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?”