Holy Ghost

by John Sandford

  Ford, barefoot, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and carrying a .45, came to the door, looking wide awake. “Virgil?”

  “Is Rose here? Put the gun away.”

  Ford looked toward the back of the house, and said, “Yeah? What happened?” He put the gun behind his back, probably in a carry holster.

  “We arrested the Nazis, and they told us a couple of things we need to check with Rose. We’re not arresting her, or anything, but we need some information.”

  From the back of house, Rose called, “Give me a minute to put my pants on.”

  * * *

  —

  They gathered in Ford’s living room, and Virgil told her what Button said about Margery Osborne’s Florida house.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Rose said. “When Margery came back this winter, after the Virgin Mary thing, she told me that she might sell. She was excited about the Virgin Mary; she started going to church every day. When she asked me what I thought about the apparitions and I told her I smelled a rat, she got really upset. I thought she might fire me.”

  “What about this Florida house? You know anything else?” Virgil asked.

  “The usual stuff . . . She and her husband sold their farm down south of here, which was small but worth quite a bit for land, and they moved into town. They rented a place; they were saving the money for their ‘real’ old age. Then, when her husband died, which was sort of unexpected, Margery started going to Florida with a friend. After a couple of years, she bought a place down there. This was a few years back, when the prices were lower and she figured it would be a good investment. I . . . mmm . . . I got the impression that it might be worth a million now. Maybe more.”

  Jenkins said to Virgil, “There you go.”

  “You know where the house is?” Virgil asked.

  “Naples. I’ve got a phone number,” Rose said.

  “Jim told us that Barry thought she ought to move back here,” Holland said.

  “They talked about that,” Rose said. “I heard them. She said it was too gloomy and cold in winter, but he hated driving her back and forth every year. After the apparitions, when she came back up here, she mentioned that she might be selling. Nothing definite, but she was thinking about it. If the Virgin came back, she was not going to miss it.”

  When Rose ran out of new information, Ford asked Virgil, “You think Barry killed his mom for the inheritance?”

  “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “There are some reasons to think he didn’t—but we’ve been looking for a motive, and a million dollars is a powerful motive.”

  * * *

  —

  Out in the street again, Jenkins asked, “What are we going to do? You want to go talk to him?”

  “Not tonight. I need to do some research on this house, make some phone calls. See if she owns it, for one thing. See how much the farm sold for . . . I’d like to know what I’m talking about when we go back to Osborne.”

  “I can probably find out about the farm sale from my girlfriend, but that won’t be until nine o’clock tomorrow,” Holland said.

  “Do that,” Virgil said. “We’ll meet in the back of the store at nine.”

  “It’s already past midnight, so make it ten o’clock,” Jenkins said. “We oughta drive over to Fairmont and check on Shrake again, and get a decent breakfast. I can’t look at another one of those potpies.”

  “Okay,” Virgil said. “Skinner and Holland at ten.”

  “What about Button and Good?” Jenkins asked.

  Virgil asked, “What if we cut them loose?”

  Jenkins nodded. “That’s what I’d do. I mean, we could do a mountain of paperwork to get them on a bullshit charge, but they did give us something interesting. I think we at least broke even.”

  “Scare them and let them go,” Virgil said.

  * * *

  —

  They were on the move at 8:30 the next morning. Virgil called the BCA computer specialist and gave him Margery Osborne’s name and Florida phone number and asked him to find out what he could about the house.

  They stopped at a Subway on the way to the hospital to pick up a sandwich for Shrake, who they found in a much-mellowed mood—possibly because one of the nurses had a mouth that matched his and because she’d given him a back scratch and early-morning lotion rub. And, of course, because Jenkins had smuggled in the foot-long Italian BMT.

  “Wish I’d been there,” Shrake said about the chase the night before, as he gnawed through the sandwich. “I got a feeling we turned a corner. Has that feel.”

