Deep Freeze

  Virgil didn’t have an answer for that except a limp, “I’ll find you. And to tell you the truth, I don’t need a bunch of amateur Sherlocks running around town, trying to turn up clues.”

  “It’s not that. It’s something specific.”

  Virgil decided to make an emotional appeal for justice; he had a few pre-canned: “Jesse, if you have something specific, it’s your obligation to tell me. We’re not talking about some button on the back of a Barbie doll. We’re talking about Margot Moore getting shot three times in the forehead while she was playing Scrabble with a couple of friends. A woman who went to the same high school that you did. You probably knew her, right? I looked into her open, dead eyes, and it seemed to me like she was pleading with me to find the killer. You gotta think about that. You gotta help me.”

  “I heard about Margot.” More silence. Then, “Johnson said you might try to pull some ethics shit on me.”

  “He was right.”

  “You did that really good. Made me feel guilty. The dead eyes thing,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  —

  Even more silence; the woman apparently didn’t feel the need to fill every crack in the conversation with the spoken word. Finally, “There’s all kinds of rumors going around, about who was at that party at Gina’s on Thursday night and what time that broke up. Some people say it broke up at nine o’clock.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t know if this will mean anything, but a friend of mine—honestly, a friend, not me, and not somebody involved with the Barbie-Os—said a GetOut! truck was parked outside Gina’s house at nine-thirty.”

  “A GetOut! truck? David Birkmann?”

  “Definitely not David. My friend said it was a blond-headed man. The man may have seen my friend looking out the window at him and turned his face away, but he was a blond for sure.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Isn’t that a lot?”

  “It could be,” Virgil said. “If it pans out, I’m going to need your friend’s name . . . I’m sure you know that.”

  “If it pans out, this person will talk to you,” McGovern said.

  “Jesse, I appreciate this . . .”

  “You gonna lay off us?”

  “I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to catch you. But if somebody sticks some Barbie doll stuff in my face, I’ll probably have to do something. And Carolyn Weaver is going to jail for a while, for beating me up. If I can find out who her helpers were, they’ll go with her.”

  “I got nothing to say about that, except what I already said: I didn’t know what they were planning, and, if I had, I would have shut it down,” she said.

  “So . . . how are sales?”

  “Starting to tail off,” McGovern said. “Another three months and we’ll have to move on to something else.”

  “Try to pick on a smaller company, okay?”

  “We’re thinking Apple,” McGovern said.

  “Oh, man, not a good idea, Jesse. Anyway, any fake Apple product is going to be expensive to make . . . Uh, what is it?”

  “An app. We hired a programmer, put the app together, and we’re field-testing prototypes.”

  “An app. There are a million apps out there; it’d have to be unusual.”

  “You know how an iPhone vibrates when you get a text message or a phone call comes in when you’ve got the phone set on silent?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What if it vibrated for ten minutes?”

  Virgil had to think about it for a minute. “Jesse, please . . .”

  “We’re thinking, ‘iPhone-eeeO: The Lady’s Happy Helper’ . . .”

  “What is it with you guys and the sex toy thing?”

  “Sex sells. It’s nothing personal,” she said. “You been here before, you oughta know: middle of the winter, there’s nothing to do but look out the window, watch HBO, and fuck. And if you can only afford the basic package, it’s look out the window and fuck. So, there’s a market. We think iPhone-eeeO will go big.”

  “C’mon, Jesse . . .”

  The whole idea was nuts, but Virgil liked to hear the woman talk, the sound of her voice.

  —

  When he got off the phone, Virgil went into the bathroom and checked his face in the mirror. He still looked beat up, and, from experience, thought he’d look that way for another three weeks or a month. He was pleased that none of his teeth were loose: dental work was a whole different problem, and way more unpleasant.

  When he was done with his inspection, he undressed and got in the shower and steamed himself off, carefully washed as much of his face as he could get to. The air was so cold and dry that the humidity of the bathroom felt terrific. He got out of the shower and was toweling off when somebody began banging on the door.

