Holy Ghost

by John Sandford

  Osborne’s cell phone was on the kitchen counter. It was password-protected but also had Touch ID. Jenkins said, “You once told me how you used a dead guy’s finger to open up a phone. I mean, we got a dead guy. And a finger . . .”

  Virgil looked at the phone, the body, and Jenkins—in that order. “Bea would have a spontaneous hysterectomy if she found out.”

  “I ain’t telling her . . .”

  “We could handle both the finger and the phone with paper towels . . .”

  They did that. Because of his prior experience, Virgil began with Osborne’s right index finger. Nothing happened. He tried the right thumb, and the phone opened up. He and Jenkins hovered over the “Recents” list, which had three calls that morning, and a half dozen the day before. Virgil wrote them down, then they shut off the phone and placed it back on the kitchen counter.

  “What Bea doesn’t know won’t hurt us,” Jenkins said.

  In the next few minutes, they learned that Osborne had called the Fairmont funeral home twice that morning, and there was a third call, earlier, at 8 o’clock, to a rug-cleaning client out in the countryside.

  “If the client was involved, he’d have killed Osborne out there and dumped the body in the weeds somewhere instead of sneaking into the house and killing him here,” Virgil said.

  “True. But you know what people have been saying all along? It’s money. Somehow, it’s money,” Jenkins said. “What if it wasn’t his mother’s money but Barry’s?”

  They were in the kitchen, and they both looked at the body, facedown in a four-dollar potpie, and Virgil said, “I don’t think he has any.”

  “But we don’t know that,” Jenkins said. “To look at where she lived up here, you wouldn’t think his mother would, either. But she does.”

  “So let’s go look at Barry’s bank accounts,” Virgil said. “I’ll call for another subpoena.”

  * * *

  —

  An hour later, they were back at the bank in Blue Earth. The bank president, who they’d dealt with in the morning, was astonished by the turn of events and told them so. “Honest to God, what is the world coming to? I don’t think there’d been a murder in Wheatfield in the last century, and now there are, what, three in a week? An entire family wiped out?”

  When they got him calmed down, he sat them in front of a computer, where they could look at images for the checks Osborne had written in the last four years. “Back further than that, we’d have to go to another cloud, and that would take a while,” the bank president told them.

  They didn’t have to do that. They found an anomaly in Osborne’s accounts. On the first of September, every year for the past four, he’d written a check for $6,550 to David D. Apel.

  “Every year,” Virgil said. “Wonder what it is? Rent? He owns the house.”

  They asked the bank president for an opinion. He pulled on his lower lip for a minute, then said, “Since he’s dead, you could probably check his income tax records on this, but, if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a loan payment.”

  They asked him to start the process of getting further records from the cloud, and when he went away to do that, Virgil said to Jenkins, “Try this: it’s a loan payment, and Apel needs the money—the principal. But Osborne doesn’t have any money. Apel counts on getting it when Margery dies, but then he hears that the old lady is giving her money to the church. He kills Margery Osborne so that Barry will inherit. Then Barry’s talking to him over the hedge, mentions that we’re looking at his mother’s money and trying to figure out who might benefit from her death . . .”

  “And that freaks him out,” said Jenkins, “and he doesn’t want Barry to tell us that he owes Apel a bundle. In the meantime, that greed head Van Den Berg figures it out, because he knows more about who has what than anybody else in town. He needs money himself and tries to blackmail Apel . . .”

  “Who walks over and kills him,” Virgil said.

  “Whew! Glad that’s settled,” Jenkins said. “I’m heading home; you go over and bust Apel.”

  “We’re not there yet.”

  “No kiddin’. But if we’re right . . . we can figure something out.”

  The bank president came back after a while, and said, “You can come look at the checks, if you want, but I can tell you that Barry was paying Mr. Apel exactly the same amount since September of 2009. Rent, or anything else, would have gone up since then—I bet it’s a fixed interest loan.”

