Holy Ghost

by John Sandford

  “She gonna get it?” Shrake asked.

  “She already has, on several occasions,” Holland said. He went back to listening on the phone, and a moment later said, “Yeah, I’m here.” He listened some more, and then said, “Thanks, Sara. I’ll call you again when you get off work.”

  He hung up, and said, “Barry owns it. Bought it seven years ago, with a fifteen-year mortgage, minimum down payment, but it was cheap. Seller was a guy named Ole Birkstrum, no relation.”

  “Well, poop,” Shrake said. “Nurse’s aide, kid already owns the house. Not like she was a walking gold mine, huh?”

  “Maybe he hated her,” Jenkins said. “One of those bad mother–son things. He’s a psycho, and he knocks her off.”

  Virgil said, “That’s possible, but, like I said, when Zimmer and I talked to him, he’d been crying.”

  “Obviously faked,” Shrake said.

  Virgil said, “Yeah. What else you got?”

  * * *

  —

  Holland said, “Since you’re wondering about inheritances . . . I bet Glen Andorra’s place was worth three or four mil.”

  Jenkins and Shrake looked at each other, and Shrake said, “Whoa! There’s a motive.”

  “Where’d you get that number?” Virgil asked.

  “Pulled it out of my ass,” Holland said. “Except for that shooting range along the creek, he had a nice piece of property. I think he owned a whole section, and he inherited from his parents, so I doubt there’s a mortgage on it. Good land around here sells for seven thousand dollars an acre, give or take. If he’s got six hundred and forty acres, you take out a hundred acres for the range . . . you’ve still got property north of three million. And the range isn’t worthless. Plus, the house and machinery.”

  Virgil to Holland: “Somebody said his kid lives in the Cities?”

  “Yeah. Zimmer’s talked to him, I think, and most likely he would have talked to the medical examiner and maybe a funeral home.”

  “We gotta talk to him,” Jenkins said. “The Cities are two and a half hours from here, he could have gone back and forth easy enough, do these other shootings, take the spotlight off his old man.”

  Shrake was tapping on his phone, looked up: “Including the house, and if he’s got average farm machinery, the place isn’t three million, it’s more than four. No tax.”

  “Did his kid grow up here?” Virgil asked Holland.

  “Yeah, he was here through high school, a couple of years ahead of me,” Holland said. “We both played basketball, but he wasn’t good enough for college ball.”

  Virgil said to Jenkins and Shrake, “We need to track him down and push on him. Why don’t you guys figure out where he is right now? He could be down here. Or if he’s back in the Cities, go on back and find him.”

  “Good with me,” Jenkins said. To Shrake: “We can get a decent pancake.”

  Shrake asked Virgil, “What are you going to do?”

  “We haven’t talked to any of the people who run the church, except Father Brice. I’ll track down some of the church council and see if they have any ideas of what might be going on.”

  “Weak,” Shrake said.

  * * *

  —

  Jenkins and Shrake were out of town in twenty minutes, having spoken to Jared Andorra on the phone: he was in the Cities and could talk to them as soon as they got there.

  Virgil had gotten Brice’s cell phone number and called him to ask about the church council. Brice had gone back to the archdiocese headquarters in St. Paul; Virgil had gotten the impression that he worked there as a kind of troubleshooter. “There’s almost always somebody from the council around the church in the afternoon,” Brice said. “Go on across and knock on the door.”

  Virgil did that, and a Hispanic man opened the door and peered out. “You are the Virgil?”

  “Yes. I need to talk to some members of the council.”

  “Come in,” the man said, pushing the door open. Inside, Virgil found two more men and a woman mounting an elaborately framed, life-sized photograph of the Wheatfield Virgin Mary on the wall of the narthex. The photo had been taken by somebody with a decent camera rather than a cell phone. Thinking back to what Van Den Berg had said, threatening to blackmail Holland, Skinner, and Fischer, Virgil thought that the Virgin did resemble Fischer, except that the Virgin had dark hair, Fischer was a blonde. Looking closer, Virgil noticed that the Virgin had blondish eyebrows, which would be unusual for a brunette Israelite in the first century.

