“That would have been a shame, the mourning and all,” Virgil said.
—
So what’s up?” Thomas asked.
Johnson introduced Virgil, who first explained the blue squid, then the murder problem, and Thomas said, “Well, it won’t be one of the big places out here. Has to be one of the small ones.”
“Why’s that?” Virgil asked.
Thomas pointed at the floor. “Because the big places have wood floors. You’d have to drill a hole through the floor. Or you’d have to move your whole outfit, and you can see if that’s been done, and nobody out here has moved since before Christmas. Lot of the smaller places don’t have full floors.”
“That helps,” Virgil said. “If you know all the people out here . . . where’s the first place you’d look?”
“I’m not sure you’d look in an ice house at all,” Thomas said. “Even if the guy is a rat, why wouldn’t he haul the body out to his house, pick up the auger, and go on up the river where nobody can see him, drill some holes, and drop her in there? It was snowing hard Thursday night—I wasn’t out here, I was in town, but I was out with my snow blower for a while . . . real pretty night. Anyway, in that storm he could have driven out on the river, a pickup or a sled—either one—and drilled a few holes lickety-split, dropped her in, been back to shore, nobody the wiser.”
“Well, fuck me,” Johnson said. To Virgil: “It was all so clear in my mind.”
“That’s gotta be an unexpected change,” Thomas said.
“You still might be right,” Virgil said to Johnson. He turned to Thomas. “You see any tracks going up- or downriver?”
“Yeah. About a million of them. Everybody’s been out riding.”
Johnson: “That’s true. Shit.”
“Still worth a look around,” Virgil said. He said to Thomas, “There’s a translucent plastic tent out there, a big one . . .”
“Duane Hawkins’s place. Supposed to get thermal gain—lets the sunlight in, got a dark fabric floor to soak up the radiation, mirror on the inside so it doesn’t radiate back out . . . free heat.”
“Does it work?” Johnson asked.
“I guess. He’s got a kerosene heater in there, too, thermal gain cuts the kerosene use by about half, he says. ’Course, doesn’t work worth a damn at night. But he’s not out much at night, and during the day the plastic lets in all the light you need, so it’s not a bad setup . . . Haven’t seen it in a real high wind yet.”
He looked back at Virgil. “Why? Can’t think Duane’s involved with Gina Hemming in any way?”
“Don’t particularly think he was,” Virgil said. “A plastic fishing tent . . . something I’ve never seen before.”
They chatted a few more minutes, but Thomas didn’t have much more information. And clearly wasn’t a suspect: Gina Hemming would have kicked his ass in a struggle.
Back outside, Virgil zipped up his suit and said to Johnson, “I want to take a look at that tent. Talk to the owner.”
“Oh-oh. What’d I miss?”
“The person going in there kept looking at me . . . there’s a kind of thing that happens when people look at cops and keep looking back,” Virgil said. “Attracts the eye. A cop’s eye, anyhow.”
“How’d he know you’re a cop?”
“Could be a she—couldn’t tell from the parka—and I got the squid on my face. And the hair, when I took off the helmet.”
“You think . . . ?”
“Dunno. Let’s go ask. Do you know this Duane Hawkins?”
“Yeah, I see him around from time to time. Works out at the Kubota dealer, mechanic or something,” Johnson said.
They tramped across the ice to the tent, probably fifty yards, but when they got there, there was no one inside.
“Shoot,” Virgil said.
“No lock on the door,” Johnson observed.
“Still would need a search warrant to go in,” Virgil said.
Johnson: “I’m not a cop. I’m an old buddy of Duane’s.”
“Johnson . . .”
Johnson pushed the door open and stepped inside, as Virgil hoped he would. Virgil didn’t go in but stood outside and watched. The tent was furnished with four orange molded-plastic chairs and a wooden gun rack that, instead of holding guns, held erect an array of short ice-fishing poles, ice skimmers, and a chipper. A well-used, gas-operated eight-inch auger lay on an unpainted board. The chairs were made more comfortable with fabric floatation pillows.