  “There is the bow hunter problem,” Virgil said. “I believed Osborne when he said he didn’t have a bow.”

  “If he’s a psycho—and he’d have to be a psycho to kill his mom—he’s probably an excellent liar,” Jenkins said.

  “Sure, but . . . would he lie if everybody in the neighborhood knew he used a bow and we were sure to find out?”

  “Dunno, but my gut says we’re onto something, and my gut doesn’t lie,” Shrake said.

  “There was that time with that Rudolph chick,” Jenkins suggested.

  “That’s because my dick overruled my gut, but my gut was telling me the truth,” Shrake said. “What can I tell you?”

  “Don’t want to hear about it,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah, like you haven’t been there,” Shrake said. And, “Damn, that was a tasty sandwich.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil and Jenkins got a pancake and link sausage breakfast and drove back to Wheatfield for the 10 o’clock meeting. Holland had talked to his banker girlfriend, who’d come through with details from the title agency.

  “They sold the farm ten years ago,” Holland said. “They got a million two hundred and eighty thousand for it. Nice piece of property, I guess. A hundred and eighty acres, good land, but not enough to be really economically feasible. It was right at the time when the speculators were buying up farmland, so they did all right. Sara doesn’t think there was much if anything in the way of taxes, so after the real estate commission and some other deductions, she thinks they walked away with around a million-two.”

  “Whoa! Did she know anything about the Florida house?” Jenkins asked.

  “She didn’t know anything about that, but she took a peek at Margery’s local bank accounts, and there was a little more than six thousand in them.”

  Virgil said to Jenkins, “Get on the phone, call Dave at the AG’s office, get a subpoena for her bank records. I’ll want to look at them this afternoon.”

  “Can do,” Jenkins said, and he went out to the back alley to make the call.

  While he was doing that, Virgil called the computer specialist at BCA headquarters, who said he was about to call him back. “I have an address for you, and I also found an old listing for the house. The former owner was asking $680,000 for it back when the real estate market was still falling apart, and Osborne did better than that. I called the listing dealer and asked what she thought it’d be worth now, and she said maybe a million. I had her look up her records on it, and she said Osborne’s end of the deal was handled by a local lawyer named John Ryan. I’ve got a number for him, if you want it.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil called Ryan, who not only remembered Osborne but said he was still her Florida attorney, although he hadn’t heard that she’d been killed.

  “That’s awful—she was a nice lady. She was thinking about selling out here and moving back to Minnesota because of that miracle up there . . . She said it was a miracle, the Virgin Mary showing up at her church.”

  “She hadn’t listed the house?”

  “Not yet. Listen, I think you should talk to a banker down here. He’s at Lost Coast State Bank, name is Bob Morgan. Margery was planning to use some of the house sale money to set up a charitable trust for that chur
ch.”

  Virgil thought, Uh-oh, and said, “Bob Morgan . . . You got a number?”

  * * *

  —

  Morgan had gone to lunch, but Virgil wheedled the number of his personal cell phone from his secretary and caught him halfway through a bacon and sausage quiche.

  “Margery has an investment account with us, not huge, but not insignificant, either. When she came down here, she spent half her money on her house, put the other half in the market, and lived on her Social Security. The stock market’s gone wild since then, and the housing market’s come back strong. I’d need a subpoena to give you the exact details of her accounts, but I can tell you that she was working on a plan that would move most of her appreciated assets to the church, which would mean that she could give them a bundle. Then she could sell her house and move back to Minnesota, where she could live free, and use the proceeds to get her through her old age, should she need nursing care later in life . . .”

  There was more of that, but the bottom line, Virgil thought, was that if Margery did need late-life nursing care, there wouldn’t be much left for Barry.

  “If I supposed, just as a . . . conjecture, that she put half of the farm money into her house and half into her investments, the investments would have appreciated at least as much as the house, wouldn’t they?” he asked Morgan.

