shot, and nobody else did, either. I couldn’t figure that out, but I’d handled that rifle and there was no suppressor, and no way to mount one. Then, I thought, it’s got a heavy varmint barrel, and it could be threaded for a suppressor, so I asked myself, where would Glen get that done? The answer was, over at Mark Ermand’s machine shop in Fairmont. I called Mark, and, sure enough, Glen got it threaded a couple of months ago, which probably means the suppressor was on its way. It takes most of a year to get one, to get all the paperwork done, but if he was threading the barrel . . . he probably had it or was about to get it. I never saw it.”

  “Thank you,” Virgil said. “That somewhat answers the question about nobody hearing any shots.”

  “Interesting shooting, though,” Ford said.

  The priest said, “I suppose,” with a certain tone.

  “Not what I meant,” Ford said. “What I meant was, this guy shot two strangers, one in the leg and the other in the hip. Now he’s getting zeroed in. I suspect he knows how to shoot, but he hasn’t been able to practice. He’s been afraid to take it out and shoot it. Maybe because people would recognize him. And maybe the gun, too, if they saw it.”

  “Hints at what we thought: he’s from here,” Holland said.

  “And he might have been aiming to kill Miz Osborne all along,” Ford said. “First two strangers are shot, like practice for the main event. Then, when he can be confident with the gun, when he knows the gun and scope, who does he kill? Miz Osborne. Why would you kill somebody like her? There are enough assholes—sorry, Father—hanging around the church, you’d think he’d shoot somebody that nobody liked. But he didn’t. He’s got a reason for shooting her.”

  “Madman,” Brice said. “We’re not talking about somebody operating on the common wavelength.”

  Skinner had walked up while Ford
was talking, said to Virgil, “I heard,” and to Ford, “You’re making some good arguments.”

  “He’s local, for sure,” Ford insisted. “Glen wouldn’t have gotten shot by a stranger, would he? How would the guy know what kind of guns he’d get? Maybe the guy wasn’t exactly from Wheatfield, but he’s from somewhere around here, and he probably knew Glen well enough that he knew about the suppressor.”

  Virgil: “I don’t know.”

  Holland came up. “What are you going to do?”

  “Gotta think about it,” Virgil said. “I know a lot of stuff, but I haven’t had a chance to sort it out.”

  “Thinking is good,” Skinner said. To Holland: “I found us a taco truck, but we might not need it. Marge getting killed, that could kill the town as dead as she is.”

  * * *

  —

  Osborne lived at the other end of town, a two-minute drive, and Virgil and Zimmer talked about whether they needed to get a search warrant to enter her house. Neither of them knew.

  “The problem is, she lives with her son—his name is Barry—and so we’d be going into his house, too,” Zimmer said. The son was with his mother’s body, Zimmer added, which was on its way to a funeral home in Blue Earth, for transfer later in the day to the medical examiner’s office in St. Paul.

  “We better call him,” Virgil said. “I don’t want him in the house before we have a chance to look at it.”

  “Seems unlikely that there’d be anything there . . . if this was another random shooting,” Zimmer said.

  “We don’t know it was ‘random.’ It’s different, because she was killed,” Virgil said. “I gotta check her stuff.”

  “Better get a warrant, then,” Zimmer said. “I got a judge who could have one here in an hour. I’ll call him. And I’ll have somebody talk to Barry.”

  * * *

  —

  While they were waiting on the warrant, Zimmer sent six deputies to knock on doors, asking about anyone seen on the streets at the time of the shooting. They got seven names. All but one of them were elderly, only one of them had anything that looked like a rifle, and that might have been a cane or a crutch, and none of them were in a place where they could see the shooting outside the church.

  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.”

  “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.