Deep Freeze

  There were far fewer messages to the other people who’d been at the party, with one exception: over the years, she’d sent hundreds of messages to Margot Moore, most of them quick notes setting up more meeting times. There were references to Fred Fitzgerald, but always in a kind of coded language that an outsider might eventually recognize as referring to sexual events: “Had a good time Thursday night, F brought a new toy. Ask him about the ‘mouses.’”

  Virgil scrolled through dozens of the notes from Moore to Hemming, both sent and received, and from Fred Fitzgerald to Hemming. The most recent note from Fitzgerald confirmed a 9:30 therapy session. No date or day was mentioned, but the message had been sent the Sunday before Hemming was killed.

  But the most interesting of all the notes was from Hemming to Lucy Cheever, sent on Wednesday afternoon, the day before Hemming was murdered.

  Lucy,

  I’m afraid that we might have to go another direction on the business loan. Frankly, a million’s too large a commitment for our bank, at the moment. I will talk to Marv on Monday, when he gets back from the Cities, and see if he has anything to say that may change our minds, but I don’t think this will happen. You told me that you’d explored the idea of a loan with Lew Andrews up at U.S. Bank in St. Paul, and I did make a quick call to Lew and they are still quite interested in talking with you. Best of luck with that.

  Gina

  —

  Virgil found Marv Hiners’s phone number and got him on the line.

  “Has the bank turned down a major loan for Lucy Cheever?”

  Hiners said, “No . . . In fact, it’s on its way to approval. I was talking to Elroy Cheever this morning, who wanted to see what effect Gina’s death might have had on their application. I told him that as far as I was concerned, we were good to go. It has to be approved by the loan committee, but that shouldn’t be a big problem. How’d you hear about it?”

  Virgil thought about telling Hiners about the email from Hemming to Cheever but held his tongue. Instead, he said, “The possibility came up in all the stuff I’ve been looking at. Thanks, Marv.”

  Off the phone, Virgil thought about what Hiners had told him. Hemming was planning to turn down the Cheevers’ loan application, but Hiners hadn’t known that. The Cheevers hadn’t mentioned it, and Hemming’s successors at the bank were about to approve it. For the Cheevers, Hemming’s death had paid off—big-time.

  When Virgil was working as a St. Paul homicide cop, he’d known of two separate killings done for single eight balls of cocaine. An eight ball, at the time, was worth maybe a hundred and fifty dollars. Kill somebody for a million? No problem. No fuckin’ problem at all.

  —

  Griffin stuck her head into the office and said impatiently, “It’s been an hour and a half. I’m waiting patiently.”

  “I’ve got some things to think about,” Virgil said.

  “Why don’t you think on your way to CarryTown?” Griffin suggested. “It’s a nice, relaxing drive out there.”

  —

  Virgil had once solved a case involving an Israeli spy, during which he’d been given the definition of “nudnik.” A nudnik, he was told, was like a woodpecker sitting on your ear, pecking at your skull. Like Margaret Griffin. When neither Bea Sawyer or Bill Jensen had any more to tell him, he went out, got in his truck, and drove out to CarryTown, with Griffin close behind him.

  CarryTown wasn’t actually a town but rather a collection of mobile homes that had been put up around a country convenience store called the Cash ’n Carry, six miles south of Trippton.

  The mobile homes didn’t look too bad under a pristine layer of snow, but when they got out of the vehicles Virgil could smell the unmistakable scent of a badly backed-up septic system. Griffin didn’t seem to notice. She pointed at one of the mobile homes and said, “His name is Joseph Anderson. I was told that he may have gotten some supply packages for the altered dolls.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “A little birdie . . . to whom I paid one thousand of Mattel’s hard-earned dollars.”

  Virgil heard what she said but was focused on a red truck parked at a mobile home three down from Anderson’s: it was almost certainly, he thought, the truck driven by the women who beat him up, right down to the husband-wife-kids-dogs-cat sticker in the rear window.

  Griffin picked up the fact that he wasn’t paying close attention to her and asked, “What? What’s going on?”

