Holy Ghost

by John Sandford

  Virgil went back outside and, from the yard, called the crime scene crew. Bea Sawyer picked up, and said, “We’re still a half hour away. You gotta be patient.”

  “I am patient, but I’ve got a second place for you to check. I think I found the actual murder scene—he was dumped in the cow pasture, but he was murdered in town.”

  He got Van Den Berg’s house number off the mailbox and walked a hundred feet down to the corner and read the street sign—Harley Street—and Sawyer said they’d stop there first.

  “He was shot from the front door, I believe, with that same .223 he used in the other shootings. It’s possible that the killer rang the bell.”

  “You’ve been messing around in my crime scene, haven’t you?”

  “I’ll see you when you get here,” Virgil answered. “I’ll be talking to the neighbors.”

  * * *

  —

  The house to the left of Van Den Berg’s was vacant. An elderly man answered the door of the house to the right, blinking through Coke-bottle glasses, and Virgil identified himself, and asked if the old man had noticed any activity around Van Den Berg’s house the night before.

  “What happened, somebody kill him? Or did he kill somebody else?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because you’re that cop who’s been investigating the murders . . . So which is it?” the old man asked.

  “Somebody killed him,” Virgil said. “Stood at the front door and shot him in the heart. Did you hear a shot about eleven o’clock last night?”

  “I don’t know, but something woke me up. Don’t know what it was. I don’t sleep so good anymore, so I was pissed off about that. I was awake when he drove away, and I was still awake when he came back. His goddamn garage door sounds like a cement truck making a dump.”

  “You heard him go and then come back?”

  “That’s right. I sleep downstairs now, because, if I sleep upstairs, one of these days I’d come tumbling down ass over teakettle, and that’d be it for me. I’d lay there and suffer until I died of thirst, since nobody comes to visit me anymore. They’re all dead, anybody who might come. Anyway”—he scratched his bald head—“what was I saying? Oh, yeah. I sleep downstairs, so I not only heard him but saw his headlights sweep across the walls.”

  “And that was about eleven o’clock?”

  “Damned if I know. It was dark. I laid there for a long time awake, and it didn’t get light, so it was sometime in the middle of the night.”

  “Think anybody else might have heard the shot?”

  “Well, Louise Remington lives across the street. If anybody had her nose between the curtains, she’d be the one.”

  * * *

  —

  Louise Remington, who appeared to be as old as the old man, slept at the far end of her house, away from the street. Like the old man, she’d been awakened by a sound she couldn’t exactly identify, but it was almost exactly 11 o’clock. “I looked at my clock when I woke up. Later on, I heard a car go out, and then come back not long after that, but I didn’t look at my clock. I read my magazine for an hour or so, and the car came back while I was reading, so it wasn’t gone long.”

  * * *

  —

  The houses on both sides of Remington were lived in, but nobody was home at either. Virgil thought, If the car both came and went sometime after 11 o’clock, then the killer was probably driving it.

  He walked back across the street to Van Den Berg’s, put on another set of vinyl gloves, lifted the garage door, lifted the back hatch of the Jeep, and immediately saw a small, thread-like line of blood that was feathered on one side, as if something had been dragged over it when it had already partially dried.

  Something like a body. Maybe the crime scene crew would actually find something useful, Virgil thought.

  If the shooter used Van Den Berg’s Jeep, then he probably walked to the house. And he hadn’t known Van Den Berg well enough to know about the ankle monitor. That was the first bare inkling of good news: a beginning picture of the killer. He closed the Jeep’s hatch and the garage door, and called Sawyer again.

  “Where are you?”

  “Turning off I-90. We should be there in ten minutes,” she said.

  “Good. I’ve been talking to neighbors, and I have reason to believe that Van Den Berg’s own car was used to move his body. We need to process the car, and the sooner, the better. This is the first thing we’ve got that I believe the killer touched, other than the body.”

  “You’ve been messing with my crime scene some more, haven’t you?”

  “Of course not,” Virgil lied. “I’ve been too busy interviewing the neighbors, and they say they heard the garage door go up and down about the time Van Den Berg was killed and moved. When you get here . . .”

  “We’ll look first thing,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Sawyer and her partner, Baldwin, got out and looked at the garage door, then Baldwin asked Virgil, “Tell the truth. Did you touch that door?”

  “Yeah, but I was wearing gloves.”

  “Still, wouldn’t have done a lot of good for any fingerprints on it,” Baldwin said.

  “You know how many times prints have helped me with a case? I can count the times on an imaginary finger,” Virgil said.

  “Be quiet, and get the door open,” Sawyer said.

  Inside the garage, the two crime scene specialists did a walk-around before touching the car, then Baldwin said, “Whoa!” and, “Bea, I think Virgil was telling the truth, for a change. He didn’t mess with the crime scene.”

  “How so?”

  “Because if he’d messed with the crime scene, he probably would have seen this .223 shell on the floor and picked it up.”

