Holy Ghost

by John Sandford

  “You actually don’t need to go out to the porn sites. He’s got his own collection on the machine, and it’s hooked up to the TV.” He pointed to a cable snaking along the wall and up behind the TV. “That’s an HDMI cable.”

  “Then let me see one.”

  Fischer settled on a video called Last Tango in Chatsworth, and Skinner fired it up for her, then began sorting through the paper chugging out of what must have been a fifteen-year-old dot matrix printer. “Got a fuckin’ parallel port,” he muttered, as he worked. “I didn’t even know you could find parallel ports anymore . . .”

  Behind him, Fischer said, “Oh my God. OH MY GOD!”

  Skinner turned to look, said, “Well, that’s not something you see every day. Wonder how they did that? You’d think they’d get stuck.”

  The printer and the video ended simultaneously, and Skinner stacked up the paper, and said, “We gotta get out of here before it gets light.”

  “You gotta get out of here. I’m going to look at every one of these filthy things. I want to know what kind of man I’ve been engaged to,” Fischer said. “Show me how that computer thingy works.”

  “Okay, but I don’t want to walk all the way home. How about if I crash at your place?”

  “Whatever,” she said, waving a hand at him, as The Gang Goes Bang! came up on the TV.

  Skinner kissed her good-bye, left her on the couch, and crept out the back door. Dark as a coal sack outside, except for the stars, which were bright and plentiful. With the incriminating pack of paper under his arm, he went back to Fischer’s house, snuck in again, and lay in her bed until dawn, reading the emails.

  By first light, he was convinced that the Van Den Bergs were up to something illegal, sending shipments of illegal somethings all over the country. Had to be the Legos. Could have been drugs, the way they talked in code, but they weren’t making enough money to be drug dealers.

  It occurred to him that if a legitimate seller of Lego kits could find an off-the-books source that only cost, say, half of the normal wholesale price, he could make a killing. Wouldn’t even have to pay taxes on the profit. The Lego company would supply the advertising, and if you bought even a small number of kits from the company . . . you’d have the perfect cover.

  “Sweet,” Skinner said. “Crooked but sweet.”

  Shortly after dawn, he heard the back door rattle and was seized by the sudden fear that Larry had come home unexpectedly; but then Fischer called out, “Skinner? You still here?”

  “Back in the bedroom,” he called.

  She appeared in the bedroom doorway and posed there, one hand on the jamb. She had, he thought, a weird glow in her eyes.

  7

  Three people shot, one of them dead, all possibly tied to the Marian apparitions.

  As Skinner and Fischer were sneaking into Van Den Berg’s house, Virgil was in bed; he’d spent a few minutes thinking about God and His religions and wondered why religions were so often tied to violence. When he was in college, years earlier, during the usual late-night weed-fired discussions of sex, politics, and religion, he’d decided that religions and political parties were quite alike, except that religions dealt with morality, primarily, while political parties dealt with economics.

  In other words, they were both dealing with people’s deepest feelings about how the world should work. Differences could escalate to physical clashes, as they might have even in the late-night weed-fired college discussions, except, of course, for the weed: “You’re so full of shit, dude. Pass the joint.”

  Now, lying in bed all these years later, he still wondered why religions, since they dealt with morality, shouldn’t shun any form of violence to others? Then again, he thought, maybe they did. Maybe the connection between religion and violence was Fake News.

  His mind got caught in a loop speculating about it, and he finally got out of bed and opened up his laptop and looked up the most religious states and the most violent states. Turns out the six most religious states, as determined in one major study, were also among the ten states with the highest murder rates. The six least religious states were among the ten with the lowest.

  He found that depressing, turned off the computer, and lay awake thinking about other demographic characteristics that could account for the overlap. Perhaps the most religious people lived in the parts of the country that were also the poorest and that accounted for the crime rather than religiosity? But, then, was religiosity related to poverty or were the two unrelated?

  What would happen if the most religious places legalized weed?

  He was still speculating about that when he drifted off.

  * * *

  —

  When he woke the next morning, he had a text from Bea Sawyer that said “We were at the scene until 2 a.m. Got a motel room in Albert Lea. Not much new. Don’t call early.”

  Virgil got up, shaved and showered, contemplated his store of T-shirts and picked a white “Larkin Poe” shirt that showed a snake wrapped around an apple. After dressing, he walked over to Mom’s Cafe, where he had two of the worst pancakes of his entire life, which made him wonder how, exactly, a cook could screw up something so simple. The pancakes tasted as though the flour had been cut with sawdust, while the syrup had the consistency of tap water.

  Done with breakfast, he walked down to Skinner & Holland, where he found a tall, rugged-looking Catholic priest, in a black suit and clerical collar, standing on the sidewalk, eating an ice-cream cone, and talking with Holland.

  When Holland saw Virgil coming, he said to the priest, “Here he is.”

  Virgil walked up, and Holland introduced him to the priest, George Brice, who said, “I think we have a mutual friend.”