  “That truck,” Virgil said. “When I got beat up, I think the women were driving that truck. No, wait: I’m sure they were driving it.”

  “Then we’ve got a second stop . . . You put your gun in your pocket?”

  “No, I didn’t think it was necessary. Let’s go knock. And, Margaret, be nice.”

  —

  Virgil led the way to Anderson’s trailer, which had a couple of concrete blocks for a step. Virgil stepped up, knocked a couple of times, stepped back down as he heard feet hit the floor inside, a heavy person walking toward the door, oil-canning the home’s aluminum floor as he/she walked across it.

  A hulking, square-shouldered man pushed the door open, looked past Virgil at Griffin, and growled, “What’d I tell you about coming back?”

  Before Griffin could reply, Virgil said, “I’m a cop. I’m looking for information about the people doing unauthorized and illegal alterations of Barbie and Ken dolls.”

  “Wouldn’t know nothin’ about that,” Anderson said. “Now, get out of my fuckin’ yard. You want to talk to me, get a search warrant.” His brow beetled, and he said, “You know, I know all the cops in Buchanan County, and you ain’t one.”

  “I’m with the state,” Virgil said. “I will be back with a search warrant. We’ll cuff your ass, sit you in the county jail until we have time to talk to you—could be a couple of weeks, with everything else going on—and tear your home apart, see what we find. If we find anything, of course, we’ll be talking prison time.”

  He paused, waited for an answer, but Anderson simply looked confused and, after a moment, asked, “Virgil?”

  “Yeah, Virgil. Instead of doing all that other shit, you could talk to us for a couple of minutes.”

  Anderson put an earnest look on his face and said, “Listen, I don’t know nothing about this, Virgil. The lady behind you came and knocked on my door and said I got some UPS packages with illegal stuff in them. Well, I don’t know nothing about illegal stuff. My neighbor wasn’t home, and I told her I’d take the packages for her.”

  “Which neighbor?” Virgil asked.

  Anderson ducked his head and pointed to the next trailer down. “Jesse McGovern. She was in the process of moving out and said it was too late to change the address on the UPS packages, so I took them for her. She come out and picked them up a couple days after they got here.”

  “She’s moved?” Virgil asked.

  “Oh, yeah. She’s been gone a couple months now. Heard she moved to . . . New York.”

  Griffin said, “Oh, bullshit. He’s lying, Virgil. The boxes came here, not to the next trailer. They had Anderson’s address on them. She’s still around here someplace.”

  “It’s a ‘manufactured home,’ not a ‘trailer,’” Anderson said. “And I hate to break the news to you, but there’s only one address here. None of these lots are legal addresses—it’s all one lot, and one address.”

  “You’re still lying about Jesse,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you, Joe. I may have to come back out here and take your ass to jail. You don’t look like a bad guy, and I’d hate to do it—but, not to put too fine a point on it, Mattel has asked the governor to stop this crime and the governor has agreed.”

  “The fuckin’ governor? Why would he give a stinkin’ wet shit about this deal?”

  Virgil looked to his left, to his right, then back at Anderson, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know the details.”

/>   Anderson said, “Oh, I see. Somebody paid the little prick, didn’t they? Donated to his campaign, or whatever they call it now.”

  “That’s entirely unwarranted speculation,” Griffin said.

  Anderson said, “Well, maybe we both have warrants in our future—me and the governor. Come and get me when you’ve got mine.”

  He stepped back inside and closed the door.

  Griffin, her arms akimbo, asked, “Well, what are you going to do, Virgil?”

  Virgil said, “If you can come up with enough for me to get a search warrant, I’ll come back, like I said. We’re not there yet.”

  —

  They’d turned back to their vehicles when a door slammed down the way and they both looked, and a large woman in a parka was standing on her stoop, her back to them, locking the door of her mobile home. The mobile home with the assault wagon parked outside.

  Virgil went that way. “Hey.”

  The woman turned, looked at him, and said, “Virgil fuckin’ Flowers.” She came down off the steps and added, “How about I kick your ass again?”