  Something to think about.

  As it turned out, all four people were members of the ten-person council. Virgil sat them down in the pews at the back of the church and interviewed them as a group. He learned nothing: nobody knew of anyone who was jealous of the church’s sudden fame, or resented it, or who’d wish to slow the stream of worshippers.

  “Only two churches in town, and the other church—the pastor was happy with this vision,” one of the men said. “More people go to his church, too.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil went back to Skinner & Holland. He’d had breakfast but no lunch, so he bought a chicken potpie and a Diet Coke and carried them to the back room. He tried to think about the case but found he didn’t have anything of substance to think about. When he finished eating, he drove out to Glen Andorra’s house, went in, and spent the afternoon looking for anything that might be relevant.

  Anything.

  He gave up at dinnertime, drove to Blue Earth, and ate at a Country Kitchen, then sat in his truck in the parking lot and talked to Frankie for a half hour. As he was talking to her, he saw Banning, the sheriff’s deputy, and a man walk into the restaurant. He said good-bye to Frankie and followed them in. Banning saw him and waved from her booth, introduced the man as her boyfriend, Gabe, and said that Fischer would be in the hospital overnight.

  “She had a headache, and they thought she might be concussed, though . . . not badly. They also want a specialist to take a look at her eye. He wasn’t there today, so he’ll look in the morning.”

  “Worse than I thought,” Virgil said.

  She shrugged, and said, “We did the only thing we could—we took her to the hospital. Next, we get all over Larry’s ass. Sheriff Zimmer came by and took a look at Jennie, and said Larry’s used up all his rope. If he drives twenty-six in a twenty-five zone, he’ll regret it.”

  Virgil drove back to Wheatfield, parked next to the Vissers’ house, lay on his bed for a while. An hour after dark, when everything was quiet, he went back out for a walk. Fischer’s tiny house was set back from the street; he checked around for obvious eyes, saw not much, tried the screen door, which opened up. The blade of his butter knife slipped the old lock, and he was inside.

  He had a simple excuse, if anybody asked: he’d been walking by the house when he noticed the screen door standing open, and, when he tried the door, it was unlocked. He knew Fischer was in the hospital, but, given her history with Van Den Berg, he thought he’d better check the house.

  Not search it, simply check it. He turned on the lights—nothing attracts the eye like a flashlight in a dark house—and checked it thoroughly, made sure that nobody was hiding in her closet or her bureau drawers or even under her unmade bed.

  There was nothing under her bed, but a stamp-sized patch of blue cloth was sticking out from between the mattress and the box springs. When he lifted the mattress, he found a thoroughly flattened garment. He shook it out, and thought, by golly, it looked a lot like the gown that the Virgin Mary had been wearing in the church photograph.

  Holland, Skinner, and Fischer: the Wheatfield Trinity.

  He put everything back, turned off the lights, locked the door, and ambled back to the Vissers’ place. Danielle Visser knocked on the connecting door when she heard him stirring around and, when he opened it, asked, “Roy and I couldn’t
stand it anymore: did you find out anything interesting today?”

  “Not a thing,” he said. “This is a very opaque little town.”

  “I never thought that,” she said. “I always thought that everybody knew everything about everybody.”

  “Then why doesn’t anybody know who the killer is?”

  “Now, that,” she said, “is an interesting topic for a column. I’ll start writing it up right now. I’ll call it . . . mmm . . .”

  “‘Who did it?’”

  She ticked a finger at him. “You oughta be a writer.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil had a bad night, stressed by the sense that he was getting nowhere, until at 8 o’clock the next morning, as he was shaving, Bell Wood called from Iowa. Virgil put the phone on speaker, and asked, “What’s up?”

  “You know we put that ankle monitor on Van Den Berg?”

  “Yeah. He cut it off?”

  “We don’t know what he did. What we do know is, the monitoring service called this morning and said that he spent all night in what appears to be a cow pasture about six miles outside of Wheatfield.”

  “A cow pasture?”

