Deep Freeze Read online

  It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen a purse or the phone. He called Purdy again. “No, we don’t have them. I should have mentioned that—I noticed it the first night when I went over to her house.”

  Virgil ended the call, walked out of the dressing room into the bedroom, went back and looked at the ties again. They’d been bothering him, and after looking at them a second time, he knew why. Men’s ties got wrinkled on both sides at the front of the neck, where the knot would be, with the short section that went around the back of a man’s neck smooth. These ties, all four of them, were badly wrinkled near the ends.

  They had been used, Virgil thought, to tie somebody up—but tie her up comfortably.

  Back in the bedroom, he dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. There were several boxes, with a variety of things inside them—the leaves for a table, Christmas ornaments.

  He put the stuff back in the boxes and shoved them under the bed again.

  One door in the upstairs hallway didn’t lead to a bedroom but to an attic instead. The stairs smelled musty and showed a layer of dust, without footprints, so he left it for the crime scene crew.

  —

  He continued prowling the house—checked the refrigerator, because women liked to hide things in the freezer, and checked the drawer under the stove—but found nothing more of interest.

  He was about finished when a deputy showed up, and they counted out the coins and the cash and the deputy wrote a receipt for them and took them away. Virgil took a last look around, locked up, got some crime scene tape from his truck and put it across the exterior doors.

  The house had more or less confirmed what people had been telling him: an impulsive killing by somebody who knew Hemming. Not a robbery—nothing out of place, with valuables left behind—but with some effort to delay discovery, with the removal of the body, phone, and purse.

  He got out Purdy’s list, found the cell phone number of Hemming’s sister, and called it. The sister answered on the second ring, and Virgil identified himself and asked when and where they could meet. The sister suggested that Virgil come to their motel. Now would be fine.

  —

  Ann and Terry Ryan and their two boys had two connecting rooms at the Motel 6, Trippton’s premier hostelry. The boys, watching TV in the second room, looked up at Virgil and went back to the TV. The Ryan adults and Virgil talked in the first room. The Ryans seemed less distraught than tired, and worried, until Virgil mentioned the gold coins.

  “Oh, thank God,” Ann Ryan said. She looked like her sister but a few years younger, strong-chinned and blond, close-cut hair. “Those are St. Gaudens twenty-dollar gold pieces. I got ten, and Gina got ten, when Dad died. They’re the rarest ones, and in perfect condition, and worth quite a bit. I didn’t want to mention them to anybody until . . . Well, we were worried . . .”

  Terry Ryan stepped in. “We were afraid that if some sheriff’s deputy found them, we’d never see them again. We were going to search the house ourselves.”

  Virgil opened his mouth to say something defensive, decided against it. Ann Ryan had grown up in the town and probably had fairly accurate ideas about local law enforcement. Instead, he asked, “Do you have any ideas of who might have done this to Gina? Anything at all, any hint?”

  They were both shaking their heads before he finished asking. “We came up here for a week every summer, around the Fourth of July, but other than that we didn’t see Gina that much. She liked the boys, but . . . she had a different life than ours,” Ann said.

  “A couple people have mentioned that Gina took the bank over when your father died . . . Is your mother still alive?” Virgil asked.

  “Oh, no, she died of breast cancer when she was forty-two. I was ten, Gina was thirteen. Dad never remarried.”

  “So . . . who inherits?”

  “Oh, boy . . . we looked at the will,” Ann said. “Gina hadn’t changed it since she and Justin broke it off. She didn’t expect to die. The way it works, Dad left the bank to Gina and me, equally, but it was in a trust, and Gina was the sole trustee. So, I owned a third of the shares, and she owned a third, but she got to vote both thirds—she had control. Every year, she’d declare a dividend, and I’d get some money, and the other stockholders would get some money, but she controlled everything. When she died, I became the trustee. I get Gina’s stock and control two-thirds of it. We’ll probably sell the bank . . .”

  “But that fuckin’ Justin gets the real estate,” Terry Ryan said. He was a tall, thin man, intense; looked like he’d spent a lot of time on a racing bike.