  Virgil called a researcher/hacker at the BCA, with whom he’d had a hasty romance a few years before and was still on tenuous terms with. “Sandy, do you remember when you once found a way to look at state income tax returns?”

  “I remember nothing of the kind. That’s would be illegal,” she said.

  “Listen, babe, we’ve had four murders now, and three people hurt bad, including Shrake. All we need to know is whether this guy is getting interest on a loan and how much . . .”

  Long silence. Then, “I heard about Shrake. And I’m not your babe. Or sweetheart. Or honeybun.”

  “So . . . Shrake . . .”

  More silence. Then, “Give me a name.”

  She called back a half hour later, as Virgil and Jenkins were driving back to Wheatfield. “It’s an interest-only loan. I can tell that because he’s paying tax on all of it, so none of it is return of principal. I looked up loan rates on the internet. In 2009, the normal interest rate was probably between four and five percent, because the big recession had started, but if it was a loan between friends, it could have been as low as three percent. At five percent, the loan would be for $130,000 or so. At three percent, it would have been more, something around $225,000.”

  “Thank you.”

  When they were off their call, Jenkins said, “Even if he kills both Margery and Barry, he still gets the money. He’ll have to wait a while, but if he has a signed note, he can make a claim against the estates. That all goes on in private. If we hadn’t figured this out, we might not ever hear about it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course, if we looked further down the line, there might be more Osborne relatives who’d inherit with Barry dead.”

  “That would be a stretch. Apel has the motive, he had the opportunity—at least with Barry—and we know he shoots a bow. Now we need to put together the rest of the case. We don’t know if he’s got alibis for any of the shootings. I want to look at what he does and where he does it.”

  “He’s a heavy-equipment operator and contractor,” Jenkins said. “I asked, when I was talking to him.”

  Jenkins didn’t know where Apel’s business was, but Virgil made a call to Holland, swore him to secrecy, and asked. “He’s got an old Quonset on Second Street,” Holland said.

  “Is that anywhere near Bram Smit’s house?”

  “Well, yeah. Down a ways, but not far. Fifty or sixty yards. Not far from the Vissers’, either. Look over your shoulder when you go to your room tonight and you’ll see it right there, down the street.”

  Virgil rang off, and said to Jenkins, “We need to check his business. This looks promising.”

  “If he’s the guy, we still need something else. Something physical. At this point, I don’t see a conviction. I don’t even see a search warrant. If he did it for the money, he’s gone as far as he can go, he doesn’t need to shoot anyone else, which means he’s probably thrown the gun in a river somewhere. Or he’s getting ready to.”

  “He still had it this morning,” Virgil said. “I doubt he’d risk moving around with it when the next yard’s full of cops. Maybe get rid of it tonight.”

  “He could have gotten rid of it right after he shot Osborne. Be a priority, I’d think,” Jenkins said.

  “Let’s hope he didn’t—that’s all we can do. And don’t forget that we have that .223 shell, and he still believes we have a fingerprint,” Virgil said.

 
“He offered to let us print him . . .”

  “Calling our bluff. We should check this Quonset, see if it works as the place he might have been shooting from. If it does, we need to maneuver him.”

  “By doing what?”

  “You’ll think of something,” Virgil said.

  * * *

  —

  Apel’s Quonset was a seventy-year-old, post–Korean War two-story steel shed meant to cover heavy equipment and its associated appurtenances, and nothing else. Access was through twelve-foot, outward-swinging doors at one end of the hut.

  The Quonset had a half dozen two-foot-square windows on each side, through which they could see a Bob-Cat and some attachments, an older Caterpillar excavator, and space for a couple of more pieces of equipment. A long wooden workbench on one wall held cans that they couldn’t identify, along with what appeared to be spare or damaged parts, some tools, shovels, and miscellaneous operating gear.