  “That’s what it looks like on a satellite photo. The monitoring service has a time line on him: he was home until around eleven o’clock, and then he drove out to the cow pasture and stayed there. He’s still there.”

  “Kinda chilly last night.”

  “Not hunting season, so that’s not it . . . I was hoping you might go out and take a look. If we keep getting a signal, and you don’t find a body, we’ll have to figure he cut the monitor off, threw it into the pasture, and now he’s in the wind.”

  “Doesn’t sound like Larry,” Virgil said. “Email me directions on how to get out there.”

  “Five minutes. I’ll send you a bunch of screen grabs of Google Maps.”

  Virgil couldn’t look at another potpie, but he stopped at Skinner & Holland and bought a bag of potato chips. When he told Holland about the ankle monitor and the cow pasture, Holland volunteered to come with him. As they drove out, Holland looked at Wood’s maps on Virgil’s iPad, and said, “If the monitor signal is accurate, looks like he’s about halfway down the pasture and halfway up the hill.”

  “In other words, about dead center.”

  “Yup.”

  They left the car on the side of the road. Holland went prosthesis-deep in the roadside marsh, while Virgil managed to jump over the soggiest bit. They clambered over a sagging barbed-wire fence and walked slightly uphill, across a pasture spotted with last year’s dried cow pies, and found Van Den Berg’s body wrapped head to foot in semitransparent plastic. He looked like a luna moth’s cocoon.

  Holland said, “There’s a lot of blood at the bottom of the plastic . . . Bet he was shot.”

  Virgil looked around the pasture, the sprouting corn in an adjacent field, the top of a red barn, an actual television aerial on the top of the house next to it, the blue skies, the puffy clouds, and said, “We can’t catch a break. We can’t.”

  17

  Never actually found a dead body before,” Holland said, “though I’ve seen a lot of them.”

  “I gotta know where you were last night, and where Skinner was,” Virgil said. “I know where Janet was, in the hospital. But you three had big problems with this guy.”

  Holland wasn’t surprised. He said, “I was on a date, actually. You heard me set it up with the bank girl. Sara McDonald. She came back to my trailer and left about midnight.”

  “What about Skinner?”

  “I don’t know where Skinner was. But sometimes I just sit in my trailer, shootin’ flies with a pellet gun . . .”

  “Shootin’ flies?”

  “Yeah, and Skinner doesn’t like it because he feels sorry for the flies. The chances that he killed Larry are slim to none. Besides, whoever killed Larry”—Holland squatted and looked at the body again—“probably shot him with a small-caliber, high-powered bullet. There’s no blood on his back, that I can see, but a lot on his chest. He was killed by the same guy who shot the other people, and we know Skinner didn’t do that because he actually witnessed one of the shootings.”

  “Yeah . . . I pretty much knew all that,” Virgil said. He pulled out his phone and called Zimmer.

  Zimmer: “You’re calling to tell me you found the shooter?”

  “Well, I found somebody. Larry Van Den Berg. Lying dead in a cow pasture. Probably shot.”

  “What!”

  “Yeah. Holland’s with me, and we think it’s the same guy who shot the others,” Virgil said. “We need some of your people out here, and I’ll get the crime scene crew moving again.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil called Bell Wood in Des Moines and told him what had happened. “I had a bad feeling about it,” Wood said. “Listen, I talked to the monitoring service, and they peg the time that he left his house at eleven-nineteen, and he got out to the pasture at eleven twenty-eight. He was probably killed right around eleven, unless he was shot at the pasture.”

  “Nah,” Virgil said, looking down toward the fence. “The killer would have had to march him across a swampy ditch, and over a fence, in the dark. It would have been too awkward. Besides, he’s got that Saran Wrap all over him. No point in doing that if he was killed here.”

  “Sorry about that, Virgil. I doubt that it has anything to do with Van Den Berg getting killed, but it probably kills our case against his brother, too. Ralph can claim he had no idea that the Legos were stolen. Since we’d have to prosecute Larry to nail down what happened with the Legos, where they came from, and he’d have to have a chance to respond, but he can’t now . . . we’re sorta out of luck. What I’m saying is . . .”