  “Language,” Ann Ryan said to him, glancing through the door at the two boys in the other room. To Virgil: “Gina owns her house, and a condo down in Florida—a very nice condo, in Naples—Justin inherits those. She also had large cash investment accounts—I get those. She and Justin were talking to lawyers about a divorce, but she hadn’t changed her will. She simply didn’t think she was going to die . . .”

  “Do you think Justin . . .”

  Ann was shaking her head. “I’ve known him forever. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. But he has this boyfriend . . .”

  “Rob Knox,” Terry Ryan said. “Justin moved out of Gina’s house last summer and he and Knox moved in together. Knox is a vicious little snake. He also thinks he’s got a great investment mind and he decided Trippton needed a French restaurant.” Terry snorted. “Can you believe that? A French restaurant? He hired some chef from down in Prairie du Chien, and they started a restaurant up here, with Justin’s money. I understand they’re in the process of losing their shirts.”

  “You don’t know that,” Ann protested.

  “Yeah? Garlic butter snails in Trippton? Are you kiddin’ me?” Terry said. “Truffled squab in sauce le orange? More like fuckin’ bridge pigeons, if you ask me. A hundred dollars a plate? In Trippton? I don’t think so.”

  “Language,” Ann said. Virgil decided not to correct the “le orange/l’orange.”

  Terry Ryan continued. “You want a tip, Virgil? Rob Knox is an ass”—he glanced at his wife—“a jerk. Would he kill Gina to get the real estate money? Yes. In a New York minute.”

  “How much is the real estate worth?”

  Hemming owned her house free and clear. The Florida condo had a mortgage on it—but if it were sold, the takeout would be about four hundred thousand dollars, Terry Ryan said. The house would be another six hundred thousand, even in Trippton.

  “Altogether, Justin will clear around a million,” Terry Ryan said. “There’s no estate tax on the trust because of the way it was set up. Since the rest of her estate comes in under five mil, there’ll be no estate tax at all. He’ll get the whole amount tax-free.”

  Ann said, “We sound greedy. We don’t want to sound that way. We’re not greedy, really. Terry’s a surgeon, and I’m a clinical psychologist, and we have an excellent income, especially for Iowa City. I’ve inherited a bunch, Terry will inherit from his folks when they die. We don’t need the money. But they were getting divorced . . .”

  “And Knox is going to get the money from Justin and piss it away,” Terry said. “A guy who had nothing to do with Gina. Nothing.”

  They had more to say, and Terry said it with more language to corrupt the boys, but what they said wasn’t of any help to Virgil.

  But the inheritance . . . that was more than interesting.

  —

  Back in his truck, Virgil called Rhodes Realty and was told that Justin Rhodes was out on a call. He thought about Corbel Cain, supposedly Gina Hemming’s rough, on-again, off-again lover.

  Time to pay him a visit.

  NINE Corbel Cain’s heavy-equipment yard had a variety of yellow John Deeres and Caterpillars lined up at one edge of the two-acre lot, including a huge excavator with a claw at the end of its boom instead of a bucket. Probably used for demolition, Virgil thought. If you needed a house ripped apar
t, right now, that would do it. A sprawling gray metal building stood on the back of the lot, and two men in battered canvas work clothes were working on a bulldozer’s hydraulics, pumping steamy breath out into the cold air as they worked.

  The company office was inside a low, unadorned concrete-block building with narrow barred windows. Virgil went to the front door and pushed through, found two women and a man working behind a wooden service counter. The place smelled of diesel exhaust and multipurpose cleaning liquid.

  “Can I help you?” one of the women asked.

  “I need to talk to Corbel Cain,” Virgil said. “Is he in?”

  “Can I tell him what it’s about?”

  “It’s private,” Virgil said. He held up his ID. “I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and I’m hoping Mr. Cain can help me out.”

  “Really? Well, hang on a minute.” She picked up a phone and said, “Corbel, you’re needed in the office.” As she spoke, Virgil heard her voice ringing through a speaker outside. She hung up and said, “He ought to be here in a minute or two.”