  Virgil said, “What?” and he and Sawyer walked around the car and looked where Baldwin was pointing: a brass .223 shell had rolled against the garage’s outer wall. “Let me get my camera,” Baldwin said.

  * * *

  —

  Five minutes later, Sawyer had inserted a five-inch steel turkey lacer into the end of the shell to pick it up, and they examined the case under a bright beam of an LED flashlight. “Nothing I can see,” she said.

  Virgil said, “There’s a partial.”

  “There’s no partial.”

  “Yes, there is, and I’m going to put the word out that I’ve got a partial,” Virgil said. “And that I bagged it, and that I’m carrying it around town with me.”

  Sawyer said, “That, mmm, could be dangerous if the killer . . .”

  “I need something to happen,” Virgil said.

  “You might want to wear a vest under that T-shirt,” Baldwin suggested. “This guy is supposedly a long-distance shooter.”

  Virgil ignored the advice. “Listen, you guys got your fuming wand with you?”

  “Yes, but we don’t have a print yet,” Baldwin said.

  “You will,” Virgil said.

  Virgil drove to Bob Martin’s house, the elderly gunsmith. He was home. “I need an empty .223 cartridge, and I need you to keep your mouth shut about me needing it,” Virgil said.

  “The first is easy, the second is harder,” Martin said.

  “Yeah, well, if you don’t keep it shut, you could hurt the town even worse than it already has been.”

  Martin agreed to keep his mouth shut, retrieved an empty shell from his workbench, and said, “Listen, Virgil, I think I know what you’re planning to do and I don’t like it.”

  “About keeping your mouth shut,” Virgil said, “I wouldn’t mind if you told your friends I came over and fingerprinted you and cleared you when I compared your print to a picture that I had on my cell phone . . . that I got off this shell . . . You gotta lie sincerely.”

  “I can do that . . . But, jeez, Virgil, you gotta be careful
.”

  * * *

  —

  When Virgil got back to Van Den Berg’s house, Sawyer and Baldwin were examining the streak of blood in the back of the Jeep.

  “That nails down the Jeep transporting the body,” Sawyer said.

  “Good work,” Virgil said, not mentioning that he’d already seen the blood and knew that the Jeep had been used to transport the body, and that none of that helped. He showed the .223 cartridge to Sawyer—she wouldn’t have let him use the actual cartridge found in the garage—and rolled his thumb across it. “I need you to fume this and pull the print.”

  “I don’t like this,” she said. “You’re going to get hurt.”

  “Nah, I’m gonna live forever.”

  “I’ll only do it under protest,” she said. “Then when I visit you in the hospital, or at the funeral home, I can tell you that I told you so.”

  “I’ll take it any way you want to do it.”

  * * *

  —

  The fuming wand looked like a black, industrial-strength dildo but was actually a butane torch with a brass tip filled with Super Glue. The idea was to heat up the glue and then fume the .223 cartridge; the glue’s fumes would stick to the fatty acids in Virgil’s print and would then harden. When it was hardened, Sawyer dusted the print with a black powder, making it more visible. The process took only a few minutes, and, when it was done, Virgil took a photo of the print with his cell phone.

  “And I need one of your tiny evidence bags. Plus, one of those fingerprint ink pads,” Virgil said.

  The pad looked like a woman’s compact, except it was made of plastic and half as large. The pad inside was filled with purple ink that would make a nice, readable fingerprint on ordinary paper. The .223 cartridge went in a transparent four-inch ziplock bag.

  “You think the shooter will believe you’re walking around with evidence in your pocket?” Baldwin asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’d be more believable if I let out the word that you’re walking around with evidence in your pocket,” Virgil said.

  “Never mind,” Baldwin said.

  * * *

  —

  Virgil left them to process the house and drove down the street to Skinner & Holland. On the way, Shrake called to say that they’d located Andorra’s son, heir to the farm, and he had good alibis for two of the shootings: he worked at a truck dispatching company and had signed out on time-stamped loads. “He’s out,” Shrake said.

  “Okay. Look, I need you guys back here. Change cars—find some old crack-and-dent sedans that you can get comfortable in. We’re talking surveillance mode.”

  “You got a suspect?”

  “Not yet, but I hope to get one.”

  * * *

  —

  At Skinner & Holland, Skinner was behind the cash register, and Holland was in the back room, counting the daily take. When he saw Virgil, Skinner said, “Jennie’s back. She’s down at her house, and she’s okay. Except she hurts.”

  “Good. I need to talk to you and Wardell.”

  “I can’t leave the register.”

  “Then one at a time . . . But let me get a potpie.”

  Virgil carried the frozen potpie to the back—nasty, but he was starving, having had no real breakfast—and put it in the microwave. He told Holland what he was going to do and what Holland should say about it. “I need to explain it to Skinner as well, but I want to do the actual printing out in public.”