  Johnson’s cabin was a full-service establishment—Johnson had somebody staying in it half the weeks of the year, he’d said—and Virgil pulled a robe off a hook, wrapped it around himself, and hurried out to the front door, pausing only to open his gun safe and put his main pistol, a Glock, in the pocket of the robe.

  At the door, he flipped on the porch light and peeked out a window to the left side of the porch. Margaret Griffin was standing there, and as he looked out the window, she knocked on the door again.

  He went over and opened the door and motioned her inside and said, “You caught me in the shower.”

  “Sorry. I stopped to tell you that I papered Duane Hawkins down at the Kubota dealer. He didn’t go to Florida at all. Everybody’s lying to me. Anyway, he says he didn’t know that anybody was putting together the dolls at his fishing shack.”

  “It’s actually a tent, and since it’s transparent, and since he supposedly goes out there almost every night, that sounds like a fib,” Virgil said. “Not that I could prove it without some surveillance.”

  “That won’t happen—this is a townwide conspiracy,” Griffin said. “I need to know whether you’re making any progress on the murders. I don’t want to get involved there; I just want to know if you’re going to be able to get me some time to run down Jesse McGovern.”

  Virgil considered for a moment, then said, “Listen, Jesse called me tonight, out of the blue. I don’t know how she got my phone number, but lots of people in town have it. She actually had a tip on the murder investigation—but she also told me that sales of the dolls are dropping off, and they’re getting ready to move to a new product that has nothing to do with Mattel. A few more weeks and there’ll be nothing to investigate, no reason to serve papers on anyone.”

  “That’s not the entire point here,” Griffin said. “We don’t only want them to stop, we want people to see that they get punished. Jesse McGovern especially. We don’t want people messing with the Mattel product lines.”

  Virgil said, “Margaret, I’m sorry, but I’ve got two murders on my hands. I don’t have time right now to mess with Jesse McGovern. If I break these murders in the next day or two . . . I’ll do what I can.”

  Griffin left, still grumpy.

  She might have to look elsewhere for help, she said.

  TWENTY-ONE The next morning, Virgil met Pweters at Ma and Pa Kettle’s. They both ordered pancakes and link sausages and extra syrup, and Virgil told him about an anonymous phone call from the night before, with the tip about a blond guy in a GetOut! truck.

  “You gonna talk to Birkmann about his employees or hit Fred Fitzgerald’s place?” Pweters asked. “I’ll tell you, Fitzgerald will be back on the street before noon.”

  “Then let’s do his place first—maybe he’s got something about this B and D ring he had going. Maybe there were more people involved than Hemming and Moore.”

  They talked about that, finished breakfast, and headed for Fitzgerald’s. On the way, Virgil called Jeff Purdy and asked, “You know that we’re gonna search Fred F
itzgerald’s place this morning?”

  “Yes. Pweters has the warrant.”

  “I know, we just had breakfast. Anyway, Fitzgerald’s got a computer up there, and the warrant covers it. Could you send somebody down and ask him what the password is? So we don’t have to break into it?”

  “Get back to you in five minutes.”

  He did, and Virgil wrote the password—Tatooine—on a piece of paper and put it in his pocket.

  —

  The day was dark and cold, the wind whistling down the Mississippi from the northeast, but there was no snow. Fitzgerald’s place was right across the street from the railroad tracks and the river, and a squadron of snowmobiles went by on the river as Virgil was pulling up.

  Pweters had the warrant and Fitzgerald’s key ring, which had been confiscated at the jail, and they let themselves in. They spent twenty minutes on the first floor—the work area—not expecting to find much, and didn’t, except for a gun safe. The safe was keyed, and the key was on the key ring; when they opened the safe, they found no guns but, instead, a collection of action figures.

  Virgil took out an eighteen-inch-high Joker figure, shook it a few times to see if something might be concealed inside, but it seemed solid. Pweters pointed him at the comic-book posters on the shop walls: Star Wars stormtroopers, Wonder Woman, Serpentor, Aquaman. “He’s a comics guy.”

