Deep Freeze Page 5

  “She’s like Jesse James,” Johnson said. “The outlaw heroine.”

  “She good-looking?” Virgil asked. Outlaw heroines in the media age usually were.

  Johnson laughed and said, “Yeah, she is. She really is.”

  Clarice changed the subject. “What about Gina? What’d you find out, Virgil? Have you been to her house?”

  Virgil told them about his visit with the medical examiner. When he mentioned the body bruising, Clarice and Johnson looked at each other, considering the possibilities. Then Clarice shook her head and said, “I don’t doubt that it happens here, with the long winters, but I don’t know who’d be into it.”

  “I experience enough pain cutting timber,” Johnson said. “And if I tried paddling Clarice . . .”

  “You’d have to sleep with both eyes open,” Clarice said.

  “I’ve dealt with sex crimes, but this . . . I’ve never done anything like B and D people, where it’s voluntary,” Virgil said. “I need to do some research, I guess. I mean, do they tend to violence? Or are they just playing? Or what?”

  “You get a thrill out of spanking somebody hard enough to leave bruises, I think you might get excited by violence,” Clarice said. “Especially if the . . . spankee? . . . is tied up and helpless. And even if that’s voluntary, there’s something wrong in that somewhere.”

  “I hear you,” Virgil said.

  “Got a thought for you,” Johnson said. “When you’re doing your research, I wouldn’t go to the library and ask for a book about it. The town is not all that big, and you might not want that kind of reputation.”

  Virgil said, “I don’t know. Could bring me some compelling new local contacts.”

  “Since it’s B and D, it’d even be heavy on the ‘compelling,’” Clarice said.

  SIX That night, in his regular pre-sleep contemplation of the mystery of God’s ways, Virgil thought about the unfairness of personal appearance. When he asked Johnson if the Barbie-O maker Jesse McGovern was good-looking, he hadn’t been asking idly.

  Pretty people, Virgil believed, both male and female, had a totally unwarranted, unearned lifelong advantage over average and ugly people. The advantage began in their earliest years—What a pretty baby!—and persisted for most of their lives. Quite often, they didn’t believe in their advantage. Oh, they knew they were pretty, but they took it as their God-given right rather than an unearned gift.

  Jesse McGovern was being forgiven even as she apparently, and repeatedly, broke and evaded the law, even if the lawbreaking in this case seemed trivial to most people, including Virgil’s friends.

  Gina Hemming had also been a pretty woman and well-off since birth. Both Johnson and Clarice had described her as haughty, better than thou, assuming appearance, brains, and money not only as her righteous heritage but as weapons to be used.

  Hemming might very well be dead because of all that, Virgil thought. Rich and pretty attracted attention, not all of it good.

  Why would a just God allow this to happen? Was it all part of an evolutionary clockwork that God allowed to work through itself, unguided, an enormous experiment of some kind, for good reasons that humans couldn’t perceive?

  Not something Virgil could work out in one night.

  —

  Virgil got up early the next morning, looked out the window at the thermometer—one below zero. He could see dead brown leaves fluttering on a riverside oak, so there was some wind, too, which would make things worse. He cleaned up, pulled on his long underwear, wool socks, put on his Pendleton wool shirt, jeans, and insulated boots, parka, double-layer watch cap, and driving gloves, with his ski gloves carried in the parka pockets.

  He had breakfast at Ma and Pa Kettle’s—scrambled eggs, toast, sausages, and Diet Coke—and read last week’s Republican-River. The newspaper didn’t have a word about the murder, not because it was a crappy paper—though it was—but because it was a weekly and came out on Thursday mornings and Hemming had disappeared Thursday night.

  As he ate, Virgil wrote down a list of names. He needed to talk to Jeff Purdy, the Buchanan County sheriff who also provided law enforcement services to Trippton; Justin (Justine) Rhodes, Hemming’s husband; and, he thought, he might make a quick visit to an elderly lady named Janice Anderson. It wasn’t much of a list, but it was a start.