  Standing at the end of the Quonset that faced the church, Virgil said, “Guess what? You couldn’t see the targets from here.” They couldn’t because there was a low wooden hut in the way, with signs on all three sides that said “Pet Parlor—Pet Bathing and Grooming.” The signs were old, and the hut appeared to be vacant.

  Jenkins stepped back from the Quonset, looked up, and asked, “How about from up there?”

  Virgil stepped back and looked up. The roof of the Quonset overhung the vertical wall, under which, right at the top of the wall, was what looked like a ventilation grille. They walked back along the side of the hut, trying to see the grille through the windows, but they couldn’t because of the way the windows were pushed out from the rounded sides, each under its own small gable.

  They walked around to the swinging doors, which were locked with a hinge and a padlock; but there was a half-inch space between the doors, near the bottom, and when Virgil got down on his knees and looked through the crack, he could see light coming through the grille at the other end.

  “What?” Jenkins asked.

  Virgil stood, brushed off his knees, looked up at the Quonset’s overhanging roof. “That’s, what do you think, sixteen to eighteen feet up there? Something like that?”

  “Probably.”

  “It’s clear, open space inside, and I don’t see any ladder.”

  “He could bring one . . . A construction guy’s probably got to have one,” Jenkins said.

  “Let’s go back to the scene of the shooting, see if we can see the top of the Quonset from there.”

  They got in the truck, drove past Bram Smit’s house on the way out to Main Street, and down to the church. On the way, Virgil said, “You know what? I bet you could raise that excavator bucket up high enough that he could crawl up there.”

  Jenkins said, “I bet you’re right.”

  Across the street from the church, where the three victims had been shot, Virgil got out of the truck, got his Nikon and longest lens, and looked down the street toward the Quonset. It would have to be three hundred yards away, he thought; and while he couldn’t see much of the building, he could see the peak of its roof and the ventilation grille. He took a picture.

  “Time to call the sheriff,” he said.

  24

  Zimmer was accompanied by Lucy Banning, the deputy who’d taken Larry Van Den Berg to jail. They gathered in Skinner & Holland’s back room to talk about Apel. Skinner was in school, but Holland was at the store and wanted to hear about what Virgil had found. When Zimmer asked if Virgil thought it was appropriate to include a civilian in a police discussion, Virgil shrugged, and said, “Sometimes. And this is one of those times. Nobody knows more about the locals than the locals.”

  “And I am the mayor,” Holland said. “By a landslide.”

  Virgil told them what they’d learned about Apel. All of it was suggestion, but the fact that Apel lived in what amounted to Osborne’s backyard and had easy and rapid access to the house was convincing.

  “Plus,” Jenkins added, “when the guy shot Virgil, and Shrake was running, we almost had him cornered. But when he disappeared, he was running that way—toward his house and Osborne’s.”

  “You know what? When I talked to Apel, he reminded me that I’d seen him standing on his porch and that he’d pointed out where the guy had run to,” Virgil said. “No way he had time to change into a white T-shirt and shorts. We’re talking about a couple of seconds.”

  Jenkins said, “Huh.” And, “We’ll figure that out later.”

  * * *

  —

  Holland thought he knew what the loan to Osborne involved. “Years ago, back when I was in college, Barry and Davy started a brew pub out on the Interstate in that old Burton Ford dealership. The rumor at the time was, Davy’s wife had come into an inheritance, they put up the money, and Barry operated the place—Davy and Ann had their own business to run; they make good money running their heavy equipment.”

  “What I remember about it is,” Zimmer said, “the brew pub went down like the Titanic.”

  “Wasn’t there some kind of . . . disease that they caught out of there?” Banning asked.

  “Wasn’t a disease. I heard that tanks were contaminated with soap of some kind, and, at the grand opening, everybody who’d had a beer got the runs something fierce,” Zimmer said. “They’d named the place the Mad Hatter, and after the grand opening, everybody started calling it the Mud Butter.”

  “That’s not good,” Jenkins said.

