Holy Ghost

by John Sandford

  “Your wife bow-hunts?” Jenkins asked.

  “Damn right, she does. She’s good at it, too. She goes after turkeys and gets one most every year.”

  “All right, that’s interesting,” Virgil said. “You think . . . she might shoot you?”

  “Well, is it possible that she killed Glen for his gun? Glen wouldn’t have been crazy enough to go through with what she was planning, so she got rid of him? But I don’t really know. She hasn’t said anything. I didn’t see any signs . . . But Ann and I haven’t been in the best shape the last few years, so maybe I wouldn’t see it. I don’t think it’d bother her much if I went away. But—” He put his hands together, his fingers under his chin, as though he were praying, and finally said, “I don’t know. I might be wrong. I might be wrong about all of it.”

  * * *

  —

  I’m too young to be such a sexist pig,” Skinner said. To Virgil: “You kept asking me who the crazies in town might be, and all I ever thought about were male crazies. If I’d included women, I might have put Ann in there.”

  “She’s not totally crazy,” Apel said. “She can be, you know, really nice . . .”

  Holland said, “Davy, if you’re right, she’s killed four people in cold blood and hurt three more.”

  Davy sat down, looked around, and asked, “You got a beer?”

  Virgil ignored the request. “Do you have any idea of what she might have done with the gun?”

  Apel shook his head. “She’s not slow. Since the place got raided, and you didn’t find anything, I’d think she got rid of it. Or, she’s innocent and never had it. There’s no one in line to get shot after Barry, and I think I probably caused that . . .”

  He told them about his conversation with Osborne shortly before Osborne was killed. “I went back to the house and told Ann about it . . . about how Barry kind of thought I might have been involved somehow. That probably set her off. She was still home when I left to go back to work.”

  Virgil asked the key question: “Will you help us get her, arrest her?”

  “That’s why I came here to talk,” Apel said. “I don’t think I can trust her. If she figures out that I knew she was the killer, she might stick a knife in me. Or we’d have a hunting accident or something. She’s smart, but she’s rough. And, like Skinner says, maybe a little crazy. She goes out there with the excavator and holds her own with construction crews. So . . . if you can think of a way to do it, I’d help out.”

  Virgil looked around the room. “Well, we have the brain trust right here. Let’s figure something out.”

  “She thinks I’m on my way to the supermarket in Fairmont, so I gotta go,” Apel said. “I’ll call her from there and then I’ll stop here on my way back. You can tell me what I should do.”

  “Go, then,” Virgil said. “We’ll see you back here in an hour or so.”

  * * *

  —

  He left, with Virgil staring after him, checking out his hair. Nicely trimmed, Virgil thought. He said to the others, “Give me twenty minutes. I’ll be back.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Up the street. Be right back.”

  Virgil drove up Main, took a left, and pulled into the Vissers’ house. Danny and Roy were watching television, and when he knocked on the door connecting his room with the house, Roy opened it, and asked, “Trouble?”

  “I need to talk to Danny about a haircut,” Virgil said.

  They all met in the front parlor, which was used as the beauty shop. Danielle Visser got her appointment book, tracing her finger down the list for the day that Margery Osborne was shot, and said to Virgil, “He was on for four-thirty. But he was here a few minutes early.”

  “How early? Exactly.”

  She squinted at the ceiling, thinking. “Let me see . . . I’d already finished Carol Cook and I was getting money from her. She came in for a blow-dry at three forty-five, and I would bet that I finished her up in a half hour. She was paying with a check and so she had to write it out . . . Davy probably got here at four-twenty, or maybe a couple of minutes either way. I try to time things with my male clients so they don’t overlap with the women; I want them to feel like they’re in a barbershop and not a beauty salon. He would have sat down in the chair at between maybe four-eighteen to four twenty-five.”

  “You told me that when you heard about the shooting and ran outside, you saw me turning the corner . . .”

  “Yes. You know, right down there.”

  “Remember that, where you saw me, but don’t tell anyone else,” Virgil said.

  Roy: “Is that a clue? That they saw you?”

  “Right now, I don’t have a clue,” Virgil said.

  * * *

  —

  Virgil went outside and peered down the street. He was looking at the back side of Apel’s Quonset hut. He checked his watch, walked over to the Quonset, then back to his truck.

  From there, he drove a block over to Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment. When he walked in the door, she was standing next to a pile of used blue jeans and was picking them up one at a time, folding them, and putting them on a sales table. When she saw Virgil, she said, “Oh, no . . . Oh my God . . .”

  “Did you just talk to Davy Apel?” Virgil asked.

  “Yes, but I can’t believe . . . Ann is my best friend.” She was still folding jeans, but faster now.

  “And was she having an affair with Glen Andorra? She told you that?”

  “Yes. When she found out Glen had been killed, I went over to her house, she was crying, she thought—well, I think she thought—that Davy might have done it.”

  “She thought Davy might have done it?”

  Still folding, even faster now—bending over, picking up a pair of jeans, folding them, stacking them, bending over again. “She hinted at it. She said she was worried . . . I don’t know.”