  He was finishing his Coke when Margaret Griffin came through the door, looked around, spotted him sitting by himself. She asked a waitress to bring her coffee and an omelet, sat down across from him, and asked, “What can you do for me?”

  “I’ve been out at CarryTown before, so I know where it is,” Virgil said. “This guy who warned you off . . . what trailer is he in?”

  “Number 400. I don’t know what his name is. I was going to ask at the post office. You want me to come along?”

  “Better if I go by myself. I’ve got to give priority to the murder case, but when I get a break, I’ll run out there,” Virgil said.

  “Okay. I looked you up on the Internet last night and found those stories about the school board . . . That sounded like quite the unusual situation,” she said.

  “Not something you run into all the time,” Virgil said.

  “I never ran into anything like it when I was a cop,” she said.

  “Where were you a cop?” Virgil asked.

  “L.A. Six years on the street, and things got so rough I finally said screw it. Started off to law school, ran out of money—didn’t much like it anyway—but that helped me get my private investigator’s ticket, and I’ve done okay,” Griffin said. “I do a lot of background checks for executive employment. Mattel is one of my big clients, so when they asked me to do this, I could hardly say no.”

  They chatted for another ten minutes, then Virgil said, “You take it easy while you’re poking around, Margaret. This woman, if she’s in town, is going to hear about you, if she hasn’t already, and the people out here have guns.”

  “You think there might be a real threat?”

  “Oh, no, not really. Minnesota’s generally a peaceful place,” Virgil said.

  “Except for a whole bunch of serial killings that you’ve looked at over the years, and Vietnamese spies killing people, and a school board that murders its critics, and now this woman who was murdered and thrown in the river . . .”

  “Well . . . yeah. We’re not perfect.”

  —

  When Virgil got up to go, Griffin asked, “You don’t carry a gun yourself?”

  “I’ve got one, but it’s, you know, heavy,” Virgil said.

  She squeezed the bridge of her nose for a moment, muttered, “Okay.”

  What she was thinking, Virgil thought as he walked away, was “hick cop.”

  —

  Virgil pulled on his ski gloves and walked over to the law enforcement center. A balding deputy was sitting behind a panel of bulletproof glass reading a book called Techniques in Home Winemaking, which he put down when Virgil walked in.

  He pushed an intercom button and said, “Virgil. Here to solve the murder?”

  “That’s one thing. Is Jeff in?”

  “Yeah, he’s back there. Be happy to see you, I believe. I’ll buzz you in.”

  The working area of the sheriff’s office was behind a sturdy black steel door. When the lock buzzed, Virgil pushed through and heard the deputy call, “Hey, Jeff—that fuckin’ Flowers is here.”

  Virgil had been there before and he followed the hallway around a corner as the sheriff popped out of his office and stuck out a hand. “Man, am I glad to see you. We gotta figure this thing out right quick. The Chamber of Commerce is all over my butt. Come on back.”

  Virgil followed him back to his office, took a chair, and asked, “Who inherits? The husband?”

  “Not quite sure. I haven’t seen a will yet. Gina had a sister, but the sister lives in Iowa City with her husba
nd—he’s a doctor—and they were both there in Iowa when Gina went for the swim.”

  “They’re out as suspects?”

  “Yeah. They came up here—they’re still here, at the Motel 6, waiting to see when they might have a funeral, making arrangements for running the bank . . .”

  “Who’s going to do that?”

  “Well, Marv Hiners is first vice president over there. He’s iron-clad for Thursday night and Friday—he was up at a Wild game in the Cities with his wife and kids, got back here about noon on Saturday. Anyway, the sister, her name’s Ann Ryan—her husband is Terry Ryan—says they’ll probably sell the bank off to Wells Fargo. Take the cash out. That’s been the plan for a while, she said, so Marv knew he wouldn’t be taking over the place . . .”

