Deep Freeze

  “No thanks to her,” Griffin said.

  The nurse came back. “We’ve got the other one. Where do you want me to put her?”

  Griffin said, “Bring her in here—give me a shot at her other arm.”

  “Ah . . . maybe not. Stick her in the first room,” the doc said. “Both the breaks will probably be overnight.”

  “How did this happen?” Virgil asked Griffin.

  “I went into the pizza parlor. I was standing in line, and this woman was sitting at a table. She’d gotten her pizza, and she looked at me and asked if I was the private detective looking for the Barbie dolls. I said I was. And she picked up a slice of pizza and threw it at me. Boiling hot cheese. Stuck to my face. I pulled it off fast as I could . . .”

  “You hit her with your baton?” Virgil asked.

  “Yeah. She was going to throw more pizza at me, but I got to her first.”

  “Jeez, Margaret, I’m sorry. We need to get done with this Barbie thing . . .”

  “You get me Jesse McGovern and I’m gone,” she said.

  “I’m trying to get in touch with her now,” Virgil said.

  —

  Virgil went out to the lobby and called the sheriff’s office, told them what had happened, and a deputy said that she’d come down and interview Griffin. “After she’s made her statement, I’ll check with Lanny up at Tony’s and if he backs her up we’ll charge the other woman with assault.”

  “Thanks,” Virgil said. He went back and told Griffin what he’d done.

  Griffin said, “I’ll give them a statement, but I’ll be damned if I’m coming back here for a court date. Maybe if she’d scarred me . . . But if I heal up okay, I’ll take the busted arm and call it even.”

  The doc said, “You’ll be back to normal in a couple weeks. If you broke her humerus, it could take her a year to get back to normal.”

  “Good. She can spend the year thinking about why she’s fucked up. Could have blinded me.”

  “I gotta stop this shit,” Virgil said. “Margaret, time for you to go home.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  —

  Virgil didn’t care either about Cain or the woman who’d gotten her arm broken but stayed with Griffin until she was cleaned up. The doc put a dressing on her face, gave her some pain ointment that included an antiseptic, told her that her biggest potential problem was infection, and told her where to go to pay for the treatment.

  Virgil drove her back to Tony’s Chicago Style, where she got in her car and said, “Fuck this place.”

  —

  Virgil went back to the cabin, easing the new truck down into the fire-charred slot beside the cabin. He went in the back door, just in case, sat down, got back up, fished a Leinenkugel’s out of the refrigerator, sat back down again to focus on the beer.

  Johnson called five minutes later and said, “I heard Birkmann won.”

  “Nobody won, Johnson,” Virgil said. “It was another full, flat-out Trippton clusterfuck. Not only that, somebody messed up Margaret S. Griffin.”

  He gave Johnson the details and then said, “Call up all the people who might know Jesse McGovern. I want to talk to her. Tonight.”

  “I’ll try,” Johnson said.

  —

  McGovern didn’t call until much later; Virgil had given up, turned off the lights, and pulled the bedcovers up to his neck, when his phone buzzed.

  She said, “This is Jesse.”

  “Goddamnit, Jesse, you know what happened last night? And tonight?”

  “I know what happened last night—your truck—but I don’t know what happened tonight.”

  “One of your women ran into Margaret Griffin down at Tony’s and threw a slice of hot pizza in her face. Burned her face bad. And if that cheese had gotten into her eyes, it could have blinded her. Your employee now has a broken arm.”

  “Oh, God. All right, you got most of our Barbie stock in that raid this morning,” McGovern said. “Not enough left to make it worth the trouble. I’ll close it down now. You can tell Griffin that we’re all done and we won’t do it again.”

  “Was it one of your people who shot me up last night?”

  McGovern said, “Virgil, I don’t control them. I got eighteen people working for me part-time and most of them got husbands or wives, and they’re hurting. I don’t know if one of them shot you up last night, but there was quite a bit of . . . I don’t know what to call it . . . Glee, maybe? . . . There was quite a bit of glee this morning at the other barn, where we were building the dolls. They were talking about it and laughing, but they all said they didn’t know who did it.”

  “And you believed them.”

  “No. I think somebody in that group knew who did it, but I couldn’t tell you which one,” McGovern said. “They won’t tell me, either—they’re protecting me from knowing. I’ve told them that they’re hurting us, not helping, but . . . they’ve got some thick heads.”

  “If I catch the one who did it, he or she is going to prison,” Virgil said. “You tell them that. That should cut the glee.”

  “I’ll tell them,” McGovern said.

  —

  McGovern: “I gave you a tip on the murders and you haven’t done anything with it.”

  Virgil: “I tracked down your tipster . . .”

  “I heard about that . . .”

  “She says the guy in the van was blond. There are two blonds driving those vans. They both have solid alibis for Thursday night. I’ve also been told, privately, that Bobbie Cole might not be the most reliable witness. She sometimes gets confused about exactly what time, or what day, she might have seen something.”

  “Huh. I have to say, that might be right,” McGovern said.

  “So . . .”

  McGovern said, “Do you believe she saw anything at all? The van?”

  “Yeah, she might’ve seen the van there some time, but exactly what time . . .”

