Holy Ghost

by John Sandford

  The dog whimpered again and edged toward the bowl and drank. And drank. And drank. And then edged away from the bowl and lay down again, his head stretched out in front of him between his paws, his eyes rolling up to Virgil.

  * * *

  —

  A man shouted, and Virgil almost jumped out of his skin.

  “Virgil! Virgil Flowers!”

  Virgil shouted back, “Down in the basement.”

  “Holy cow, it stinks in here . . .”

  A deputy appeared on the landing, one hand pinching his nose. “What’s that?”

  “Collie,” Virgil said. “He’s alive, but not by much. I got him some water.”

  “Ah, man . . . I gotta get out of here.”

  “Go back out through the mudroom,” Virgil said. He touched the collie on the head: his hair was matted and felt almost like plastic broom bristles. “We’ll be back, boy,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Outside, the deputy said, “Another guy’ll be here in a minute. I don’t know if I can go back in there until we air it out.”

  “Let me give you some Vicks,” Virgil said.

  5

  Zimmer stood in the kitchen, his nostrils slick with Vicks, and looked at Andorra’s body with disgust: “He was a good ol’ boy, and that’s no way to end up, all rotten and falling apart.”

  “I talked to my boss, and he’s sending down the crime scene crew, so we gotta stay out of there,” Virgil said. All the deputies had wanted a look. “They probably won’t be here until late.”

  Zimmer nodded, and said, “I’ll keep a couple of cars in the yard until they finish up and we move the body. You think he killed himself? Or somebody did it for him?”

  “Looks like suicide, but if he wasn’t murdered, it’d be a hell of a coincidence,” Virgil said. “I wanted to ask him about long-range shooters.”

  Behind them, two deputies came up the stairs, carrying the collie in a blanket they’d stripped off a second-floor bed. They’d folded it like a hammock, with the dog slung inside. One of the cops had a sack of dog treats in his car and he fed peanut butter–flavored cookies to the collie, who ate them slowly, but wanted another. And another.

  “Motherfucker who’d lock a live dog down in the basement,” Zimmer said. “I don’t think Glen would do that if he decided to kill himself. He’d at least let the dog outside. If Glen was murdered . . . Well, I can understand shooting somebody, but why would you do that to a dog?”

  “If it’s the Wheatfield shooter, we already know he’s an asshole,” Virgil said. “I don’t think a dog would mean much to him.”

  * * *

  —

  Zimmer looked back at Andorra’s body, waved toward it, and asked, “Suppose he was murdered. This tell you anything? The whole . . . you know . . .”

  “The shooter probably came out to the range regularly enough that Glen knew what he was shooting. I’ll say in passing that the Nazis used to come out here until Glen kicked them out, though that doesn’t prove anything,” Virgil said. “I think the gun on the floor will turn out to be the weapon that killed him.”

  “In my experience, people who like military stuff are attracted to 1911 .45s. Nazi people.”

  “Still not proof,” Virgil said. “Besides, they might be more attracted to Lugers or something German. You also have to consider that Glen didn’t like those guys—but he let the killer come right into his TV room. Working backwards from that, I’d say that the shooter was somebody he knew fairly well and who shot him because he knew that Glen had seen him sighting a .223. Or knew he was a good shot with a .223. Also, the guy had a big handgun, which means he’s not a casual target shooter. He likes guns, and he probably has several.”

  “There are fourteen thousand people in Lamy County, half of them women. And of the other half, half of them are too young or too old and feeble to pull this off. That leaves about thirty-five hundred male suspects, and we can eliminate most of them by reading through the phone book and saying no,” Zimmer said. “That ought to get us down to a few hundred.”

  “I’d bet that one of your deputies knows the shooter personally and knows that he has some guns,” Virgil said. “Ask them. Ask who they think it could be.”

  Zimmer nodded. “I’ll do that. And I gotta find Glen’s son. My wife thinks he lives up in the Cities somewhere.”

  “Glen didn’t have a wife?”