  “You’re saying Ralph has a motive.”

  “Or his wife. Or some associate that we don’t know about.”

  Virgil thought about it, then said, “Nope. The two brothers were working on what was, basically, an impulse theft. I doubt there are any associates.”

  “I would tend to agree, but, uh, better to bring it up now than to find out later.”

  * * *

  —

  An hour later, a line of a dozen deputies was slow-walking the pasture and the roadside, looking for anything that might relate to the murder. Holland had called Skinner, who left school to drive out, and who told Virgil that nobody was going to find anything. “The killer drove him out here, threw him in the pasture, and drove back home. Period. What’s to find?”

  “Thanks for that.”

  Zimmer came by, said that he’d parked a deputy outside Van Den Berg’s house. “You’ll want to go in there, so I thought it’d be best to keep an eye on the place.”

  A deputy gave a loud whistle from the roadside ditch, and they all looked toward him, and he followed with a “come here” gesture. “There goes your genius badge,” Virgil said to Skinner. “He found something.”

  The deputy had spotted a scuff mark in the dirt by the fence, and some fuzzy gray threads on one of the fence’s barbs. “If he parked here, crossed the ditch, and went up the hill . . . it’s almost a straight line,” the deputy said. “And we’ve had enough rain that those threads shouldn’t be all puffy like that. Unless you and Holland left them there.”

  “No, we crossed the fence down a ways,” Virgil said. “You’ve found something. The guy was probably operating in the dark and got hooked on the fence. Leave it for the crime scene crew. Keep people away from here.”

  * * *

  —

  Holland and Skinner left, while Virgil waited for the deputies to finish their search. They did, without finding anything more, and Zimmer left four deputies to keep watch until the crime scene crew arrived from St. Paul. Virgil wanted to check the body for house keys but knew the crew investigators would have a fit if he did, so he drove back to
Wheatfield, to Van Den Berg’s house.

  The front and back doors were locked, but Van Den Berg hadn’t repaired the window that Fischer had knocked in the back’s. Instead, he’d taped a piece of cardboard over the hole. Virgil put on a pair of vinyl gloves, pushed the cardboard in, unlocked the door, went inside, and walked through the house. A silver .357 was lying in the front hallway. He left it. He could see no sign of any disturbance; but when he went down the stairs, he saw LED power lights on Van Den Berg’s computer and the computer speakers, and when he touched the “Return” key, a pornographic image popped up on the screen.

  Would Van Den Berg have left that image on-screen when he left the house? Virgil doubted that he would but didn’t know Van Den Berg well enough to be sure either way.

  Van Den Berg: Fischer had insisted that the man wasn’t stupid. He’d figured out why no gunshots were heard, before Virgil or anyone else. She said he knew more about who had what, in Wheatfield, than anyone else in town. He’d once tried to make a living as a day trader, which, even if unlikely, did require an interest in finance and some basic ability with numbers.

  Had he figured out who the killer was? Had the killer found that out?

  * * *

  —

  Virgil walked through the house one more time, and as he hesitated before going out the kitchen door into the garage, he saw a bullet hole in the steel hood over the gas range. Until he went over and checked, he wasn’t absolutely sure it was a bullet—it could have been a rivet or the head of a screw—but when he looked closely, there was no question. The rim on the other side of the range was dented; the remnants of a bullet would be around somewhere, but probably so damaged they wouldn’t get any good information from them. The hole had been made by a .22 caliber bullet—like the .223 everyone so far had been killed with.

  From the two holes, he could tell where the shot had come from. He turned and looked down the hallway to the front door, where the .357 still lay, and a sequence of events offered itself: Van Den Berg had been in his man cave, looking at porn. Somebody had rung the doorbell. Van Den Berg, not expecting a late visitor—and 11 o’clock was very late in Wheatfield—took his .357 up the stairs with him, had looked out the front door, and had recognized the visitor, not knowing he was also the killer. When he opened the door, the killer had shot him in the heart.