  She started to cry.

  * * *

  —

  Back at Skinner & Holland, Virgil took his chair again, looked at Jenkins, and said, “Davy Apel’s alibi got a flat tire.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. When he told me he was getting his hair cut when Margery Osborne got shot, he even told me that he saw me running down the street. Remember that?”

  Jenkins nodded. “Yeah.”

  “That’s one of the reasons I bought his alibi, that detail. When I talked to Danny Visser just now, she told me that when they ran out in the street to look down toward the church after the shooting, they saw me running around a corner. I was thinking they saw me down by the church—but the corner where they saw me, that’s gotta be five hundred yards from the church. Before I got there, I was looking in backyards, checking out people I saw, running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But I didn’t dash right down there. That must have been ten minutes after the shooting.”

  Holland: “Visser’s place is a two-minute walk from the Quonset hut. A slow two-minute walk.”

  Virgil nodded. “Doesn’t take that long. I walked it. Slowly. A minute, or a little more.”

  “Takes some major balls to pull that off,” Skinner said.

  “Whoever’s doing this has got some major balls—we already know that,” Holland said. “So Apel’s back in play. You guys scared him this afternoon, and he decided to throw his old lady under the bus.”

  “Could be,” Virgil said. “On the other hand, he is the guy I saw standing on his porch when I was chasing the bow hunter.” And to Jenkins: “That creates a problem. You see it?”

  Jenkins said, “If it’s the same one you see.”

  Holland: “What’s the problem?”

  * * *

  —

  Assuming that everything Apel said about his wife is true but he no longer has a solid alibi himself, how do we take her to trial?” Virgil asked. “Every single piece o
f evidence that we have against her also applies to him. No jury is going to find her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt if she testifies that he must have done it, because the evidence points in both directions. To him and to her.”

  “Not only that, his alibi may have a flat tire but it’s not completely flat,” Jenkins said. “A good defense attorney would get that time all confused: get you up the street faster, get him in the shop earlier. Nobody could say it’s not possible.”

  “He’s still taking an awful chance,” Holland said.

  “Maybe he saw what was about to happen—that we had all of this circumstantial evidence—and he decided to move first and to blame her,” Virgil said. “I mean, the marriage is apparently on the rocks.”

  “Plus, she was the one sleeping with Glen,” Holland said. “She’s the one who’d know about Andorra’s guns, and she could walk right up to him . . .”

  “Try it the other way: Davy follows Ann out to Andorra’s place. She goes inside. The light comes on in the bedroom window, bedsprings can be heard squeaking a half mile away, Ann drives off with a smile on her face. Apel goes over to Andorra’s the next day on some pretext and kills Andorra for screwing his old lady,” Jenkins said. “What’s more likely—what will a jury think is more likely? That a woman cold-bloodedly killed her lover so she could steal a gun? Or that a guy killed his wife’s lover out of jealousy?”

  “And then he decides to take a gun and collect on the debt. Kill one person, why not two? Some dimwitted idea of making it look like a crazy person was sniping people. But it gets away from him,” Skinner said. “Wow. That’s a neat problem. You know what? I like it.”

  Holland mimed a backhand to Skinner’s head. “How is this neat, in any way, shape, or form, genius?”

  “Because thinking about it is neat,” Skinner said. “Let me make a suggestion. We tell Davy to go home and maybe open a window a little bit so Virgil and Jenkins can sneak over there and listen in. Then, he starts an argument with Ann—accuses her of sleeping with Glen. Then, when they’re screaming at each other, he accuses her of killing all those people. Like he just thought of it. Killing Glen and Margery and Barry and Larry—shooting those other people, using a bow . . . See what she says to him. Maybe she admits it, but maybe she accuses him of doing it. All without knowing you’re listening.”

  “Is he that good an actor, do you think?” Holland asked.

  Virgil said, “I don’t know, but it could work. We wouldn’t listen in, though, we’d put a wire on him. I got a kit in my truck. We could record the whole thing.”

  “What if he won’t do it?” Holland asked.

  “Then we go back to thinking he might be the one,” Jenkins said.

  They all sat, staring into space, mulling it over, for several seconds, and Skinner finally said, “Wow.”

  26

  Virgil kicked Skinner and Holland out of the back room. “You can’t be here when Apel comes back. Gotta be cops only. Gotta be totally official. If this goes to a trial, we don’t want to look like amateur night at the grocery store, with a bunch of yokels wandering around.”

  “Yeah, we yokels,” Skinner said to Holland.

  “Give Virgie the finger when we leave,” Holland said. “I would, but I’m a cripple, and he might beat me up.”

  * * *

  —

  Apel was back an hour after he left, and Virgil had the body wire on the back room table. He pointed at it—a thin, black box, two inches by two inches, and a half inch thick, with the microphone wire trailing out of one corner—and said, “We’ve worked this out. We want you to confront Ann. First of all, we want you to ask about Glen . . .”