Two cardboard boxes sat behind the chairs.
“What’s in there?” Virgil asked.
“Nothing. They’re empty.”
Virgil scanned the village: nobody in sight. He stepped inside, glanced around, and was about to step back out when he saw what looked like a silver coin on the floor attached by wires to a brown plastic disk about the size of three quarters stacked on top of one another. Virgil picked it up, turned it over in his hand. The silver coin was a battery inside a thin holder; the brown disk showed a hole the size of a pencil eraser and, at its bottom, a shiny copper strip.
“What do you think?” he asked Johnson.
Johnson peered at it for a second, fished in a pocket, produced a mechanical pencil, and used it to push on the copper strip.
The brown box spoke to them. “Oh, yes, oh, yes, give it to me harder, big boy. Oh, yes, you’re so big . . .”
“Goddamn. Must have been out building them Barbie-Os,” Johnson said. “That’d keep you busy while you’re waiting for a bite.”
“That was a woman who went sneaking off. She knew who I was. If we’d come here first, I would have had my hands on one of the women who put the squid on my face,” Virgil said.
“Quit whining. What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. Not yet. Call up Margaret Griffin, suggest she talk to Duane what’s-his-name . . .”
“Hawkins . . .”
“And, in the meantime, we ought to check around with the people out here and see if anybody saw anything Thursday night. Or a truck go by. I’d like to find the hole the killer stuffed the body through.”
—
Over the next hour, they talked to a dozen fishermen, got a lot of shaking heads; went farther south, checked a couple of isolated shacks but found nobody home; hit a second, smaller fishing village, talked to a few more fishermen. One of them said, “Let me call Rusty Tremblay. He might know something. He saw a weird hole Friday night.”
A minute later, they had Tremblay on speaker, and he said, with a mild Quebecois accent, “Yah, I seen a hole, too big even for pike guys. Let’s see . . . Friday night, I might have had a couple three or four drinks, so I was not one hundred percent. I was going over to Rattlesnake, but I aimed too far north . . . You know how that works, pissed as a newt and snowing an’ all . . . There’s a light on a pole outside the Lutheran church. I was aiming at that, thinking it was Rattlesnake, and I almost run over the hole . . . Yeah, you could have shoved a body through it . . . Thinking about it now, had to been done either Thursday night or Friday, ’cause somebody had scraped snow in it and it wasn’t completely froze up yet.”
“Good information, Rusty,” Johnson shouted into the phone. “We’ll go over there. How’s Booger?”
“She’s fine. Getting trained now. I got her bringing my shoes.”
“Great. Good for you,” Johnson shouted. “We’re gonna go look for this hole. And my assistant here, Virgil, might want to come talk to you later. That okay?”
“That’s okay, Johnson. I’ll be at Wyatt’s after eight o’clock.”
On the way back to their sleds, Virgil asked, “What kind of fuckin’ idiot would name his dog Booger? You can see him, out in the neighborhood, calling her in: ‘Here, Booger’ . . .”
“Not his dog,” Johnson said, as he straddled his sled. “She’s his granddaughter. Gotta be two years old now.?
??
He fired up the sled and took off, Virgil trailing behind.
—
They took an hour to find the hole. They started by lining up the Lutheran church, which was on a road along the river, north of the Rattlesnake Country Club, and the boat ramp at Trippton, which was where almost everybody got onto the river.
They made the mistake of looking too close to the Wisconsin side, tracking back and forth, and finally stumbled on it less than halfway across and south of their original line. The newly refrozen hole wasn’t much to look at, maybe two and a half feet long and twenty inches wide, made with six auger holes, and connected by chipping out the area between the holes with an ice chipper.
“That’s got to be it,” Johnson said, scuffing at it with his boots. “No reason in hell that somebody would cut a hole that size out here by itself. You might catch a mud cat down there, but there’s no walleyes or anything good.”
“Okay.” Virgil looked around and picked out a reference point on the Wisconsin side that lined up with the hole and the Trippton boat ramp. “You know what? Suppose you killed a woman and wanted people to think she might have gone off someplace with her purse and shoes and all that shit . . . what would you do with that stuff? You wouldn’t want to get caught with it.”