  Virgil opened his mouth to reply—something soothing and noncombative—but that apparently wasn’t how they did it in L.A. Margaret Griffin, standing next to him, flicked her hand, and a two-foot-long steel wand snapped open.

  Griffin said, “Come and get us, bitch.”

  Something about Griffin caused the woman to step sideways, circling to her left, which gave her a clear shot at Virgil, and suddenly she was moving more quickly than her size would have suggested, with newly painted and pointed fingernails flashing with Dior’s Victoire 758 right at Virgil’s face.

  Virgil had his feet set, and he punched her.

  —

  A lot of great punches were thrown in the twentieth century. One of the most famous was captured in the painter George Bellows’s iconic work Dempsey and Firpo, also known as Dempsey Through the Ropes, in which Luis Ángel Firpo, the “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” knocked Jack Dempsey entirely out of the ring in the first round of their 1923 fight.

  Then there was Rocky Marciano’s 1952 knockout of Jersey Joe Walcott in the thirteenth round of their heavyweight fight, called a one-punch knockout by everyone, though there were really two; to say nothing of Muhammad Ali’s 1974 knockout of George Foreman in what some people call the greatest boxing match ever.

  Virgil’s punch, though nearly a century after Firpo’s, was on that scale. The woman came straight at him, talons flashing, the brightest thing around under the sullen winter sky, but Virgil had five inches’ reach on her and had had time to set his feet.

  He focused the punch two inches behind her nose, and she walked straight into it. The punch was so clean, straight, and pure, with Virgil’s wrist and elbow locked up tight, a perfect line of bone between his shoulder and his knuckles, that the woman went down on her back like a wet sack of fertilizer.

  Off to the side, Griffin said approvingly, “Whoa!”

  The woman on the ground was swinging her arms back and forth as though she were making a snow angel while spraying blood from her nose all over the snow wings; a bloody angel, and making loud gasping and crying sounds. Virgil said, “Keep an eye on her, I’ve got some cuffs in the truck.”

  When he got back, the woman had flopped over onto her stomach, bleeding heavily into the snow. Virgil grabbed one wrist, and she tried to push up with her other hand, but Griffin stepped over, put her heel on the woman’s cheekbone, and pushed down. The woman squealed, and Virgil said, “Don’t hurt her,” and Griffin asked, “Why not?”

  Virgil said, “She’s hurt bad enough already.” Virgil got the woman’s other wrist and locked it up, and said to Griffin, “Help me get her into the backseat of my truck.”

  They lifted the woman to her feet, and Virgil said, “Hold on a second—keep her steady,” and he went back to the truck and got a large-wound bandage from his first aid kit, which looked like an old-fashioned Kotex pad but twice as large, and pressed it against the woman’s nose. The woman screamed and said, “Hurts,” and Virgil said, “Yeah, I know. That’s why I got a blue squid on my face. Remember that?”

  “I’d do it again, fucker,” the woman mumbled through the pad.

  They helped her get into Virgil’s truck, and Virgil put a leg-iron around one ankle and clipped it to a steel loop welded to the floor. When she was settled, Virgil asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Carolyn Weaver,” the woman said.

  Virgil said, “Okay, Carolyn, it’ll help if you get some cold on your face to hold down the swelling. I’m going to give you a big chunk of snow to put on it. I’m going inside your trailer to get something to wrap it in. Do you hear me?”

  She nodded, and Virgil said to Griffin, “Hold the pad against her face until I get back.”

  Virgil went to the trailer, where Weaver’s keys were still in the lock. Inside, the first thing he saw were large cardboard boxes full of Barbie dolls and smaller cardboard boxes full of the tiny voice boxes. He looked around, found a box of garbage bags, took one outside, put a couple of pounds of packed snow in one of them, carried it over to the truck, and said to Weaver, “Lean forward. I’m going to put the bag of snow against the back of the front seat. Push against it with your face—but keep the pad pinned to your nose, too. We want the pad to stop the bleeding, the cold to stop the swelling. You got that?”

  “Yeah.”