  “It was a bad location anyway,” Zimmer said. “There’s nothing out there. If you go in and have three or four beers, you’re automatically driving drunk when you leave. Took the highway patrol about one second to figure that out. You got to drinking at the Mud Butter, and there was about a fifty-fifty chance the bears would be all over your ass when you left.”

  “That’s not good,” Jenkins said.

  “So the place goes down, and Barry winds up getting stuck with a piece of the original investment,” Virgil said. “His mother was their backstop. He’d keep paying interest on the loan, and when she finally died, he’d come into a bundle, and Apel would get the principal back.”

  Jenkins asked Zimmer, “You think it’s enough for a warrant? You know the judges around here.”

  “I got a guy I can talk to,” Zimmer said. “What do you want to do?”

  “First we hit that Quonset hut,” Virgil said, “see if there’s any sign that somebody’s been shooting through the vent. There’s a big padlock on the door, so Apel couldn’t hardly say somebody else got in there. Then, if there’s anything, we go to the house and hope to hell he hasn’t ditched the rifle. And we check to see if there’s arrows matching the ones that hit me and Shrake.”

  “Goddamnit, I think we’re rolling,” Holland said. “Though, I gotta tell you, if you’d said Davy Apel last week, I would have said you were full of it.”

  “That’s not good,” Jenkins said. He added, “I’d be happier if you’d said he’s a psychotic asshole you hadn’t thought of.”

  “Money does weird things to people,” Zimmer said. He looked at his watch. “You all go get some of those potpies. I’ll make a call, get the warrant over here. Probably take an hour, if old Hartley’s out on the golf course, which he probably is.”

  Holland said to Virgil and Jenkins, “Hartley’s the judge.”

  “Been a bad spring for golf,” Jenkins said. “The greens are always wet; you see the balls throwing off that spray, so you can’t judge how hard to hit a putt. And then there are footprint indentations around the cup . . .”

  Virgil jumped in before it became a conversation. “Let’s get the judge going. Let’s get the potpies going.” And to Jenkins: “Fuck golf anyway. Stupid goddamn game, chasing a ball around a perfectly good cow pasture.”

  “I’ve lost all respect for you,” Jenkins said.

  “Can we get the warrant without all the
se histrionics?” Holland asked. Everybody looked at him, and he said, “I know, it’s a big word, I apologize, but I couldn’t think of anything else on the spur of the moment. So, we should stop dicking around and get the warrant. Okay?”

  “There you go,” Jenkins said.

  * * *

  —

  Hartley, indeed, was on the golf course. The deputy drove up and down twelve fairways before he found the judge’s foursome, and Hartley was so pissed off, Zimmer said, that he almost refused to consider the warrant. Reminded about the killings—and the voters—he reconsidered.

  “We’re good to go,” Zimmer said. “Lucy’s got a bolt cutter in her car, but don’t we need a ladder?”

  They did, for the inside of the Quonset hut. The town had one, in the municipal equipment shed, and Holland went to get it with the store’s pickup truck. They then met at the Quonset, Banning used her cutters to take the padlock off, and they were in.

  The hut was on the back side of the Main Street stores, so they had no audience for their entry. A tired-looking Bob-Cat sat in one corner of the hut, but the large excavator was gone. Zimmer looked around, and said, “You know what? This is one of those Korean War surplus huts, so it’s insulated. See how thick the walls are? Gotta be a foot thick. Probably full of asbestos . . . But it would sure cut down the sound of a gunshot.”

  “Smit’s only about, what, fifty yards from here?” Virgil said, looking down the street. “Man, this looks almost too good.”

  Getting the ladder up was harder than expected—they couldn’t figure out how the extension worked and, when they did, it turned out to be somewhat broken, but Jenkins hammered the relevant stopper in place, and Virgil climbed up to the grille. It was eighteen inches high and a foot wide, with eight rotating metal louvers that could be moved from completely open to fully closed. They now were almost closed.