Holy Ghost

by John Sandford

  “That’s because you’re right,” Virgil said. “It’s a guy.”

  * * *

  —

  Frankie went to shower and get dressed while Virgil got his traveling gear together, which, as usual, bummed out Honus. Honus was a dog of no specific breed, although there had to be some Labrador DNA in the mix: he loved to go out to the swimming hole. That wouldn’t happen for another few weeks, as the water coming out of the spring uphill from the hole was essentially liquid ice.

  Virgil gave him a scratch, then roughed up his head. He was getting neurotic about the dog, which the dog took advantage of. Frankie never made him feel bad about going out on a case, and she loved to hear about them afterwards. Honus, on the other hand, always acted like this was it: Virgil was ditching him, never to play baseball again. The dog could chase down grounders forever.

  * * *

  —

  Virgil was a tall man, thin, athletic, with longish blond hair and an easy smile. He was wearing a “got mule?” T-shirt, purchased in the parking lot at a Gov’t Mule show a year earlier in Des Moines, an inky-blue corduroy sport coat, and bootcut blue jeans over cordovan cowboy boots.

  As an agent of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, he should have been wearing a suit with a blue or white oxford cloth shirt, a dull but coordinated nylon necktie, and high-polished black wingtips. What the BCA didn’t know, he figured, couldn’t hurt him.

  Since he’d be close to home, he packed only one extra pair of jeans, with five days’ worth of everything else. To the clothing, he added a pump shotgun and a box of shells. A Glock 9mm semiautomatic pistol went in his Tahoe’s gun safe with two extra magazines. If he needed more than fifty-one shots at somebody, he deserved to die.

  When he was packed, he considered the boat. He rarely went anywhere in Minnesota without towing the boat in case an emergency fishing opportunity should jump out in front of him. This time, though, he decided to leave it. There wasn’t fishable water anywhere near Wheatfield, unless you liked carp and bullheads. And he was only an hour from home, so, if he needed to, he could always come and get the boat.

  Frankie reappeared to kiss him good-bye and give him a few more minutes of essential advice: “Don’t get shot. With your rug rat chewing on my ankles, I’m gonna need your help.”

  “I’ll be back for the ultrasound, even if I haven’t gotten anywhere on the shooting.”

  “Better be,” she said. The ultrasound was scheduled for the following week.

  Virgil rubbed his chin on Honus the yellow dog’s forehead and then he was on his way, turning south down Highway 169 and out of town.

  * * *

  —

  Virgil had passed through Wheatfield a couple of times but had never stopped. He knew little about the place, other than what he’d read in the newspaper stories, of which there had been many in the past few months. It had been settled by Dutch pioneers in the nineteenth century, who gave the town the name Tarweveld, which means “wheatfield.” The Dutch were followed by a bunch of Bavarians, then finally the Irish, few of whom could pronounce the town’s name. By 1900, even the Americanized inhabitants were stumbling over it, and, in 1902, the name was officially changed to Wheatfield. But the Dutch influence remained: just about every other lawn had a miniature windmill on it, the product of a manic carpenter who loved building them and insisted on doing it.

  Like a lot of prairie towns, Wheatfield had been dying. Minnesota and the surrounding states had plenty of jobs—Minnesota’s unemployment rate was three percent, and Iowa’s was even lower, down in the two’s. The problem was, the jobs were in the larger towns, the smaller towns having less and less to offer their residents, especially the younger ones.

  Wheatfield had reached its peak population of 1,500 as a farm service center after World War II. The Interstate had severely damaged its businesses—it was too easy to get to the larger towns—and a regional Walmart had pretty much finished them off. There was still a cafe and a gas station and a hardware store, and a couple of other businesses, but they’d been moribund as well.

  Not anymore, thanks be to God.

  The previous winter, on a Wednesday night between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Virgin Mary had appeared at St. Mary’s Catholic Church before a congregation of mostly Mexican worshippers, with a few devout Anglos mixed in. Unlike other Marian apparitions, as her appearances were called, this one had been documented by numerous cell phone cameras.