  They climbed the stairs and took in Fitzgerald’s living quarters more carefully. While Virgil scanned the bedroom, Pweters looked at an aging Apple iMac. He tried a couple of passwords but nothing worked. “I got no ideas,” Pweters said. “I’ve tried one, two, three, four, five . . . his initials . . . his name . . . tattoo . . .”

  Virgil said, “Let me in there.”

  Pweters moved, and Virgil tapped in a few letters into the password space, and the machine opened up. “Look at his emails, see who he’s talking to,” Virgil said.

  “Holy shit, how’d you do that?” Pweters demanded.

  “Password was Tatooine—you know, the Star Wars planet, and a pun on ‘tattoo.’ Couldn’t miss it, with those posters on the wall downstairs.”

  “Hey, I’m fuckin’ impressed, man.”

  “Routine, when you know what you’re doing,” Virgil said.

  —

  Virgil found a collection of B and D equipment, including some crappy handcuffs, in a box in a living room closet; also a folding massage table and several books on massage. Fitzgerald appeared to have a variety of sidelines, but that wasn’t unusual in an isolated small town.

  “Got something here,” Pweters called.

  Virgil went over to look as Pweters clicked through a list. “I put ‘spank’ in the search field, which would cover ‘spanking’ and other variations, and I got seventeen emails up. Looks like four or five different women . . . although, some of the emails could be guys, I guess . . . Jeez, I bet that’s Janet Lincoln, the JLinc one.”

  “You know her?”

  “Yeah, everybody does. She runs the Sugar Rush; it’s a candy store downtown. And ice cream and so on. She’s a little chubby . . .”

  “Guess chubby people like to get spanked, too,” Virgil said.

  Pweters laughed. “I was hoping to find McComber on the list.”

  “Didn’t seem to go all that well last night,” Virgil said.

  “Ah, I got her,” Pweters said. “She pushed me and I pushed her back. Now she’s worried that I’m not interested. So she’ll flirt with me next time and I’ll be cool. A little distant. Eventually, I’ll get her. I mean, she doesn’t have a lot of choice down here—last night she was out with a guy who does satellite TV installations.”

  “You’re walking a thin line there, Pweters. Women do not like rejection.”

  “Oh, I won’t reject her—I’ll make her work for it. I know she basically wants my body.” Pweters tapped the computer screen. “Say, look at this one. Cripes, I wonder if that’s Lucille Becker.”

  “Looks like a Lucille Becker to me. What else would LuBec be? You know anybody else in town whose name would crunch down like that?”

  “No, I don’t. Huh.”

  “What does she do?” Virgil asked.

  “She’s a fiftyish English teacher up at the high school. Had her my senior year, gave me an A. I could see her in black vinyl.”

  “Let’s try to stay professional,” Virgil said. “By black vinyl, you mean the kind with cutouts over the butt?”

  “Exactly,” Pweters said. He looked up and said, “I’m starting to feel a little dirty doing this. Violating their privacy.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really.” He went back to the computer.

  “Attaboy,” Virgil said. “Part of the job. Get those email addresses, check the letters for anything that might apply to the case, and put ‘whip,’ or something, into the search field.”

  “I can do that.”

  —

  Virgil continued to prowl the apartment, stopped periodically to suggest new search terms for Pweters, but they found nothing that would tie Fitzgerald to the murders—nothing like a club that would match the one that must have been used on Hemming. And no guns at all.

  He would have gotten rid of the gun, of course . . . The gun. He had to think about the gun. What had the witness said? The gunshots sounded like Moore had been clapping her hands? Twenty-two CBs, both shorts and longs, were quiet, but Bea Sawyer had recovered .22 long-rifle shells. If the inner door had been closed, or mostly closed, when Moore was shot, the sound might have been muffled.

  “Hey, Pweters?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know anybody who has a .22 pistol?”