  Morgan said, “Speaking purely hypothetically, if someone had done that, actually, the investments would have outpaced the appreciation of her house.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Tell her son to get in touch—we have a lot to talk about,” Morgan said.

  Jenkins had come back in, and said, “Dave’s gonna get the subpoena down to us . . . What’s the deal with Florida?”

  “If I understood everything the banker guy was hinting at, Margery was probably worth two million bucks, maybe more, and was about to give a big chunk to the church. And if she had a difficult late life, Barry could have been left with almost nothing.”

  “There you go,” Jenkins said. “Let’s jack him up.”

  “I dunno,” Virgil said. “He still seems like a weak possibility.”

  “Better than no possibility,” Jenkins said.

  Virgil couldn’t argue with that, so they drove over to Osborne’s house. The rug-cleaning truck was gone, and there was no answer when Virgil knocked. “Call him,” Jenkins said.

  “I’d rather jump him face-to-face,” Virgil said. “Why don’t we . . . Wait, here he comes.”

  The Steam Punk van turned the corner, slowed when the driver saw Virgil, then pulled into the driveway. Osborne got out, carrying a grocery sack, and asked, “What’s up?”

  “We need to talk,” Virgil said. “Can we go inside?”

  “Sure. If it won’t take too long. I’ve got an appointment to make arrangements for Mom. I’ve got to buy a coffin. Can you believe that?” His voice pitched up; stress leading to a crying jag. “The medical examiner is done. God knows what they did to her. I don’t want to know . . .”

  “It’s tough,” Virgil said, as they walked to the door. “I’ve seen enough of it to know. We can’t tell you anything but that we’re sorry.”

  Osborne unlocked the door, led them inside, put a couple of packages in the freezer section above the refrigerator, opened the main compartment and got a bottle of Dasani water, and offered bottles to Virgil and Jenkins. They both accepted because it established a friendlier mood, even only a fake one. In the living room, they all sat, and Virgil said, “I talked to some people in Florida today, and they said that you’d be inheriting from your mother.”

  Osborne nodded. “Yeah, probably, although I think she gave some money to the church.”

  “She was going to give money to the church? Do you have any idea how much?”

  Osborne shook his head. “No, not exactly. I don’t think she was planning to give them all of it . . . I’d get something.”

  Virgil and Jenkins glanced at each other: the interview wasn’t going exactly as they’d foreseen. “So . . . did that bother you? That a good bit of it was going to the church?”

  “No, not especially. I don’t worry much about money—what’s gonna happen is gonna happen,” Osborne said. “I miss Mom, though. That didn’t have to happen. The guy who killed her . . . If I knew who it was, I’d think about killing him myself.”

  “Not what you usually want to tell a couple of cops,” Jenkins said. “Now if he gets run over by a car, people are going to be looking at your front bumper.”

  “Okay, so I’ll back over him,” Osborne said.

  Virgil said, “Listen, Barry, the reason we’re asking is, we’re looking for a motive. You could get a couple of million, from what we hear. That’s a motive.”

  “C’mon,” Osborne said. “How many people do you know who’d kill their mom for money?”

  “A few,” Virgil said.

  “But it’s rare, I bet.”

  “But it happens,” Virgil said.

  “You know where I was for some of those shootings,” Osborne said. “I couldn’t have done it, you know that.”

  “You wouldn’t necessarily have pulled the trigger yourself,” Jenkins said.

  Osborne rolled his eyes. “Of course not. I could have hired the Wheatfield hit man to do the job for me. Then I wouldn’t even have had to watch a bullet blow her heart out.”

  “Barry . . .” Virgil began. He stopped, and took another direction. “Let me run out to the truck for a minute. I’ll be back.”

  He was back in a minute, bringing the fingerprint kit with him. “This will probably clear you for good,” he told Osborne. “You might have heard that we got a print off a cartridge shell. We might normally need a warrant, but if you’re innocent . . .”

  “Everybody in town heard,” Osborne said. “I’m innocent. Bring it on.”