  “Divorced. My wife thinks his ex lives in Seattle.”

  “Maybe I should be talking to your wife,” Virgil said.

  “I don’t think you’re ready for that,” Zimmer says. “You’d need several years of preparation.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil’s boss, Jon Duncan, called to say that the crime scene crew was loading up, but it’d be 7:30 before they made it down. Virgil locked the doors of the house with a key he found in a kitchen cupboard, turned the scene over to the deputies, telling them that he’d be back at 8, and warned them not to go inside.

  The dog was gone, loaded into one of the sheriff’s SUVs and taken to a shelter. “Hope he’s not too far gone. You let a dog go too long without water and it kills his kidneys,” Zimmer said. “That’s a good mutt. I’d take him myself if I didn’t already have three.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil caught Willie Nelson singing “Stardust” on the satellite radio on his way back to town; listened and thought about how far the song was from the afternoon’s death scene. He needed something to eat before what would be a long night but stopped at the Vissers’ to take a shower and change clothes to get the stink of the dead man off him. As he was parking, a battered Jeep pulled up to the front of the house, and Wardell Holland got out.

  “I heard,” he said. “Must’ve been ugly.”

  “Still is,” Virgil said. “You know anybody who can operate a .45?”

  Holland rolled his eyes up, thinking, then said, “Nope. Haven’t had them in the Army for quite a long time, but they were always a popular gun, so I’m sure there are some around. Bob Martin—he lives over on Walnut—does some gunsmithing, he might know.”

  Roy Visser came out, slapped hands with Holland, said to Virgil, “We were in the Army at the same time. He was a hero; I fixed trucks.”

  “Trucks were more important than lieutenants,” Holland said.

  “That’s true,” Visser said. To Virgil: “Did you talk to Glen?”

  “Glen’s dead,” Virgil said.

  Visser’s mouth literally dropped open, and Virgil scratched him off any possible list of suspects.

  “Shot? Somebody shot him?”

  Virgil nodded. “Sometime back. Probably more than a week, maybe even two.”

  “Holy cow . . . What about his dog?”

  Virgil shook his head. “Locked in the basement. There was a sack of dog food on the landing, he had ripped it open, but he was hurting for water. Still alive, last time I saw him. Got some water in him.”

  “Oh, man. That’s Pat. Pat the dog. World’s best dog. Where is he?”

  “Took him to the shelter,” Virgil said.

  “I’ll go out and take a look,” Visser said. “We lost our Lucky a year ago; it’s about time we got another one.”

  Virgil said, “Do that. I’ll call Zimmer and fix it. I need to get something to eat and get back out to Andorra’s place.”

  “Hell, Danny’ll fix you something,” Visser said. “C’mon. And you kinda stink, so throw your stuff in the washer. I’ll go see about Pat, later on . . .”

  “Gonna need a vet,” Virgil said. “He was locked down there for days.”

  “I got a vet,” Visser said. “You c’mon, eat. And, Wardell, you need something to eat, too. You can’t eat any more of that shit from the store.”

  “I resemble that remark,” Holland said.

 
Visser herded them inside. Virgil went to take a shower and change clothes; Danielle got his clothes and carried them away while he was still in the shower. He wasn’t particularly body shy, and she apparently wasn’t easily impressed, so that’s what happened, and without unnecessary commentary. When Virgil made it back to the kitchen, she’d warmed up leftover meat loaf and nuked a bag of frozen french fries.

  “I’m going out to the shelter with Roy,” she told Virgil. “I know Pat.”

  The food wasn’t great, but it was hot, and tolerable when covered with ketchup, and Holland rambled on about the Marian apparitions being a mixed blessing: “If they hadn’t happened, Glen would probably still be alive.”

  “Maybe, but the town would be dead,” Roy Visser said, “And you’d still be sitting in that double-wide shooting flies.” To Virgil: “I suspect he shoots them sitting, but he claims he wing-shoots them.”

  “I’d never shoot a sitting fly,” Holland said.

  “That’s not what Skinner told me,” Danielle said.