  “Well, what other day would have one of those vans been parked in front of Gina Hemming’s house at nine-thirty at night?”

  Virgil said, “Uhh . . . I’ve got no answer for that.”

  “Maybe you ought to get one.”

  “I’ll try. This number—will it be good for you?”

  “No,” she said. “This is a borrowed phone, and I’ll be giving it back, so you won’t be able to track me with it. I’ll borrow another one and call you tomorrow afternoon, see what Griffin has to say.”

  “I’ll be talking to you,” Virgil said.

  —

  Virgil lay in bed in the dark but spent no time at all consulting with God. He spent it, instead, in contemplation. He’d never formulated exactly what he thought about contemplation except that it was superficially like meditation. You found a quiet, dark place—a bed would do fine—and worked with your brain. Instead of attempting to empty your brain, as you did with meditation, you filled it with a particular subject matter and stirred it around, making new connections, as ridiculous as those connections might be.

  Lucas Davenport, Virgil’s old boss, had a friend named Kidd who sometimes worked with tarot cards. Kidd argued that there was no supernatural aspect to the cards, but when you selected one at random, and used the tarot “meaning” as an angle with which to examine a problem, you often achieved a new clarity. The tarot forced you out of the worn ruts of your thinking. Sometimes, he said, it even worked.

  And that was, Virgil believed, another form of contemplation.

  Lying on the bed, near sleep, opening his eyes every once in a while to peer up into the rafters, he came to a realization: Rob Knox, Justin Rhodes’s boyfriend, had told him who the killer was.

  Something he’d said had given the whole game away—but not about himself. Knox and Rhodes were both innocent, Virgil realized, but he didn’t know why he was so sure of that.

&nb
sp; Having solved that part of the crime, Virgil went to sleep.

  —

  At nine the next morning, Johnson Johnson called and woke him up.

  “You’re still in bed? I wish I had a job that let me sleep that late.”

  “I was up late last night, contemplating,” Virgil told him.

  “Did it do any good?”

  “Yeah. I know who knows who the killer is. Rob Knox knows. He just doesn’t know he knows.”

  “He doesn’t know he knows and you don’t know—do I got this right?”

  “More or less,” Virgil said. “I’m gonna go see him. You think Clarice could come along?”

  “I guess . . . Why Clarice?”

  “I wanted another unfogged mind to hear what Knox has to say,” Virgil said.

  “Wiseass. Okay, I’ll come with you.”

  “I was hoping you’d offer. I gotta get cleaned up, get some breakfast, and think about it some more. The restaurant serves lunch, so I’ll see you there at eleven. We’ll catch him before they get busy.”

  —

  Virgil took his time getting ready now that the end of the hunt was in sight. After shaving and showering, he dressed and called Margaret Griffin and said, “Jesse McGovern called me last night, on a borrowed phone. She was upset when she heard about the truck getting shot up, and more upset when I told her about you getting burned. The woman who attacked you will be the second of her people to go to court, so she’s calling it all off. She says she’s shutting down the operation.”

  After a moment of silence, Griffin asked, “Do you believe her?”

  “Yeah, for no other reason than she said we got most of her doll stock in the raid,” Virgil said. “But, I think she’s worried about the violence, too. If they’d shot me the other night, the town would have been filled with BCA agents, and there’s a chance that Jesse would be doing a few years in jail as the head of a criminal conspiracy. I think she knows that. Same if you’d been seriously hurt last night. Then we wouldn’t be fooling around with cease-and-desist orders, we’d be talking felony arrest warrants. So, I believe her.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to my contact in Los Angeles, see what they think,” Griffin said. “We’ve got people monitoring the Internet sales offers, and if those end, I think they’ll probably call me back home.”

  “That would be good,” Virgil said. “Jesse’s supposed to call me again on another borrowed phone, so I won’t be able to track her, and if she does I’ll tell her to make sure the Internet stuff stops. I don’t know if she’ll be able to stop resales, but the new sales—she should be able to call those off.”

  “Keep me informed,” Griffin said.

  “Will do.”

  —

  At eleven o’clock, Virgil found Johnson Johnson talking with Justin Rhodes at Le Cheval Bleu. When Virgil walked in, Johnson said, “Knox is in the back, whipping up a crêpe. Wait—did I say ‘whip’?”

  “Shut up, Johnson,” Rhodes said. And, “He did NOT have anything to do with the murders.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Virgil said. “But he knows something I need to know.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rhodes and Johnson glanced at each other, and Johnson said, “Same old Flowers shit. You gotta ride with it.”

  —

  Knox was talking to a guy in a tall cook’s hat. When he saw Virgil, he broke away from the cook and asked, “What?”

  “Tell me what you said the other night.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me what you said.”

  “You know what I said,” Knox said.

  “Yeah, but maybe not exactly. How did it go? What exactly did you say?”

  Knox rubbed his forehead between his eyes and shut his eyes and began to recite what he remembered of their conversation. When he was finished, Johnson looked at Virgil and asked, “Well?”

  “Nothing,” Virgil said. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there wasn’t anything.”