Johnson checked the hole again and said, “Yeah. I’d throw it in the hole. The river’s low and slow, it’s probably right down there.”
“Maybe with the murder weapon,” Virgil said. “We need an ice diver.”
“Don’t know of one,” Johnson said, “though I imagine they’re around.”
—
They headed back to the cabin, letting the sleds run two or three miles north of the turnoff to Johnson’s slough, a wildly enjoyable ride on a darkening afternoon. At the cabin, they parked the sleds next to it because Virgil thought they’d probably need them again, and Johnson said, looking at the sky, “If you’re gonna find a diver, you better get going. A quick eight inches of snow would cover that hole right up.”
“Is it supposed to snow tonight?”
“Not supposed to . . . or not much . . . but still . . .” He looked up at the oncoming cloud bank.
Virgil called Jon Duncan, told him what he’d found.
“I know there are divers around, I’ll find one,” Duncan said. “What’s happening with the, uh, Barbies?”
“Got a name on that—I’m going to feed it to this private eye, hope we get clear,” Virgil said.
“Good. Good. I’ll tell the governor. His weasel called this morning. I told him you were all over it.”
“You can count on it,” Virgil said.
—
After ringing off from Duncan, he called Margaret Griffin and gave her Duane Hawkins’s name and said that he worked at the Kubota dealership. “I’ll be all over his credit history in five minutes; I’ll be collecting his ears by ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” she said. “Virgil, thank you.”
When Virgil hung up, Johnson made a dusting-his-hands motion and said, “We done good. I’m thinking burgers and fries.”
“I need to finish some interviews,” Virgil said. He took a slip of paper from his jeans. “What do you know about David Birkmann?”
“Bug Boy? He’s kind of a sissy,” Johnson said. “His wife got it on with the owner of Dunkin’ Donuts, and they split up, and she made him buy the donut shop so she and lover boy could buy another Dunkin’ Donuts in Austin. Or maybe Houston. I get them confused. That’s the story anyway.”
“Why’s he called Bug Boy?”
“He owns the pest control company, bugs and rodents and skunks and so on,” Johnson said.
“And the Dunkin’ Donuts.”
“Right. You can talk to him, but I kinda don’t think he did it—killed Gina. He is sort of a sissy.”
FOURTEEN David Birkmann lived in an American foursquare farmhouse a mile west of Trippton, above and west of the riverfront bluffs. The house was basically a two-story clapboard cube painted a grayish white with a pyramidal roof, and a dormer centered over the wide front porch.
The front lawn, going up to the porch, was a plateau of unmarked snow. A narrow barn-shaped building sat to the left side, in back, with newer garage doors. The driveway had been plowed back to the garage and up to the side door leading into the house. Snow was starting to fall; not heavy yet, but with the slanting, serious feel that would leave behind at least a few inches by morning. The yard was lit by a sodium-vapor pole light that threw a flickering orange glow on the falling snow, the plowed snowbanks, and the side of the house.
As he drove up the driveway, it occurred to Virgil that if it had been a scene from a Stephen King movie, somebody was gonna die and it was gonna be ugly.
He parked at the side of the house, considered for a moment, knelt on his seat, opened the lockbox in back, and took out his backup pistol, a small Sig 938 in a flat, front pocket carry holster. He slipped it into his jeans pocket, as a porch light came on next to the side door, and got out of the truck and walked over.
The chubby, balding dark-haired man stood behind the half-open door, wearing tan slacks and a plaid shirt, the shirt open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He called, “Can I help you?”
Virgil said, “I’m an investigator with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Are you David Birkmann?”
“Yes. You must be Virgil Flowers.”
“I am,” Virgil said. “I need to speak to you about Gina Hemming.”
“I was expecting you,” Birkmann said. “Come on in.”
They walked up a short flight of steps into a kitchen, with an old linoleum floor, that smelled of fried eggs, grease, and maybe oatmeal. Birkmann asked, “You want a beer or a Pepsi?”