  “Still could wind up running the bank if Wells keeps him on,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah, but he’d be on a branch bank salary. Even if he runs the place, he won’t be getting rich. Besides . . . he was in the Cities. This whole thing doesn’t look like a professional hit, which it would have to be if the Ryans or Hiners paid for it. To me, it looks like a domestic, and the killer tried to hide it.”

  “So . . . Justin/Justine?”

  Purdy winced and shook his head. “Got no alibi, got nothing. His boyfriend was down in Prairie du Chien that day, taking a cooking class and hanging out. He and Justin/Justine have a new French restaurant. Justin said he was home reading Proust.” He pronounced “Proust” as if it rhymed with “toast.”

  “Proust?” Virgil rhymed it with “roost.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “I understand he was still talking to Hemming,” Virgil said.

  “Oh, yeah, they were still friendly. Gina told me, ‘No harm, no foul.’”

  “Was she dating?”

  “She’s had some male friends over the years but wasn’t sleeping with any of them—not currently, as far as I can tell. But I wasn’t in charge of watching her, you know?”

  “You do know about the B and D bruises?”

  “Thurston told me about them. I don’t know what that means. He said they were old, for one thing. And, hell, they were voluntary. I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about them even if they are real.”

  They spent another ten minutes talking over the background. When Virgil asked if the department’s crime scene investigator, whose name was Alewort, had turned anything up, Purdy told him that Alewort was up at St. Mary’s, in the Cities, drying out.

  “This is usually our slow season, so it was the best time for him to go,” Purdy said.

  “So, basically, you haven’t been able to turn up a lot.”

  “That’s not quite true,” Purdy said. “We’ve got a guy who’s trained to fill in for Alewort, though he might not be quite as good as the real thing.” He turned around to his desk and pawed through a rubble of paper, finally coming up with a single yellow sheet torn from a legal pad.

  “When Gina was found, she was wearing a dressy outfit, matching burgundy-colored skirt and jacket with a pinkish blouse. On Thursday night, she had a meeting at her house, to work with a committee that’s setting up the Twenty-fifth Reunion of the Trippton High School Class of ’92. There were eight people there, besides her, and all eight say she was wearing that same outfit. She didn’t show up for work on Friday, so we all think she was killed Thursday night before she had a chance to change clothes.”

  Virgil said, “Okay, I can use that.”

  Purdy held up a finger. “Furthermore, our investigator found a spot of blood on the carpet in the living room. Not much of a spot, but enough that it wasn’t a casual cut. We’ve taken samples and sent it off to the lab to make sure it’s human, but I’m betting it is. So, she was killed at home, Thursday night, after that meeting.”

  “You’ve checked all the people at the meeting?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “One thing we know is, the last three people who were there all left together. Of course, any of them could have gone back,” Purdy said. “But it’s also possible it’s a total outsider.”

  “Anyone in particular look good?”

  “I haven’t pushed that aspect of it,” Purdy confessed. “Soon as we pulled her out of the water, I called your folks up at the BCA and asked for help. Even if one of these people is the killer, I’d have to piss off seven innocent people to find that out. I knew you were coming, so I decided to leave the pushing to you. And the pissing off.”

  Virgil nodded. He dealt with local sheriffs all the time, and what Purdy told him wasn’t unusual, although it wasn’t usually stated quite so bluntly. “All right. I can push.”

  Purdy handed him the yellow sheet of paper. “Names, phone numbers, addresses, both home and business, for everybody involved.”

  “Saves me a day right there,” Virgil said. “I’d like to look at the crime scene. Do you have keys?”

  “I do. They’re in the evidence locker. I’ll get them.”

  “Do you know if Janice Anderson is still alive?”

  “Shoot, that old biddy is never gonna die,” Purdy said. “You know she wants to end high school football and replace it with art? You know what life drawing is?”

  “Drawing naked people?”