  After that comment, they didn’t have to, but Virgil printed him anyway, rolling all ten of Osborne’s fingers on a blank white piece of dress shirt cardboard. He compared Osborne’s prints to one of his own, taken from the cartridge Virgil had gotten from Martin, the gunsmith. After inspecting the prints, he said to Jenkins, “Nothing here.”

  “Worth a look, though,” Jenkins said.

  Osborne: “So I’m clear?”

  “At this point,” Virgil said.

  * * *

  —

  They tried jerking him around for a while longer but he didn’t jerk easily because, Virgil thought, he was innocent. Back on the sidewalk, Jenkins said, “What was that whole fingerprint thing about?”

  “As far as the killer knows, we’re still printing people. The print’s still out there. If Osborne spreads the word around, maybe the killer will come back.”

  “Real fuckin’ smart,” Jenkins said. “Next time, he’ll shoot you in the fuckin’ head.”

  “You got any better ideas?” Virgil snapped.

  “Yeah, I do. What we’ve got is a wonderful, classic, free-floating motive: two million bucks. That apparently didn’t inspire anybody to kill her? I don’t believe it. It’s involved, somehow,” Jenkins said. “We got that subpoena; let’s go look at her bank accounts. See if there’s something we haven’t thought of. Maybe somebody else wanted to get money out of her.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Virgil said. “I wonder if there’s anything in Florida? If maybe she committed to something down there that wasn’t going to happen . . . But, nah. That’s weak. How’s a Florida guy gonna fit in up here? With a gun? How would he know about Andorra?”

  “It’s weak, but it’s something,” Jenkins said. “We need to think about Florida and go look at her accounts.”

  * * *

  —

  When Virgil and Jenkins had gone, Osborne went upstairs to his bathroom and took a shower, to get the rug-cleaning odor out of his hair, changed out of his Steam Punk coveralls into jeans an
d a flannel shirt, went down to the kitchen and took one of the Skinner & Holland potpie boxes out of the freezer. He’d removed the pie from the box and was reading the cooking instructions when he heard a knock at the back door. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and when he looked out, found his backyard neighbor, Davy Apel, on the steps.

  He opened the door, said, “Hey, Davy.”

  Apel asked, “How are things? You okay?”

  “All things considering. Come on in. You want a chicken potpie?”

  “No, I ate fifteen minutes ago,” Apel said. He sat in a kitchen chair. “I was driving back home from the store when I saw that Flowers’s car parked out front of your place. I thought maybe he had some news.”

  “Not really. They thought I had a motive for the shootings. You know, inheriting from Mom. I told them they were crazy, thinking that I’d kill Mom for . . . financial reasons. I guess they believed me. Then they fingerprinted me ’cause of that thing with the cartridge case they found at Larry Van Den Berg’s.”

  “So at least they know you’re innocent,” Apel said.

  “I guess. Kind of a kick in the butt, though. I was up in St. Paul, signing papers at the medical examiner’s to get the arrangements started on Mom . . .” Osborne went back to the potpie, stuck it in the microwave, and took a chair across from Apel.

  “So bizarre,” Apel said. “I was talking to her last week. I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  A tear trickled down Osborne’s cheek. “I can’t, either . . . Somehow, you think your mom is going to last forever, even if you know she won’t. One thing about it, I guess, is I’ll be able to pay you the money back.”

  Then his eyes closed down a fraction of an inch and cut sideways to Apel.

  Apel said, “I guess you’ll have the service at the church, huh?”

  “Yeah, I already talked to Father Brice about it . . . So how have you been, Davy? How’s business been?”

  “Fine. It’s been fine. I’ve been working that new hog factory down in Iowa, the one that’s got everybody pissed. And Ann’s got an overdue ditching job that’ll keep her busy for two more weeks. So it’s been good.” Apel stood up, and said, “You know, all this talk reminds me of something. About Marge. I gotta go get something. I’ll be right back.”