  Roy Visser’s eyes narrowed, and he asked, “You been talking to Skinner?”

  “Shut up, Roy. He’s a nice boy.”

  “He’s screwed half the women and girls in town, and I don’t want him messing around in my territory,” Roy Visser said. “But I would like to know what that boy’s magic is.”

  “You don’t need to know,” Danielle Visser said. “You already got me.”

  “And the answer’s simple,” Holland said.

  They all waited.

  “He likes women,” Holland said.

  Roy Visser and Virgil looked at each other, then Virgil said, “We all like women.”

  “Yeah, but Skinner really likes women. Not just sex. He likes women. Young women, old women. I’ve seen him bullshitting ninety-year-olds. Making them laugh, too. Getting a twinkle from them.”

  Roy Visser said, “Whoa! That’s kinda nasty.”

  “I didn’t say he was screwing them. He likes them and they know it. That’s his whole secret.”

  They contemplated that, then Danielle Visser said to her husband, “Let’s go get Pat. All you men can think about is Skinner liking women and what you might learn from it.”

  * * *

  —

  When they finished dinner, Virgil drove back to Andorra’s house. Bea Sawyer was standing on the mudroom stoop when he got there, a 3M mask hanging under her chin. In addition to the crime scene van, there were two sheriff’s cars in the yard, with the deputies leaning on fenders and chatting with each other. The chances that Sawyer, the crime scene crew chief, would let a deputy into her crime scene were nonexistent.

  Virgil walked over, and asked, “Suicide?”

  “Don’t believe so. The way the slug went through his head, he was leaning away from it, but the shot came in level. We found the bullet hole in the wall, hit a stud. We can dig it out.”

  “Brass?”

  “One shell. Like you’d get in a suicide.”

  “But no note, or anything?”

  “Eh, I wouldn’t say not anything. Andorra was divorced, as I understand it, and his ex-wife lives a long way from here. But, he was still sexually active. There’s a box of condoms in the top drawer of his bedroom dresser, a Trojan Super Value Pleasure Pack, hundred-count. Looks like there are about sixty of them left . . . so forty or so were used for protection, unless he was sponsoring a balloon festival.”

  “How about the sheets?”

  “The sheets are absolutely fresh and unmarked. In my opinion, too fresh and unmarked. It looks like the last thing he did before blowing his brains out, or getting his brains blown out, is that he changed the sheets.”

  “Which you normally wouldn’t do before eating a bullet.”

  “Can’t tell. Maybe he was naturally neat. Some suicides get all dressed up for the act because they don’t want their bodies to be disrespected.”

  * * *

  —

  Don Baldwin, Sawyer’s partner, stuck his head out the door, and said, “I thought I heard you, Virgil. Another interesting one, huh?”

  “I’ve been hearing about it from Bea,” Virgil said. “How you doin’, Don?”

  “Got something to add. I should probably tell Beatrice first, you know, so everything stays in the proper bureaucratic channels.”

  “Oh, for God’s sakes, Don, what is it?” Sawyer asked. Before he could answer, Sawyer told Virgil, “I’ve got him finishing the scan of the house.”

  “Down in the basement, there’s a workbench with a canvas bag full of gun-cleaning tools, earmuffs, and a partial pack of handgun targets,” Baldwin said. “There are four boxes of .45 shells in the bag, two partially used. There’s also a gun safe. I opened it, and there’s a custom slot for a handgun that isn’t there but which would fit a .45 perfectly.”

  “Then that’s probably his own gun on the floor,” Virgil said.

  Sawyer said, “If that is the case and it’s not a suicide, it brings up the question of how the killer got hold of the gun.”

  “Could have just come back from the range with the killer,” Virgil said.

  Baldwin said, “There also appears to be a missing rifle. There are two shotguns on one side of the safe, one with a two-power scope, probably a slug gun for deer hunting, the other a twelve-gauge pheasant gun. There’s a .30–06 on the other side, and then an empty slot that looks used, but the barrel would be too slender to be a shotgun. Did I mention that there’s a box of .223 FMJ shells in that range bag?”