  He mentioned a St. Paul priest that Virgil had met through his father, and they talked for a moment about one of Virgil’s earlier cases that had involved a Lutheran minister who was an international criminal, a fake but politically explosive archaeological find, a variety of gunmen from the Middle East, and a secret American intelligence organization that Virgil wasn’t even supposed to dream about but occasionally did anyway.

  “There’s been a murder now. Wardell tells me you think it’s related to the two church shootings,” Brice said, bringing the conversation back to the present. “Is that correct?”

  “Yes, but I’m not a hundred percent on that,” Virgil said. “We found out that Glen Andorra was having a sexual relationship with somebody, but we don’t know who. Sex can be a powerful motivator for homicide. If his death was murder and not a suicide, it might not have anything to do with these church shootings. Even if it doesn’t, though, I believe the gun used in the church shootings came from Andorra. And since we’re talking about murder, whoever killed Andorra is probably the church shooter. It’s just not a hundred percent.”

  “He was shot up close, and in cold blood, before anyone was shot here,” Holland said. “I don’t see how a lover would have done both things unless killing Andorra unhinged her.”

  “Ah, it’s not his girlfriend, it’s a madman,” Brice said, as he finished the ice-cream cone. He stepped over to a trash can and dumped the cone’s paper wrapper.

  “I believe you’re right,” Holland said. “But is that all he is?”

  * * *

  —

  I need to talk to you about what you saw when Harvey Coates was shot,” Virgil said to Brice.

  “C’mon in the back room,” Holland said.

  Virgil and Brice followed him through the store, where a dozen people were lined up at the cash register. “Still going gangbusters,” Brice said.

  “I’d cross myself, but you might think I was joking,” Holland said. “I wouldn’t be.”

  As they went through the store, several of the customers reached out to the priest:

  “Hola, padre.”

  “God bless you, Father.”

  �
�God bless . . .”

  They settled into the three chairs in the back room, and Virgil asked Brice, “So, what did you see?”

  “I was standing on the church steps looking right at him, at Coates. I saw him jerk like somebody had slapped his back, and then he . . . croaked . . . and looked around . . . and fell over. I thought maybe he’d had a stroke or a heart attack, but then people started screaming, but nobody else fell. I ran across the street, and a couple of other men were trying to get him, and themselves, behind an old concrete planter over there in case there was another shot. There wasn’t. One of the other men was from here in Wheatfield, and he had the sheriff’s department on speed dial and he called them and got an ambulance going. Then we just sat there and held some towels against the wounds to keep him from bleeding out. His wife was with him; she’s a nurse, she knew what to do but was pretty panicky and crying . . .”

  “Didn’t hear a shot, or anything?”

  “Nothing like that,” Brice said, shaking his head.

  “Did you notice exactly how he was standing? Whether he was turned one way or the other?”

  “No, I didn’t notice. Wardell was curious about that, too, but I didn’t notice.”

  “I called Coates himself after Miz Rice was shot, and he didn’t know exactly how he was standing, either,” Holland said. “He thought he was more or less square to the street. He wasn’t sure, though.”

  They talked for a while longer, but Brice had nothing to add about the shooting. He knew more about the wound. “Went right through his thigh, from one side to the other. I noticed that the exit wasn’t much larger than the entry, which I think probably means he was shot with a military-style non-expanding bullet,” he said.

  “You know about bullets? Wardell told me the same thing about Miz Rice.”

  “I was a chaplain at the Balad military hospital in the early days in Iraq,” Brice said. “I saw a lot of wounds. Most were shrapnel from roadside bombs, but some were bullets.”

  * * *

  —

  When they were done, Virgil and Holland followed the priest through the store to the front exit, and Virgil asked, as they stepped outside, “What about the apparition? What do you think?”

  Brice half smiled, and asked, “What do you mean, what do I think?”

  “Was it real or did somebody . . . fake something? Or what?”

  Brice squinted across the street at the church. “Something happened. We know that for sure because we have photographs. Lots of photographs, quickly converted to postcards. We even have some partial voice recordings, which is more than we’ve ever had at any of the other apparitions. So something happened. And happened before one of the sincerest Catholic congregations in Minnesota. Or anywhere else, for that matter.”

  “You sound the tiniest bit skeptical,” Virgil said.

  “I believe in the possibility of Marian apparitions,” Brice said. “That doesn’t astonish me. What astonishes me are the other miracles in Wheatfield. It’s inevitable to wonder if they’re related.”

  Holland and Virgil looked at each other, and Holland shrugged. Virgil asked, “What other miracles?”

  “The miracle of Skinner and Holland, among others,” Brice said, gesturing at the store. “The town could barely support a gas station and yet this store appeared, like magic, barely minutes after the first apparition.”

  “C’mon, George. You know the story,” Holland said. He turned to Virgil. “Right after the first apparition, Skinner came running to me and told me what was going to happen. I knew he was right, and we went to work. There was nothing magic about it: this store is the result of several people working like dogs for weeks.”

  “I will admit that Skinner is an unusual young man,” Brice said. “Perceptive. In this case, perhaps even . . . clairvoyant.” He shook his shoulders, brushed off some nonexistent dandruff, tugged at his coat sleeves, and said, “I better get over to the church. The management committee is meeting in a few minutes.”