  “She wants high school seniors doing that—these girls seeing grown-up naked men,” Purdy said.

  “You think you got any senior girls down here who haven’t seen a grown-up naked man?” Virgil asked.

  Purdy thought it over for a while, then muttered, “Gotta be one or two.”

  “Maybe those two could make cookies instead,” Virgil said. “Now, tell me about Jesse McGovern.”

  Purdy groaned. “Aw, shit, Virgil, don’t hassle me about Jesse. Please.”

  “Where is she?” Virgil asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to know,” Purdy said. “You ever run for anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “If you ever do, this is what you’ll find out,” Purdy said. “Every year, you piss off one percent of your constituents. No way around it. They’ll vote against you every chance they get. I’ve been sheriff for twenty years, so there’s twenty percent of the electorate who’ll vote against me every chance they get.”

  “I don’t think the math would work exactly like that,” Virgil pointed out. “Some of them you’d piss off twice.”

  “Okay, okay, not exactly, but I try not to piss off influential people any more than I have to, and pointing you at Jesse would probably cost me five hundred votes,” Purdy said. “So, I ain’t gonna do it. You want her, catch her on your own. To tell you the truth, if I were you, I’d catch whoever killed Gina Hemming and let Jesse McGovern slide. Catching her wouldn’t do nobody any good except some big corporation out in California. Which doesn’t have any votes in Buchanan County.”

  He had a point, but somehow it didn’t seem entirely congruent with the American Way, the Rule of Law, and all that. But a job was a job, and times were bad in the small out-of-state towns. Virgil got the keys to Hemming’s house and headed for the door.

  SEVEN Janice Anderson wasn’t on Purdy’s list of contacts, but she’d provided key information when Virgil broke the school board case. He didn’t know if she’d have any relevant information on the Hemming murder, the old lady nonetheless keeping her ear to the ground, so instead of going straight to Hemming’s house, he stopped at Anderson’s.

  Virgil parked down the street from her house, walked the last two hundred yards—no point in advertising the fact that he was talking to Anderson—pushed through her front gate, and knocked on her bluebird orange door. He heard her moving inside, and a moment later an elderly woman with short, curly white hair and rimless glasses pulled open the inner door, pushed open the storm door, and said, “Virgil Flowers. I knew you’d come snooping around.”

  “You gonna leave me s
tanding out here freezing my tits off?” Virgil asked.

  “Not at all. Say, did you ever play football?”

  “Yeah, in high school, out in Marshall. I was a wide receiver.”

  “That explains a lot,” she said. “C’mon in anyway. I wouldn’t want to have any frozen tits on my conscience.”

  —

  Anderson had spent nearly forty-three years in Trippton as a high school teacher, and since few outsiders moved into Trippton, virtually everybody in town, forty-eight and younger, had been in one of her classes. Since she’d grown up in Trippton, she also knew almost everybody between forty-eight and seventy as friends from her youth.

  She led the way into the kitchen and asked, “Coffee or hot cocoa?”

  “Cocoa,” Virgil said, as he took a chair at the kitchen table.

  “That’s right,” she said. “You get your caffeine from Diet Coke.” She got a can of Hershey’s cocoa out of the cupboard, and as she was putting it together with milk and sugar on the stove she said, “You’re here about Gina Hemming.”

  “Yup. What do you know?”

  “A few things—which you didn’t hear from me,” she said.

  “Of course not,” Virgil said. “By the way, I’ve got a list for you to look at.”

  He put the yellow legal pad page out on the kitchen table, and when she’d finished mixing the cocoa and milk with a metal wisk, she picked it up and read down the list.

  “If any of these people killed her, it was an accident,” she said. “Though, I guess the cover-up wouldn’t have been an accident, would it? Taking her out and throwing her in the river.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. Killing her wasn’t an accident, either, unless you’d consider whacking somebody on the head with a heavy object to be an accident.”