  The night after the first apparition, the church had been jammed with worshippers and the simply curious, as word of the miracle spread. There had not yet been a priest in attendance, so a deacon was presiding when the Virgin appeared the second time, floating in the air behind the altar.

  The Virgin spoke. According to television commentators on Telemundo, she said, “Bienaventurados los mansos, porque ellos heredaran la tierra,” or, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” The same commentators said the Virgin didn’t have a very good accent in any dialect of Spanish that they knew of, but somebody quickly pointed out that she couldn’t be expected to since her native language would have been Aramaic; or, perhaps, she was speaking what would have been closer to Latin. A few skeptics suggested a local accent, more of a oodala-oodala-oodala Minnesota version of Spanish.

  A panel of experts convened by CNN agreed that the Virgin’s appearance could cost Donald Trump three to four percentage points in the next presidential election by encouraging meek female voters who wished to inherit the earth. A similar panel on Fox argued her appearance would certainly increase the vote for Donald Trump, possibly by as much as five percentage points, by encouraging the religious right.

  A television reporter from the Twin Cities had been interviewing people outside the church when the second apparition occurred, and when worshippers began screaming, she rushed inside. Her cameraman tripped and fell going up the stairs, was nearly trampled by people fighting to get past him. He managed to get video of only the very end of the apparition as the figure of the Virgin faded away.

  But he got something.

  The reporter herself had seen and heard the Virgin.

  At the end of her report, she had tearfully confessed, “I came to St. Mary’s as a nonbeliever, but now . . .” She fell to her knees: “I believe. I BELIEVE!”

  She went worldwide, and a week later was offered a job as a weather girl on an L.A. television station, an offer she accepted.

  * * *

  —

  As Virgil rolled past a million acres of newly sprouted cornfields on the way to Wheatfield, he realized that there were damn few wheatfields around anymore. Everything had gone to beans and corn. A patch of oats might pop up here or there, recognizable by the bluish tint, and there were spotty plots of commercial vegetables—cucumbers, string beans—but that was about it.

  On the animal side, there were pigs and cows and some riding horses.

  One interesting thing about spring, Virgil thought, especially a wet one, was how you could identify the livestock without ever seeing them. Cow shit was a definite stink, but a tolerable one. Pig shit, on the other hand, wasn’t tolerable: it had a hard ammonia overtone that made the nostrils seize up. Chicken shit had an unpleasant edge, like when damp pinfeathers were scorched off a roaster’s carcass; horse shit, on the other hand, was almost sweet, if not actually cheerful.

  He thought about it as the car rolled through a swampy smell and decided he might have been working out in the countryside a tad too long, now that he had begun comparing and contrasting the different varieties of livestock odors.

  He switched to contemplating the appearance of the Blessed Virgin. Virgil’s father was a Lutheran minister, and Virgil had gone to church almost every Sunday and Wednesday from the time he’d been born until he’d gone to the University of Minnesota. At the university, he’d lost his faith in churches as bureaucratic organizations, but hadn’t entir
ely lost his faith in God: if you spent time immersed in nature, in his opinion, you simply saw too many wonders to casually dismiss the possibility of a deity. Think about a solar eclipse for a while . . .

  About the Virgin Mary, he was agnostic. The Lutheran Church, in the years he’d spent in it, seemed confused on the subject of Mary. But if Mary was actually out there somewhere, as a spirit, it didn’t seem completely unreasonable that she might decide to appear from time to time.

  On the other hand, most Marian apparitions—he’d looked it up on the Wiki—seemed to present themselves to children or deeply religious folk whose testimony was accepted on the basis of faith rather than hard evidence. Skeptics might ascribe these apparitions to religion-based psychological phenomena or even a type of hysteria, if not outright fraud.

  Wheatfield was a whole new kind of apparition: the crowd was large, not uniformly religious, and armed with cell phone cameras.