  “I dunno, man. Frankly, this sounds a little stupid . . .”

  “Send Skinner back here.”

  When he’d told Skinner what he was planning, Virgil sent him back out front, then sat and ate the potpie. When he was finished, he went out the back door, around to his truck, got the fingerprint pad and a piece of white paper, and carried them into the store. He printed both Holland and Skinner, as three locals watched, then compared their prints to the print on his cell phone.

  “I guess you guys are in the clear,” he said. “Neither of you have that big of a whorl.”

  “You got it off a cartridge?” Holland asked. “Can I see it?”

  “Not much to see,” Virgil said. He took the evidence bag out of his jacket pocket and dangled it in front of Holland’s nose. “The print’s clear enough. Now, I just have to find a match.”

  He put the bag back in his pocket, turned to the locals—a fourth had joined the first three, and none were leaving—and asked, “Anybody else want to get cleared?”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil’s last stop was back at his room, where he knocked on the connecting door between his room and the main part of the house. Danielle popped it open, and asked, “What’s up?”

  “About the town blog . . . ?”

  “Yes?”

  “Could you put a news story up for me without saying where it came from?” Virgil asked.

  “Depends on what it is.”

  Virgil explained about the cartridge shell and the fingerprint. “I’d like to get the word out that I’m going around printing suspects, without it coming from me.”

  “Hey, that’s a good story. I’ll put it at the top of my ‘Heard Around Town’ column.”

  When she’d gone to post the news, Virgil locked the door, went out to his truck, got his armored vest and his iPad, and started reading all the news he’d neglected over the past few days. He checked a few wildlife forums and “The Online Photographer.”

  He had nothing to do until news of the fingerprinting had percolated through the town and until Jenkins and Shrake got back.

  How long would that take? In Wheatfield, everybody should have heard about it before nightfall, he thought. Jenkins and Shrake should be set up by then.

  And finally he asked himself, how stupid is this?

  18

  Jenkins called from his car at 9 o’clock, and said, “We’re in place. I’m down the block from the front of the house, and Shrake will set up on the street behind you. You got your radio?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tac light?”

  “Yes.” Virgil had a LED flashlight.

  Jenkins: “You got your vest?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’ll probably shoot you in the head,” Jenkins said.

  “Listen, you moron . . .”

  “I’m not the moron, you’re the moron for even thinking this up,” Jenkins said. “If you’re going to do it anyway, set your radio so we’re all getting the same thing at the same time. Stay away from your fuckin’ window. I’m looking over that way, and I saw the shadow of your head on the window shade. It looked like a gourd sitting on a fence.”

  “All right, I’ll watch it. But I want him to see me moving around inside,” Virgil said. “I’ll walk out to the truck every fifteen minutes or so until midnight. He won’t come after that because he’ll figure I’m asleep.”

  “If he knows where your bed is, where it is in the room, he could try a blind shot,” Shrake said.

  “I don’t think so. He has to wait until he sees me because shooting me won’t be enough. He’ll want to get that print and the cartridge. He’s got to shoot, then he’s got to watch what happens after that, to make sure he’s alone, and then he’s got to come in to get it. He’ll have to be close. You should see him before he gets here.”

  “We will if he comes on the street,” Jenkins said. “I’m a little worried if he sneaks down through the backyards. I’m looking down between the houses, and there are a lot of bushes in there, trees, fences; there’s a swing set and a couple of sheds . . . We should be there in the backyards with night vision goggles.”

  “Too late for that.” Virgil told them to watch for somebody cruising the streets, doing recon, as well as movement in the backyard. “We’ll start at nine-thirty. It’s about eighty percent that nothing’ll happen, but we’ve got to
give it a chance. Don’t go dozing off.”

  “Talk to us,” Shrake said. “Put your goddamn vest on. If you don’t have your vest on, I’ll shoot you myself.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil had what was called a Level IIIA hybrid armored vest. The vest itself was made of Kevlar, and other composite fabrics, and would stop most pistol bullets. It also had two pockets, one in front, one in back, that held armor plates. The plates would stop rifle bullets up to a .30–06. The Level IIIA was thicker, heavier, and more uncomfortable than ordinary bulletproof police vests.

  Highway patrolmen and street cops, who both make unpredictable stops, mostly need protection from concealed handguns. Their vests have to be comfortable enough to encourage the wearing of them for a full shift; that meant light vests made from soft, bullet-resistant materials.

  Virgil didn’t make traffic stops in the rural countryside, where he usually worked. When he was confronted with a weapon, which had happened a few times, it was a rifle or a shotgun as often as it was a pistol. An ordinary urban cop’s vest, made to stop handgun rounds, wouldn’t stop a bullet from a rifle heavier than a little .22.

  He got to think about all of that as he took his vest out of the truck and felt its weight in his hands.

  * * *

  —

  At 9:30, Virgil called Jenkins and Shrake on the radio, and asked, “Anything?”