  “Ah, shit,” Virgil said. “The .223 we’re looking for belonged to Andorra. The guy came here, killed Andorra, and took the rifle.” Everything that Virgil had imagined about the shooter sighting the gun on the range and killing Andorra because Andorra had seen him doing it went out the window.

  “Andorra must’ve known him pretty well, then,” Sawyer said. “But how did the range bag end up down in the basement while the gun came back up with the killer?”

  Virgil considered the question, shook his head, and said, “I can think of eight different ways that could happen—and there’s no way to know which one to pick.”

  “Give me one,” Sawyer said.

  Virgil shrugged. “They came in with their guns, Andorra leaves the bag on the kitchen counter, they go into the dining room to chat, the guy goes back out to the kitchen like he’s getting a drink of water, gets the .45, comes back, and shoots Andorra. Then he’s smart enough to try to confuse us—he takes the bag downstairs so it looks like Andorra had to go down to get it and bring the gun back up.”

  “Nobody’s that smart,” Baldwin said.

  “Well, who the fuck knows,” Virgil snapped. “Besides, we’ll never figure it out, so why worry about it?”

  “’Cause I like mysteries,” Baldwin said. He added, “I’m going back down there.”

  “Tell him what you said about the rubbers,” Bea said.

  Baldwin said, “Oh, yeah. They suggest that he’s seeing a woman of child-bearing age, and since forty-two of them are missing, he’s seeing her with some frequency. You wouldn’t buy a box of a hundred if you were using one a month.”

  “Could also be seeing an older woman with an STD, but I’m siding with Don on this one,” Bea said.

  “No sign of a name for her? Cards, notes . . . ?”

  “Not that we’ve found so far,” Sawyer said.

  Baldwin turned to go back down to the basement, and Virgil shouted after him, “Hey, Don!”

  Baldwin shouted, “What?”

  “Were any of those targets used?”

  “No. No used targets.”

  Sawyer asked, “Is that important?”

  “Well, the range is a homemade one. There are a couple of trash barrels down there that I suspect Andorra emptied. Right now, they’re almost full, like they haven’t been emptied in a while,” Virgil said. “Peopl
e throw used targets into them. I wonder if there’d be any .45 targets in there?”

  “I got some nice thick rubber gloves, if you want to go look,” she said.

  “I probably should,” Virgil said. “Have you gotten to his wallet yet?”

  “Yeah. Nothing there of interest.”

  “Was there a magnetic key card?”

  “A plain blue one. Do you know what it’s for?”

  “Probably for the gate to the shooting club. Let me borrow it . . .”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil got the key card and the rubber gloves and drove back out to the range. The sun’s disk was sitting right on the tree line: he wouldn’t have much time. He drove through the gate and over the top of the rise and found that he was alone.

  He drove to the pistol range, found what appeared to be new targets sitting at the top of the nearly full trash barrel. The targets had been gathered in a stack and then folded over before they were dropped in the barrel. Each target showed more than a dozen shots, grouped in a smaller-than-palm-sized space near the center. The occasional target showed individual holes that suggested the shooters had been using 9mm, or .38 caliber and .22 caliber, handguns. Virgil thought the targets may have been used by the couple he’d seen. Not bad shooting, if they were doing rapid-fire self-defense work.

  He started digging through the trash, pulling it out and dropping it on the ground. There were used targets, water and soft-drink bottles and cans, empty ammo boxes, a couple of pizza boxes, sandwich wrappers from Subway, and two black plastic bags of the kind used to pick up dog poop. The deeper he got, the soggier he found the contents, from the intermittent rainstorms.

  Some of the targets had names on them; most did not. He was nearly to the bottom of the can when he pulled out three that he would bet had been shot with a .45. There were other possibilities—a .40 caliber would make a hole only slightly smaller, and a .44 would be almost indistinguishable from a .45—but the .45 was by far the most common, and they knew that Andorra had one.