  * * *

  —

  Virgil crossed I-90 and ten minutes later entered Wheatfield. Most similar small prairie towns resembled the main street in the movie High Noon before the shooting started—a line of ramshackle stores on an empty street. Wheatfield had all the ramshackle you could hope for but was busy. Even six blocks out, he could see people crossing Main Street and walking along the sidewalks, cars lining the block-long business district.

  St. Mary’s was located at one end of a block with another church at the other end, a flat green lawn between them. A wooden windmill squatted in the middle of the lawn, looking a lot like a two-story red-white-and-blue fire hydrant, with ten-foot-long vanes that rotated slowly in the breeze. There were no parking spaces on the street, so Virgil drove around the corner, past the Immanuel Reformed Church. Both churches had parking lots in back; Virgil squeezed into the one behind St. Mary’s, along with fifteen other vehicles.

  He got out, looked around to orient himself, walked past the church and spotted Skinner & Holland, Eats & Souvenirs, across the street. He let a couple of cars go past, hurried across, and went inside. The place was packed: two women were looking at a rack of three-dimensional postcards of the apparition, several other people were buying soft drinks and snacks and ice-cream cones. A tall, thin, freckled kid was manning the cash register, keeping up a steady sales patter with the customers. Virgil took a Diet Coke out of a cooler, got in line, and, when his turn came, gave the kid a five-dollar bill, and said, “I’m looking for Wardell Holland. I’m with the BCA.”

  The kid nodded, and turned and shouted, “Wardell! The cop is here.”

  Virgil said, mildly and in the spirit of educating the young, “Not all cops like to be called cops.”

  “I heard that,” the kid said, handing Virgil his change. “I figure they got bigger problems to deal with than me calling them cops. I’m Skinner, by the way.”

  Holland pushed through a curtain that closed off the back of the store, looked toward Virgil, and asked, “Virgil?”

  “That’s me,” Virgil said. They shook hands, and Holland said, “Come on back. I’d have given you a free Coke, but Skinner . . .”

  Virgil looked back at the kid. “He doesn’t like cops?”

  “When we had a town cop—that was a few years ago—he’d give Skinner a hard time every time he saw him.”

  “For what? Dope?”

  “No. Skinner would be out driving his girlfriends around, and the guy would pull him over. Every time. He’d yank him out of the car and yell at him,” Holland said. “Embarrass him. Skinner hasn’t had much time for cops ever since.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Virgil said, as he followed Holland through the curtain into the back room. Virgil had had some problems with cops himself as a kid. “The cop sounds like a jerk.”

  “Well, Skinner usually had an open beer or something . . . and he was twelve at the time.”

  “Ah.”

  * * *

  —

  Holland was Virgil’s height, heavier in the chest and shoulders, clean-shaven, with reddish brown hair; he was wearing a blue work shirt and jeans and one boot; his other foot having been replaced with a flexible, sickle-shaped piece of black metal. He waved Virgil at a well-used green easy chair and took a matching chair on the other side of a battered round coffee table. The back room was mostly used for storage, stacks of cardboard cartons full of chips and soft drinks and beer, and smelled exactly like that: cardboard and beer, with an undertone of pizza. In addition to the easy chairs, four more chairs, no two alike, were arranged around a card table, with a microwave on a shelf over a sink on the back wall. The room was apparently used for employee breaks.

  “Sheriff will be here in five minutes,” Holland said. “We’re seriously worried. Right on the edge of desperate. The sheriff says you’re the man for the job.”

  “Nice of him,” Virgil said. “I heard about the first shooting, but nobody called us.”

  “We thought it might be accidental. Lots of hunters around here, and nobody heard the shot or had any idea where it came from. Could have come from a mile away,” Holland said. “The guy who got shot—his name was Harvey Coates, and he and his wife were here from Dubuque—wasn’t hurt all that bad. I mean, bad enough, but he won’t be crippled, or anything. Dimples on his thigh, is all, after he heals up. Two inches lower and he would have lost a knee. Anyway, we didn’t have a slug, didn’t have any clues . . . Not much we could do. And, besides, like I said, we thought it might be an accident. We asked the shooter to come forward but nobody did. That’s now starting to look . . . idiotic. We should have called you guys.”

