“Do that,” Virgil said. “We’ll meet in the back of the store at nine.”
“It’s already past midnight, so make it ten o’clock,” Jenkins said. “We oughta drive over to Fairmont and check on Shrake again, and get a decent breakfast. I can’t look at another one of those potpies.”
“Okay,” Virgil said. “Skinner and Holland at ten.”
“What about Button and Good?” Jenkins asked.
Virgil asked, “What if we cut them loose?”
Jenkins nodded. “That’s what I’d do. I mean, we could do a mountain of paperwork to get them on a bullshit charge, but they did give us something interesting. I think we at least broke even.”
“Scare them and let them go,” Virgil said.
* * *
—
They were on the move at 8:30 the next morning. Virgil called the BCA computer specialist and gave him Margery Osborne’s name and Florida phone number and asked him to find out what he could about the house.
They stopped at a Subway on the way to the hospital to pick up a sandwich for Shrake, who they found in a much-mellowed mood—possibly because one of the nurses had a mouth that matched his and because she’d given him a back scratch and early-morning lotion rub. And, of course, because Jenkins had smuggled in the foot-long Italian BMT.
“Wish I’d been there,” Shrake said about the chase the night before, as he gnawed through the sandwich. “I got a feeling we turned a corner. Has that feel.”
“There is the bow hunter problem,” Virgil said. “I believed Osborne when he said he didn’t have a bow.”
“If he’s a psycho—and he’d have to be a psycho to kill his mom—he’s probably an excellent liar,” Jenkins said.
“Sure, but . . . would he lie if everybody in the neighborhood knew he used a bow and we were sure to find out?”
“Dunno, but my gut says we’re onto something, and my gut doesn’t lie,” Shrake said.
“There was that time with that Rudolph chick,” Jenkins suggested.
“That’s because my dick overruled my gut, but my gut was telling me the truth,” Shrake said. “What can I tell you?”
“Don’t want to hear about it,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, like you haven’t been there,” Shrake said. And, “Damn, that was a tasty sandwich.”
* * *
—
Virgil and Jenkins got a pancake and link sausage breakfast and drove back to Wheatfield for the 10 o’clock meeting. Holland had talked to his banker girlfriend, who’d come through with details from the title agency.
“They sold the farm ten years ago,” Holland said. “They got a million two hundred and eighty thousand for it. Nice piece of property, I guess. A hundred and eighty acres, good land, but not enough to be really economically feasible. It was right at the time when the speculators were buying up farmland, so they did all right. Sara doesn’t think there was much if anything in the way of taxes, so after the real estate commission and some other deductions, she thinks they walked away with around a million-two.”
“Whoa! Did she know anything about the Florida house?” Jenkins asked.
“She didn’t know anything about that, but she took a peek at Margery’s local bank accounts, and there was a little more than six thousand in them.”
Virgil said to Jenkins, “Get on the phone, call Dave at the AG’s office, get a subpoena for her bank records. I’ll want to look at them this afternoon.”
“Can do,” Jenkins said, and he went out to the back alley to make the call.
While he was doing that, Virgil called the computer specialist at BCA headquarters, who said he was about to call him back. “I have an address for you, and I also found an old listing for the house. The former owner was asking $680,000 for it back when the real estate market was still falling apart, and Osborne did better than that. I called the listing dealer and asked what she thought it’d be worth now, and she said maybe a million. I had her look up her records on it, and she said Osborne’s end of the deal was handled by a local lawyer named John Ryan. I’ve got a number for him, if you want it.”
* * *
—
Virgil called Ryan, who not only remembered Osborne but said he was still her Florida attorney, although he hadn’t heard that she’d been killed.
“That’s awful—she was a nice lady. She was thinking about selling out here and moving back to Minnesota because of that miracle up there . . . She said it was a miracle, the Virgin Mary showing up at her church.”
“She hadn’t listed the house?”
“Not yet. Listen, I think you should talk to a banker down here. He’s at Lost Coast State Bank, name is Bob Morgan. Margery was planning to use some of the house sale money to set up a charitable trust for that church.”
Virgil thought, Uh-oh, and said, “Bob Morgan . . . You got a number?”
* * *
—
Morgan had gone to lunch, but Virgil wheedled the number of his personal cell phone from his secretary and caught him halfway through a bacon and sausage quiche.
“Margery has an investment account with us, not huge, but not insignificant, either. When she came down here, she spent half her money on her house, put the other half in the market, and lived on her Social Security. The stock market’s gone wild since then, and the housing market’s come back strong. I’d need a subpoena to give you the exact details of her accounts, but I can tell you that she was working on a plan that would move most of her appreciated assets to the church, which would mean that she could give them a bundle. Then she could sell her house and move back to Minnesota, where she could live free, and use the proceeds to get her through her old age, should she need nursing care later in life . . .”
There was more of that, but the bottom line, Virgil thought, was that if Margery did need late-life nursing care, there wouldn’t be much left for Barry.
“If I supposed, just as a . . . conjecture, that she put half of the farm money into her house and half into her investments, the investments would have appreciated at least as much as the house, wouldn’t they?” he asked Morgan.
Morgan said, “Speaking purely hypothetically, if someone had done that, actually, the investments would have outpaced the appreciation of her house.”
“Thank you.”
“Tell her son to get in touch—we have a lot to talk about,” Morgan said.