  Brice started toward the corner to cross the street, and when he was out of earshot, Holland said to Virgil, “You see, that’s the kind of thing we have to deal with—skepticism, even from the Church. Or maybe he played a little too much football.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Notre Dame. Linebacker. Had a lot of head-to-head collisions,” Holland said.

  “A university devoted to the Virgin Mary—interesting,” Virgil said. “I think he’s probably trying to protect the Church. Its credibility,” Virgil said. “If the apparitions turn out to be a fraud of some kind, they don’t want to be out front vouching for their authenticity. Gettin’ punked.”

  “Who would do that? Who could be cynical enough to defraud the public using the Blessed Virgin Mary?” Holland asked.

  Virgil stepped out to the edge of the sidewalk and looked up at the storefront sign, “Skinner & Holland, Eats & Souvenirs,” and said, “I have no idea. Nice sign, Wardell.”

  “Hey!”

  Virgil said, “See ya,” caught a break in the traffic, jaywalked across the street, and called to Brice before the priest entered the church. “Father Brice! . . . George!”

  Brice stopped on the steps leading to the church’s portal, and Virgil caught up with him. “If there are no services going on, you think it’d be okay if I looked around the church?”

  “Sure. Let me know if you see anything that . . . I should be aware of.”

  “I’ll do that,” Virgil said.

  Across the street, Holland shook his head and disappeared into the store.

  * * *

  —

  Virgil had been in a lot of churches, most of them Lutheran, but a few Catholic or other Protestant types, as well as a few temples, both Jewish and Buddhist. He’d been in one of them as a result of his job, two more as the result of his relationships with hippie women, but most he’d been dragged into as a result of his father’s ecumenical interests.

  As a result, he knew something of traditional church layouts, and, though small, St. Mary’s was traditional, built on the plan of a Christian cross.

  Immediately inside the front doors—the portal—there was a vestibule called a narthex. Through the narthex door, he entered the main part of the church, called the nave, which consisted of a clutch of pews with kneelers and was suffused with the odor of melting candle wax. The pews were divided by a wide center aisle like the upright of a cross, with narrower aisles running along the sides. Above these side aisles were colored plaster reliefs denoting the Stations of the Cross, and at the end of each aisle was a rack of red votive candles, about half of them burning.

  A transept—an aisle like the crossbar of a cross—divided the pews from the altar and pulpit. There was a bell tower directly above the transept. From the inside, the tower revealed a domed ceiling, also made of painted plaster, with faded angels playing ten-foot-long Renaissance-style trumpets. At the left end of the transept was another rack of candles, this one with white tapers, most of them showing bright, flickering flame.

  The Marian apparition had appeared over the altar, which was at the far opposite end of the church when seen from the entry.

  Five or six men and three women had gathered at the right side of the transept, where a table and chairs had been set up for the management meeting.

  As they walked toward it, Brice said quietly, “We have to have our meetings in the church. There used to be a rectory right outside, where the little park is, but it burned down thirty years ago. Never replaced.” He added, “Probably shouldn’t go wandering around the altar, but you can see the back parts of the church if you take the stairs over there.”

  He pointed out the left side of the transept as he turned right, toward the men around the table. Virgil went left, out a door at the end of the transept, where he found a closet containing threadbare vestments and church paraphernalia, a tiny kitchen, two restrooms, a room full
of new-looking cleaning gear—push brooms, mops, buckets—and a back door. The door opened to the parking lot. He went back inside.

  Everything about the structure was old and not recently repaired, but originally had been well built and well fitted with brick and oak, and now it was very clean, as if every inch had been scrubbed by hand. Virgil realized that being the scene of a miracle, it probably had been.

  A door that must have been directly behind the altar, which was on the other side of the wall, opened to a narrow winding stairway. Virgil took it up to the top of the tower. There was still a bell there, but both it and its clapper had been tied off with heavy blue nylon ropes that appeared to be years old, if not decades.

  Openings to the street were covered with louvers. There were four newer-looking 4×12 Marshall speaker cabinets perched on metal racks so that they faced up and down Main Street, with two amplifier heads connected to a central control unit connected to a CD player. Three CD cases sat next to the player: three identical copies of the Bells of Notre-Dame.

  Nothing to see up there, Virgil thought. He went back down the stairs; partway down, there was a small maintenance door in the wall. Virgil tried to open it, but it was locked.

  He listened for the sound of anyone nearby, then took out his pocketknife and went to work on the simple lock; opening it only took a few seconds. The door was less than half height and opened on a crawl space that was behind the altar but within the wall that separated the altar from the back rooms. The space went in both directions and apparently was used to service the lights that illuminated the altar.

  He crawled a few feet to his left, to a small door in the wall. When he opened it, he found himself looking at a floodlight. The door wouldn’t be visible from below, and he couldn’t see down, only the back of the light fixture. He closed the door and crawled back out. He noticed that while the walls of the crawl space were made of aging plaster, everything was remarkably clean and dust-free.