“If the client was involved, he’d have killed Osborne out there and dumped the body in the weeds somewhere instead of sneaking into the house and killing him here,” Virgil said.

“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 . . .”