  Apel was wearing a loose, button-front Carhartt work shirt. They taped the box to his back, above his belt, and trailed the wire around his body and pinned the dime-sized microphone under his shirt next to a buttonhole. Virgil checked the receiver/recorder to make sure it worked, rechecked the battery, and finally rehearsed Apel on the confrontation.

  “I can do it,” Apel said. “This thing with Glen: I thought something might be going on, but not with him. I thought maybe she had something with one of the guys she’d met on a worksite. I knew we were coming apart . . .”

  He went on for a while, and Virgil and Jenkins heard him out, then sent him on his way.

  As he was going out the door, Jenkins said, “On your way home, think about Ann and Andorra gettin’ it on. Think about the details of it. It’ll be hard, but you ought to be majorly pissed by the time you arrive. You want to have a real head of steam when you get there . . .”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil and Jenkins would set up in Jenkins’s rental car, parked on the street around the corner from the Apels’ house. The receiver/recorder worked best within a hundred feet of the microphone and transmitter. On the way over, Jenkins said, “You’re plotting something. Is there more going on than I know about?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not going to talk about it because I’m probably wrong, and then you and Shrake would make fun of me until I got something even worse on you guys.”

  Jenkins thought about that. “What if you’re not as clever as you think you are?”

  “Then, uh, we go home without solving this case.”

  When they left Skinner & Holland, they told Apel to wait five minutes before he followed them. Five minutes after they parked, Apel turned into his driveway and parked in front of the garage. “Here we go,” Jenkins said.

  As he walked up to the house, carrying a grocery sack, Apel said, “I hope you can hear me.”

  “We can,” Virgil said, though Apel couldn’t hear him.

  * * *

  —

  They heard the door opening, and Ann Apel said, “Took you long enough. Where’ve you been?”

  “I got a story about that. Let me put the frozen stuff away.”

  Refrigerator door opening, paper and plastic rustling, then Ann: “What’s going on?”

  After a lengthy pause, Apel asked, “How long were you fuckin’ Glen? Huh? How long was that going on?”

  “What! I don’t know what . . .”

  Apel was shouting. “I just wrung it out of Trudy. When that fuckin’ Flowers was here, he said Glen was fuckin’ somebody, but he didn’t know who, but I figured it out. It was you. I knew something was going on . . . Were you fuckin’ him and me on the same day or did you trade us off?”

  Ann Apel screamed at him: “I wouldn’t have been fuckin’ him at all if you could still get it up . . .”

  “Oh, yeah, if I could still get it up? I could get it up if you weren’t colder than a frozen fish stick . . .”

  * * *

  —

  They went on.

  Jenkins asked, “I wonder where they heard that ‘fuckin’ Flowers’ thing? I thought it was only us cops who said that.”

  “Everybody says that, even Frankie. Now, shut up and listen.”

  * * *

  —

  Apel: “. . . brushed your fuckin’ teeth when you got home anyway. But now I’m wondering, what else was going on? Did you have to get rid of him?”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “You shot him, bitch. I know that, and if you get real unlucky, that fuckin’ Flowers knows it, too. He’s gonna figure out who was there with Glen; he got some DNA stuff off the sheets . . .”

  “You think I shot him? I didn’t shoot him. I thought maybe you did, you asshole, but I kept my mouth shut about it . . . Hey! What do you mean, brush my teeth . . .”

  Sound of glass breaking.

  * * *

  —

  Guy’s not bad,” Jenkins said. “They’re rockin’ out.”

  * * *

  —

  I’m not the one who wanted the money from Margery,” Apel shouted. “Who was the one who was always going Margery, Margery,
Margery: Margery’s gotta go. When’s Margery going to die? What I want to know is, why’d you kill Barry? You didn’t have to do that. The money was already on the way . . .”

  Ann’s voice stayed loud but went cold, “Davy, you gotta know I didn’t kill anybody. I had no idea what happened to Glen, and it scared me. I was worried that it might be you, that I’d be next. Then when those people got shot at the church, and the word got around that it was Glen’s gun, I thought it was some crazy person. I was like everybody else in town: I had no idea. And why would anyone kill Larry Van Den Berg? What did that have to do with anything? Then Margery and Barry, I thought . . . That’s when I started worrying that you’d gone nuts or something. About the money. I almost moved out then.”

  “You thought I’d gone nuts? You knew it wasn’t me who killed Margery. I told you about being in the barbershop. It couldn’t have been me.”

  “I didn’t know you were telling the truth about that,” Ann shouted. “It’s not like I could go and ask Danny if you had an alibi. Then people would start wondering why we were trying to set up alibis.”

  “You could’ve figured out a way.”

  “Why don’t we talk about me for a while,” Ann shouted. “You know where I was when that lady got shot, and when that man got shot. The same fuckin’ place, down in Hargrove’s fuckin’ ditch with the Bob-Cat. Clayton Hargrove wouldn’t let me off the site one fuckin’ minute early, so you know I was down there until four-thirty and later . . .”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil was getting discouraged. “Hasn’t given him an inch.”

  “I’ll tell you something else—if we do find something and get them to trial, and Apel tells them about the wire, the defense is going to want to hear this recording. Then we will be truly fucked.”