Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(15)

“Not a bad idea,” Virgil admitted. He took their names, and said, “I might call you about that.”

As Virgil was walking away, another pickup rolled down into the shooting bowl and turned off toward the pistol range. Virgil stopped to talk as the couple in the truck were getting their weapons out of the back of the camper, but the woman said, “We don’t pay much attention to the rifle people. We shoot handguns at seven yards.”

They hadn’t seen Andorra for a couple of weeks, and the man said they came out to shoot most evenings.



* * *



—

No card was needed to get out of the range. The gate slid sideways as Virgil approached it, and he took the dirt road out to the highway and turned left. Andorra lived in a typical early-twentieth-century Minnesota farmhouse, a white four-square clapboard, with a front porch, a side entrance off the driveway, and triangular attic dormers.

The place was neatly kept, without having been modernized. There was still a clothesline, on the side of the property opposite the driveway, with a rug hanging on it; the lawn needed to be cut, if you were a serious lawn guy. Virgil couldn’t see any cars, but they could be in the garage in back. He got out, sniffed the country air—cows, he thought, but not too nearby—went to the side door, and rang the bell. And rang again. No movement inside.

He walked down the driveway to the garage and looked in the windows. He could see a newer Mustang 5.0 parked next to a Bob-Cat.

He said, “Huh,” scratched his head, and glanced back at the house. He was getting a bad feeling about this. He called Wardell Holland. Holland answered on the second ring, and Virgil asked, “Do you know Glen Andorra?”

“Sort of. I nod at him,” Holland said. “He doesn’t live in town.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m out at his place. Do you know anyone who would know him well enough to have his phone number?”

“Yeah. Try Doug Cooper. Let me get Doug’s cell number for you . . . He farms out there.”

Virgil called Cooper, who didn’t have Andorra’s phone number. “Why are you looking for him?”

Virgil explained, and Cooper said, “Tell you what, I thought about checking on him. I drive by his place every day—I’m about two miles down the road—and there’s been this rug hanging on his clothesline for a couple of weeks now. That’s not like Glen. He’s a fussy guy, and we’ve had some rain coming through, but the rug never moved, so . . . I thought about checking on him.”

“I’ll check, I guess,” Virgil said. “There’s a Mustang in his garage . . .”

“Well, that’s his only car. Since you’re the law, I’d go look inside, if I were you.”



* * *



—

Virgil walked all the way around the house and wound up climbing the six steps of the front porch and peering through the hand-sized cut-glass windows in the door and the big window on the porch itself.

The only thing he saw that might be useful was a double-hung window on the far side of the house that appeared to be cracked open at the bottom. He walked around to check it, but the window was up eight feet. He went to the garage, found the door unlocked, borrowed a stepladder, walked it around to the side of the house, set it under the window, climbed up, looked inside.

The window was open, but only two or three inches. Virgil stared into what was once a dining room but was now being used as a place to watch television. The wide-screen was tuned to a game show, the cheery quizmaster joking with a group of D-list Hollywood celebrities. A man whom he assumed was Glen Andorra was lying back in an easy chair, and he had the withered, rotted look of a genuine zombie.

And Virgil could smell him in the air that wafted out through the window.

“Ah, jeez,” he said aloud. He got on the phone to the sheriff’s office, and Zimmer said he’d send a bunch of cars. “Does it look natural?”

“Hard to tell . . . He might have been sitting there for two weeks,” Virgil said. “There’s warm air coming out—I think the furnace is turned on.”

“Oh, boy. Sit right there, Virgie, I’ll have you two cars in ten minutes, and I’ll be out in twenty.”

Virgil went to his Tahoe, got a couple of vinyl gloves out of his equipment box, and tried the front and two side doors. The rearmost of the two rattled in its frame, and Virgil went back to his truck, got a butter knife out of his equipment box—stolen from the Holiday Inn for this very purpose—fit it into the space between the door and the jamb, and pushed back the century-old bolt on the door.

He found himself in a mudroom, as he expected. The door opened on the kitchen, and it was unlocked. When he stepped inside, the odor of decomposition was overwhelming. He went back outside, got his jar of Vicks VapoRub from the equipment box, and jelled up his nostrils.

Back inside, he stepped carefully through the kitchen. A door to the right would lead to a stairway that would go three or four steps down to a landing, then out the other side door and down into the basement. He knew this because most old farmhouses were built like that.

Straight ahead was a narrow door that would lead to the living room; and, to his left, a two-panel door that would lead to the dining room, where Andorra lay back in his chair. A couple of Persian-style carpets were rolled up next to the basement door, and with the carpet hung from the clothesline, it suggested that Andorra may have been doing spring cleaning.