Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(88)

“True. But you know what people have been saying all along? It’s money. Somehow, it’s money,” Jenkins said. “What if it wasn’t his mother’s money but Barry’s?”

They were in the kitchen, and they both looked at the body, facedown in a four-dollar potpie, and Virgil said, “I don’t think he has any.”

“But we don’t know that,” Jenkins said. “To look at where she lived up here, you wouldn’t think his mother would, either. But she does.”

“So let’s go look at Barry’s bank accounts,” Virgil said. “I’ll call for another subpoena.”



* * *



—

An hour later, they were back at the bank in Blue Earth. The bank president, who they’d dealt with in the morning, was astonished by the turn of events and told them so. “Honest to God, what is the world coming to? I don’t think there’d been a murder in Wheatfield in the last century, and now there are, what, three in a week? An entire family wiped out?”

When they got him calmed down, he sat them in front of a computer, where they could look at images for the checks Osborne had written in the last four years. “Back further than that, we’d have to go to another cloud, and that would take a while,” the bank president told them.

They didn’t have to do that. They found an anomaly in Osborne’s accounts. On the first of September, every year for the past four, he’d written a check for $6,550 to David D. Apel.

“Every year,” Virgil said. “Wonder what it is? Rent? He owns the house.”

They asked the bank president for an opinion. He pulled on his lower lip for a minute, then said, “Since he’s dead, you could probably check his income tax records on this, but, if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a loan payment.”

They asked him to start the process of getting further records from the cloud, and when he went away to do that, Virgil said to Jenkins, “Try this: it’s a loan payment, and Apel needs the money—the principal. But Osborne doesn’t have any money. Apel counts on getting it when Margery dies, but then he hears that the old lady is giving her money to the church. He kills Margery Osborne so that Barry will inherit. Then Barry’s talking to him over the hedge, mentions that we’re looking at his mother’s money and trying to figure out who might benefit from her death . . .”

“And that freaks him out,” said Jenkins, “and he doesn’t want Barry to tell us that he owes Apel a bundle. In the meantime, that greed head Van Den Berg figures it out, because he knows more about who has what than anybody else in town. He needs money himself and tries to blackmail Apel . . .”

“Who walks over and kills him,” Virgil said.

“Whew! Glad that’s settled,” Jenkins said. “I’m heading home; you go over and bust Apel.”

“We’re not there yet.”

“No kiddin’. But if we’re right . . . we can figure something out.”

The bank president came back after a while, and said, “You can come look at the checks, if you want, but I can tell you that Barry was paying Mr. Apel exactly the same amount since September of 2009. Rent, or anything else, would have gone up since then—I bet it’s a fixed interest loan.”

Virgil called a researcher/hacker at the BCA, with whom he’d had a hasty romance a few years before and was still on tenuous terms with. “Sandy, do you remember when you once found a way to look at state income tax returns?”

“I remember nothing of the kind. That’s would be illegal,” she said.

“Listen, babe, we’ve had four murders now, and three people hurt bad, including Shrake. All we need to know is whether this guy is getting interest on a loan and how much . . .”

Long silence. Then, “I heard about Shrake. And I’m not your babe. Or sweetheart. Or honeybun.”

“So . . . Shrake . . .”

More silence. Then, “Give me a name.”

She called back a half hour later, as Virgil and Jenkins were driving back to Wheatfield. “It’s an interest-only loan. I can tell that because he’s paying tax on all of it, so none of it is return of principal. I looked up loan rates on the internet. In 2009, the normal interest rate was probably between four and five percent, because the big recession had started, but if it was a loan between friends, it could have been as low as three percent. At five percent, the loan would be for $130,000 or so. At three percent, it would have been more, something around $225,000.”

“Thank you.”

When they were off their call, Jenkins said, “Even if he kills both Margery and Barry, he still gets the money. He’ll have to wait a while, but if he has a signed note, he can make a claim against the estates. That all goes on in private. If we hadn’t figured this out, we might not ever hear about it.”

“Yes.”

“Of course, if we looked further down the line, there might be more Osborne relatives who’d inherit with Barry dead.”

“That would be a stretch. Apel has the motive, he had the opportunity—at least with Barry—and we know he shoots a bow. Now we need to put together the rest of the case. We don’t know if he’s got alibis for any of the shootings. I want to look at what he does and where he does it.”

“He’s a heavy-equipment operator and contractor,” Jenkins said. “I asked, when I was talking to him.”