“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.