  On the way across town, Virgil had called the duty officer at the BCA and had given him Corbel Cain’s name. “Don’t know his birthday, lived his life in Trippton, Minnesota. I do have an address, which should give you his DOB from his driver’s license.”

  The duty officer called back as Virgil was leaning on Cain’s shop counter. “We show three arrests involving domestics, no convictions, two DWIs, paid fines on both of those, the last one was in 2010. Not a lot of detail on the domestics, but it appears that the charges were withdrawn by the victim.”

  Virgil rang off, and five minutes after the woman had called for him, Cain pushed through the front door. His face was red from the cold, and he was wearing a heavy yellow canvas work jacket over a hoodie and cloth work gloves. He nodded at Virgil and said, “I’m Corbel. Can I help you?”

  Virgil repeated what he’d told the woman, and Cain said, “Well, come on back.” He led Virgil through a door at the back of the building and into an office that smelled of cigarettes and was decorated with a couple of stuffed muskies, a twelve-point deer head, and an ancient, carefully preserved Snap-on Tool calendar.

  Cain stripped off his jacket, dropped it on the floor, sat behind his desk, pointed at a plastic visitor’s chair, and asked, “What’s this about?”

  “About Gina Hemming,” Virgil said, as he settled into the chair.

  “I don’t want any shit about that, from you or anybody else, especially that dipshit Purdy,” Cain said. “I’m really serious. I liked her, she was an interesting woman, and I’m more than a little pissed about what happened.”

  “I don’t know yet if I’m going to give you shit, Corbel, but I’ve got some questions and I need some answers,” Virgil said.

  Cain was an inch or two shorter than Virgil, but wider and thicker. He had a strong-boned face, and wore his hair longer than Virgil’s, halfway down his neck. His face and hands were heavily weathered, and he had a piece of paper medical tape stuck to one cheek over the hint of a nonstick pad. He put a leg up on a corner of his desk, the cleats pointed at Virgil’s face, scowled, and said, “If you’re here, you know I used to sleep with Gina. I haven’t for years. The murder’s got nothing to do with me.”

  Virgil said, “A couple of people have mentioned that you and Gina had an off-and-on sexual relationship. You also have several domestics on your record, so . . .”

  Cain shook his head. “I don’t know who told you about the affair, but they must not have told you it’s been over for quite a while. We broke it off three years ago, and I’ve hardly seen her since—never, except on the street. When we saw each other on the street, we usually had a good laugh. I never would have hurt her. I never would have. I liked the pussy, but we were never like a big passion or anything.”

  “Three years?”

  “About three . . . except it was in the summer when we broke it off . . . It could be two and a half, could be three . . . Let me think.” He scratched at the bandage and said, “Three. Yup, three years. Three and a half. I didn’t have to shut her up to hide her from my wife or anything stupid like that because Janey already knew about it. You can ask her, if you want.”

  “Purely out of friendly curiosity, where did that bandage come from? On your face?”

  “Why? Did she fight back and cut somebody?”

  “Where—”

  “She did, didn’t she? She was a tough girl. Good for her.” Cain reached up and touched the bandage. “Mohs surgery, they cut out one of those basal cell panorama things. Takes six or eight weeks to heal up. I can give you the doctor’s name and all kinds of people have seen it on me, for three weeks now. Looking at you, by the way—you’re gonna get some real-time experience with the Mohs. Blond and too much sun will do it every time.”

  Virgil asked him a few more questions—Cain said he had no idea of who else Hemming had dated recently. Virgil mentioned the signs of a B and D relationship, and Cain’s eyebrows went up. “Really? That’s something new. I mean, that girl really liked to get moved around, if you’ll pardon the expression, but she never even hinted she’d be interested in anything like that.”

  “When you say that Gina liked to be moved around . . .”

  “She liked it that I was big. And I’m strong. So . . . I could pick her up and turn her around and move her. She was pretty big herself, and she said I made her feel like a girl . . . that’s what I meant. She was married to this guy . . . Justin . . . he didn’t move her around much. If at all.”