“Thanks, I’m good,” Virgil said, he being a Coca-Cola snob.
Birkmann led the way out of the kitchen through a squared-off arch into the dining room and through another arch into the living room, where a couple of easy chairs faced an oversized television. He pointed Virgil at one of the chairs, which turned out to have a revolving base, and he took the other, and they rotated toward each other.
Birkmann said, “Ask away, but I don’t think I can help you much.”
“You last saw Gina Hemming Thursday night?”
“Yeah. I left there about eight forty-five. I sat in my truck for a minute, wrote down some stuff from the meeting—when we were supposed to meet again; what I was supposed to do, exactly; the deadlines and stuff. There were still a few people there when I left . . .”
“Then you went home?” Virgil was checking Birkmann, saw no signs of any fingernail damage to his bare face or arms.
“No, not right away. I went down to Club Gold—that’s a bar downtown. They have karaoke on Thursday. I drank a couple beers and sang a couple of songs. I was there for a while . . . I don’t know exactly how long. I walked out with Bob Jackson, he’s a post office clerk. He might have a better idea about the time, but I’d say . . . it must have been close to eleven. From there, I came straight home and went to bed. I never even heard about Gina until Sunday morning, down at the donut shop. I couldn’t believe it.”
“What’d you do on Friday and Saturday?”
Birkmann shrugged. “The usual. I have two businesses, and most of my job is keeping the books, making appointments, making sure the guys are on time and are doing the work, and ordering stuff. I take complaints, if there are any. I’ve got an office on Main Street—actually, it’s in a building on Main Street, but I’m in the back. I did the usual stuff on Friday, I guess, because I didn’t know that anything had happened to Gina, and nobody told me. I worked a half day Saturday, came back here, plowed the driveway, and, later in the day I ran up to La Crosse. Went to a bookstore, bought some movies, got back late, got up early Sunday, went downtown to the donut shop, and that’s where I heard about Gina. Freaked me out, man. I mean, really. I
’ve known her since we were both five years old.”
“Did you see anybody you knew at the bookstore?”
“No . . . but I did charge the movies on my Visa card. That’d give you a time and date, I guess, if you wanted to check.”
Virgil nodded. “Of the people on the committee, who’d be most likely to have killed her?”
Birkmann leaned back in the chair. “What? None of them. Listen, Officer . . . Agent . . .”
“Virgil,” Virgil said.
“I have a hard time believing any of this, Virgil,” Birkmann said, waving a hand to indicate “any of this.” “If you want to know what I think, I think she went out somewhere after we were all gone, maybe got hit by a drunk driver, and the guy panicked, and, you know . . . put her in the river.”
“Her car was still parked in her garage and it was really cold—not much place to walk to from where she lived. She had some boots, but they were sitting by the back door.”
“Maybe somebody . . .” Birkmann trailed off in thought. Then said, “You know what? I don’t know what happened. I don’t have any idea. I can’t even guess.”
“Do you have a ten-inch ice auger?” Virgil asked.
“I don’t have any auger. I don’t do that . . . ice fish. Or regular fish. I don’t have a boat or a snowmobile, or anything. Before I got divorced, I used to deer hunt, but I don’t do that anymore, either. Mostly what I do is work.”
“Dating anyone?” Virgil asked.
“No. To be honest, I’d like a few years of peace and quiet,” Birkmann said. “I’ve had some of the local gals flirting with me, but I’m not making another mistake like the last one.”
“You wouldn’t know anyone involved in bondage and discipline, that kind of sexual practice?”
Birkmann chuckled—a dry, tired sound—rubbed his face, and said, “You know what, Virgil? I talked to Margot Moore and she said you had asked her about B and D. That’s what she called it, and I had no idea of what it was. The initials. I knew people tied each other up and played with whips and so on—I’m not stupid—but I didn’t know what you called it. I was kinda embarrassed she had to explain it to me. I mean, the sexiest thing I ever looked at was a Playboy magazine. This tying people up . . . I didn’t know.”