  “You mean, besides me?”

  —

  Virgil called the sheriff, asked him to round up Sandy Hart and Belle Penney, the two women who’d been playing Scrabble with Moore when she was murdered, and take them back to Moore’s house. “We’ll meet you there in an hour.”

  He and Pweters finished with the search, and Virgil lugged Fitzgerald’s computer out to his truck; they had nine names of possible B and D clients and had found ties both to Hemming and to Moore. Hemming had disguised herself by using a masked account name on Gmail but had slipped up by signing one of her emails with a lowercase “g,” and in another, from the same Gmail account, mentioning that he couldn’t come over at the regular time because she had a meeting that wouldn’t break up until nine o’clock.

  Moore had used her regular email account.

  In some of the emails, there’d been quite explicit suggestions for upcoming events; Hemming had mentioned neckties, which confirmed what Virgil had thought about the four men’s ties he’d found in her dressing room.

  “Doesn’t really help,” he told Pweters. “We’re confirming what we already knew.”

  “Can’t believe Fitzgerald had nine clients,” Pweters said. “I mean, how would they find each other?”

  “Maybe some kind of female underground communications system?”

  “You think?”

  Virgil scratched his head. “You know . . . Corbel Cain told me about a guy who knew about some B and D stuff over here. Can’t remember his name—I’ve got it in a notebook—but there are some guys who know about it, too. You’re just not one of them.”

  “As far as you know,” Pweters said.

  Virgil shook his head. “You’re far too much of a Dudley Do-Right to know about that kind of thing.”

  —

  Jeff Purdy, Sandy Hart, and Belle Penney were waiting when Virgil and Pweters got to Moore’s house. Pweters had made a quick stop at his apartment to pick up his .22, and Purdy had collected a stack of undistributed newspapers at the Republican-River before going to Moore’s.

  Virgil explained what he planned to do, put the two women at the kitchen table, stacked the newspapers on Moore’s porch, closed the inner
door all but a crack. Pweters had loaded three rounds into the gun’s magazine; Virgil jacked one into the chamber, and when everybody was ready, fired three quick shots into the pile of newspapers.

  That done, he took the magazine out of the pistol, checked the chamber to make sure it was empty, handed the gun and magazine to Pweters, and went back inside to the kitchen. “What do you think?”

  “Way louder,” Penney said.

  Hart nodded. “Nothing like what we heard.” She clapped her hands quickly, a golf clap imitating Virgil’s three gunshots, and said, “That’s what we heard.”

  “Guy’s got a silencer,” Purdy said. “Remember when you were here the last time? The guy selling silencers?”

  Virgil said, “Yeah. Goddamnit, that doesn’t sound like . . . I mean, the first killing seemed like an accident. This sounds like, I dunno . . . a professional. Or a semipro anyway.”

  Pweters began, “That guy”—he glanced at Purdy and the women, veered away—“who, uh, made the silencers. Did you get a list of people who bought them?”

  “No, but he’s available. Up in Stillwater for another three years. If we need him,” Virgil said.

  They thanked Purdy and the two women, and Purdy picked up the stack of papers, Pweters went to lock the gun in his truck. Purdy asked if they’d come up with anything at Fred Fitzgerald’s, and Virgil said they hadn’t found anything useful. With Purdy gone, Pweters said, “I almost blurted out that tip you got about a blond guy in a GetOut! truck.”

  “I thought that might have been it,” Virgil said. “Good catch. We’ll keep that to ourselves for now. But I’m going to go talk to Birkmann about it.”

  “You want me to come? I like this detecting shit.”

  “Naw. Take Fitzgerald’s computer somewhere and read any email that looks like it might be something. Don’t think you’ll find much, but we can’t let it go. I’m gonna go find Birkmann.”

  —

  He was on his way to Birkmann’s office when he took a call from Jenkins, who, with his partner Shrake, made up the BCA’s muscle. Jenkins said, “We’re on our way down. You gonna be there?”