  “You weren’t exactly sweethearts,” Virgil suggested.

  “Like I said, not a big passion. I was having trouble with my wife . . .”

  “Involve a shotgun?” Virgil asked.

  Cain flinched, then smiled. “Damn, you’ve got some sources there, Flowers . . . Nobody there for that except me and the old man. There wasn’t a shotgun, the time I’m talking about. What I was going to say is, I was having trouble with my wife, I was living at Ma and Pa’s for a couple of weeks. I called up Gina and she blew me off—she was packing for a trip. I got down to pleading with her. Didn’t do any good, she blew me off anyway. Another time, she called me up, but I was going deer hunting and I didn’t want to miss the party we have the night before the season opened, so I blew her off. Made her unhappy. We were like that: we liked the sex, but we weren’t all that romantic about it. Or committed to anything.”

  —

  Okay.” Virgil pushed him on the charges of domestic violence, but Cain claimed they came in the wake of brawls with his wife, brawls that went both ways. He claimed that she’d attacked him more often than he ever smacked her, and she usually came after him with something that would hurt, like a coffeepot.

  “The cops always charge the guy, and after everybody talks to the sheriff and the judge, they usually let it go. That’s what happened with me,” Cain said.

  “Don’t do that anymore,” Virgil said.

  “What am I supposed to do when the woman comes after me with a coffeepot?”

  “Run,” Virgil said. “Seriously. It’s the best answer.”

  Cain almost laughed. “Probably the best idea. Last time, though, she had me cornered in the bedroom.”

  —

  When Virgil finished with the questions, Cain had a few of his own. “How was she killed?”

  “Struck once with something heavy,” Virgil said.

  “She wasn’t thrown in the river and drowned?”

  “No.”

  Cain made a twitchy movement with his hands. “You know where Orly Crick is?”

  “Yes.”

  “I went through the ice there, when I was a kid,” Cain said. “Almost got pulled downstream, under the unbroken ice. I’ve had nightmares ever since, about getting stuck under the ice, trying to break my way up . . . Good she was dead before she went in.”


  “Well . . .”

  Cain asked, “Have you figured out how she got in the water? River’s froze solid for miles.”

  “I don’t know where she went in, but her body came up at the sewer plant outflow,” Virgil said.

  “I heard that. You know, the sewage plant has a couple of cameras up there on the roof. I did some work for them once and they said it was okay to leave the Bobcat because there were cameras covering it twenty-four/seven.”

  Virgil said, “Thanks for the tip. I’ll go take a look.”

  “One more question,” Cain said. “Does Rhodes inherit? They weren’t divorced yet.”

  Virgil said, “That’s really private . . .”

  “Right. The sonofabitch does get something, doesn’t he? I heard a rumor about that. About how he gets the house.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You lie with a straight face. That’s good if you’re a cop, I guess,” Cain said. “I’ll tell you something, Virgil. I did like that woman. A lot. And I’m not one to lay around yanking on my dick when there’s work to be done. I know all about when you were down here the last time, and I guess you’re good at it, the cop shit, but I’m gonna look into this myself. I been thinking about it all day.”

  “Corbel—”

  “Fuck it. I’m gonna kick some ass and take some names. If I find anything out, I’ll call you.”

  “Stay away from Justin Rhodes,” Virgil said.

  “That’s something I can promise you,” Cain said. “I’ll stay away from Justin Rhodes.”

  —

  They sat there, staring at each other, and Virgil was at a loss: he had nothing to use as a crowbar, and Cain had answered all his questions. Still, Cain had the look of a brawler about him, and, by his own admission, was a brawler. If Hemming’s death was an accident, a brawler might be exactly the person you were looking for. Virgil had a feeling that Cain had been telling the truth, that he wasn’t involved in the murder, but Virgil wasn’t yet ready to label him nope. After a moment, Virgil said, “I’m going to hold you to that. Don’t mess with Justin.”