  “Huh. Then yesterday . . .”

  “Same deal,” Holland said. “Even the exact same time, four-fifteen, or a minute or two after that, just before the first evening service at St. Mary’s. The second time, the shooter—whoever he is—took out a woman. She got hit in the hip, the shot went all the way through. She won’t die, either, but she’s in a lot worse shape than Coates. Busted the ball in her hip joint; she’s got bone splinters all through her pelvic area. She’s gonna need a full hip replacement before she can walk again. She’s over at the Mayo.”

  “You say there’s no bullet?”

  “Nothing. No idea of where it ended up,” Holland said. “Both times, the people were waiting at the corner and they were all talking with each other and turning this way and that. We know where the slugs entered and exited, but since we don’t know their positions, exactly how they were standing, we don’t have a good idea of where the bullet came from. The deputies talked to both of the victims and they themselves don’t know where they were standing. I believe—”

  From outside, Skinner shouted, “Wardell! ’Nother cop!”

  “Gotta be the sheriff,” Holland said. He heaved himself out of the chair and went to the curtain, and called, “Karl. Back here.”

  Karl Zimmer came through the curtain, spotted Virgil, and said, “It’s that fuckin’ Flowers. Nice to see you, Virgie.”

  “Karl,” Virgil said, as they shook hands. “I heard you sank your boat.”

  “That’s not a happy subject,” Zimmer said. He was a tall man with a gray crewcut and gold-rimmed glasses, wearing a tan Carhartt canvas jacket with a badge sewn on the left side. He looked around, picked a kitchen chair as Holland sank back into his easy chair. “My kid was over on the Cedar, hit a snag, ripped a hole in the hull. Instead of beaching it, he tried to run back to the ramp. Sank it with the engine running full bore, which didn’t do it a hell of a lot of good.”

  “Insurance?” Virgil asked.

  “Well, we’re arguing about the engine,” Zimmer said. “The Farmers guy said hitting the snag and putting a hole in the boat was an accident but wrecking the motor was negligence. We’ll get something, but I don’t think we’ll get it all. Two-year-old Yamaha V MAX 175.”

  “Ouch,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah. But, you know, shit happens . . . Did Wardell tel
l you all about the shootings?”

  “He’s started to fill me in,” Virgil said.

  * * *

  —

  The woman who’d been shot the day before was named Betty Rice and she’d been in town for two days, going to all the church services at St. Mary’s, hoping for an apparition. “She was over from Sioux Falls with her sister and a friend,” Zimmer said. “Never been here before; none of them had. Same with the fellow who got shot last week.”

  “You didn’t call for a crime scene team?”

  “What’d be the point?” Zimmer asked. “We don’t know where the shooter was, we don’t know where the bullet went.”

  “Crime scene might’ve been able to tell where the bullet came from by looking at the blood spatter,” Virgil said.

  Zimmer shook his head. “We thought about that. The fact is, after she got hit, everybody went running, and, when nobody else got shot, they all came running back. It happened on the grass over there. Everybody was calling for doctors and police, and by the time things got sorted out the whole area had been trampled over for an hour and they’d moved the woman around a couple of times and she was bleeding bad . . . Virgil, I’m saying we had a bloody mudhole, and you couldn’t tell anything in there.”

  Virgil nodded. “Okay.”

  Holland said, “I think the shot came down from the business district. Maybe from a two-story building on the east side of the street. There are only a dozen of those, but most of the top-floor rooms are still empty. Some of them are being rehabbed to rent, and the walls are open for the construction work. Guy could get up there and have a pretty nice sniper’s nest. I borrowed one of Karl’s deputies, and we walked up and down over there, never found anything—no shells, nothing. Judging from the wounds, I suspect both people were shot with a .223. Small entry, bigger exit, but not all that big. About as big around as your middle finger, and clean on the edges. So: powerful, small-caliber full metal jacket slug. Maybe military ammo or target stuff.”