  They did that, and Virgil said, “I’ll get you into the clinic in ten minutes. You have to hold it there until then. Hold it with your face.”

  “’Kay.”

  Virgil shut the truck door and said to Griffin, “The trailer is full of Barbie dolls and those voice things. She was making them here.”

  “Terrific,” Griffin said. “You’ve made my day, Virgil. I’ll get a deputy with a search warrant. And, goddamnit, that was one of the best punches I’ve ever seen. Ever. That was like . . . totally awesome.”

  “Thank you. I thought it was a good one,” Virgil said. “I better go lock the trailer.”

  Virgil went back to the trailer, and Griffin said, “Give me a peek.”

  Before Virgil could say yes or no, she climbed the stoop and pushed the door open. In the next second or so, as Virgil was climbing the stoop, she snapped a few photos with a small Sony point-and-shoot camera, until Virgil told her to stop—“Technically, you shouldn’t be in there.”

  “I’m in shock from the fight. I wasn’t thinking. When I saw the contraband, I reacted instinctively to take the pictures,” she said. “That’s my story, and I believe the court will accept it. Where are you headed now?”

  “Into the Trippton Clinic,” Virgil said.

  “I’ll follow you. As soon as Weaver is done with the doc, I’m going to drop some paper on her.”

  The trip to town took fifteen minutes in the snow, and, on the way, Virgil said to Weaver, “I locked up your trailer.”

  “Manufactured home,” she said. She began to cry, and hadn’t stopped when they arrived at the clinic.

  SEVENTEEN Birkmann sat frozen with fear in The Roasting Pig, thinking about what Margot Moore had said. Moore didn’t know what she knew—but if Flowers went back to her and she blurted it out, even in confusion, Flowers would be on that one simple fact like a duck on a june bug, and he, David Birkmann—Daveareeno, etc., Bug Boy—would be fucked.

  So Birkmann sat in the coffee shop, running through a list of fantasies about how it all could be explained. Came up empty. As the sun disappeared behind the bluffs and the night came down like an Army blanket pulled over the head, the question occurred to him, What if Margot died?

  Moore was some kind of health nut and obviously wasn’t going to drop dead on her own, so there was no point in pretending. If she was going to die, she’d have to be murdered.

  An ugly word.

  Murdered.

  More fantasies, in whi
ch she died all on her own . . . And finally a dark, tickling thought, persistent, unavoidable: a perfect murder weapon was at hand. Something nobody else in town had access to . . .

  Birkmann’s father had dealt almost entirely with bugs. Insects. On a rare occasion, one of his clients might ask him to take care of an errant raccoon or skunk. Or an obstreperous possum, a too-visible rat. For those occasions, he carried a .22 caliber Ruger pistol in his van. The notable thing about the pistol was that it was made specifically for exterminators. And was silenced, so as not to disturb the peace when used in urban settings.

  The pistol was in a wooden box at the back of a storage closet. The weapon had been purchased before all the current paperwork was required, probably forty years before. There was no sentimental value to it. But who threw away a gun? They were serious chunks of metal that, with even minimal care, would last forever. A ’70s gun in a common caliber was as good as a gun bought yesterday.

  Birkmann dug it out, carried it up to the living room, and sat and stared at it. Worked the action . . .

  —

  Margot Moore’s second guest, Sandy Hart, came through the front door at seven o’clock, brushed a few snowflakes off her shoulders and out of her hair, pulled off her coat, and said, “My golly, when will this cold go away? It’s been a week, and I don’t see an end to it.”

  Moore took her coat to put on the bed and said, “Don’t worry, we’ve got something to warm you up.”

  “Margot’s hot toddy?”

  “Exactly. Gonna send you home drunk on your butt. Belle’s in the kitchen, setting up the board.”

  “She’s probably hiding some tiles under her chair,” Hart said.

  Belle Penney called from the back of the house: “I heard that.”

  Moore took the coat into the bedroom, and when she walked back into the kitchen, Hart and Penney were seated at the kitchen table, turning the Scrabble tiles facedown in the game’s box top.