  He’d pulled up a kitchen stool to listen to Knox and now he stood up and said, “But that’s not right, there was something.”

  Knox said, “Maybe you should talk to a shrink. Maybe get hypnotized or something.” He pulled on his red Japanese apron and yellow bandanna and said, “I gotta help cook, if you’re done.”

  Johnson followed Virgil out through the restaurant to the front door. As they left, Rhodes said, “Feel free to come back and eat anytime.”

  Outside, in the cold, Johnson said, “Well, that was a total waste of time. And I won’t be eating there anytime soon. I suspect ol’ Rob might hock a loogie into my crêpes susanne.”

  “Suzette,” Virgil said absently. He was staring out into the street. “It wasn’t a waste of time. He told me what I needed to know.”

  “What?”

  “I got it. This second. I think I know who killed them,” Virgil said.

  “Who?”

  “Don’t tell anyone until I pile up the evidence.”

  “I won’t, except maybe Clarice,” Johnson said.

  “Well, tell her not to tell anyone. This is gonna take the rest of the day to figure out.”

  “Who is it?” Johnson demanded. “And how do you know?”

  So Virgil told him and Johnson gaped. “That’s all you got?” He looked through the window into the restaurant. “You figured it out because of a hat?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT Virgil said good-bye to Johnson and called Jenkins. “You back in St. Paul?”

  “Yup. What’s up?”

  “I want you to run out to Stillwater,” Virgil said. Stillwater was the state penitentiary. “There’s a guy out there named Buster Gedney, doing five years on the school board murder case—he was manufacturing silencers and making full-auto modification kits for .223s. I need you to ask him a question about who he sold a silencer to.”

  “I can do that. When do you need it?”

  “Today.”

  —

  Even knowing who the killer was, Virgil had a major problem to deal with: it was perfectly possible to know who committed a murder without any chance of getting a conviction.

  Virgil didn’t count on getting much from Gedney, a sad-sack machinist who’d been out on the periphery of the board murders. But Margot Moore’s friends who were at her house at the time of her murder said that the sound of the shots that killed her were as quiet as handclaps. Knowing whether Gedney sold a silencer to Virgil’s major suspect would be another good piece of the puzzle.

  Virgil had realized something else: everything in the case depended on working out the precise time line Hemming was killed.

  The Moore murder, on the other hand, had been so efficient that he’d have to name and arrest the killer before he could hope to find any evidence, because the only evidence would be the gun that was used to kill her, a semiautomatic .22. Semiauto .22 long-rifle pistols were made by a variety of manufacturers, including Ruger, Browning, Walther, Smith & Wesson, Sig, and Beretta. Ruger also made a semiautomatic .22 rifle, probably the most popular .22 in America, though Virgil doubted the shooter used a rifle. The firing pin’s impact mark made on the .22 shells found by the crime scene crew might give them the brand, which could be important.

  But he had to get enough evidence to obtain a search warrant before he’d find the gun . . .

  —

  Virgil got on his phone, called Lucy Cheever. “You were absolutely the last to leave Gina Hemming’s house. If you had to make your best guess, what time was it? Down to the minute.”

  Cheever said, after thinking about it, “Three or four minutes to nine.”

  “Before nine o’clock?”

  “Yes. People started leaving probably around eight-thirty or quarter to nine, but nobody stayed much longer after that. Gina said a few things to Margot and to Justin at the last minute, and th
en we had a few words, but I still think it was probably before nine when I left.”

  “Did you make any phone calls or anything while you were driving home?”

  “No. No, I didn’t. I was only a few minutes away; I drove straight home. If you really need an exact time, Justin is always on his phone, and I left before he’d gotten all the way down to the street. He might be able to tell you closer than I can . . .”

  —

  Virgil called Rhodes.

  When he left Hemming’s house, Rhodes said, he’d driven home to continue reading Remembrance of Things Past in Knox’s absence. “I was probably halfway home when I called Rob to find out if he was on his way back to Trippton in the snow. He said he was . . .”

  “Look at the ‘Recents’ on your phone and tell me what time the call went through.”

  “Okay, hang on . . .”

  A few seconds later, Rhodes said, “The call went through at nine-oh-two.”

  “You were halfway home?”

  “Well, maybe not exactly. I was driving home . . . I mean, I didn’t call him the minute I left Gina’s . . . It was some ways.”

  “What time do you think you actually walked away from Gina’s? What time did you leave Lucy Cheever there with Gina?”

  “I . . . guess . . . maybe eight fifty-five? If the call was at nine-oh-two, I had to walk down to my car and I said something to Margot, who was ahead of me a little, getting into her car, saying good night . . . So, yeah . . . eight fifty-five or thereabout.”

  —

  Virgil called David Birkmann. “When you left Hemming’s house, did you make any phone calls? Anything that would tell you the exact time that you left?”

  “No . . . I didn’t have anybody to call. I just drove down to Club Gold. There were a bunch of people there who could probably tell you when I got there . . . Probably ten minutes to nine. Something like that. Why?”

  “I realized I have to nail this time line down. I hadn’t understood how important it is.”

  “Well, I walked down the driveway with Sheila. Maybe she made a call.”

  “Thanks, Dave, I’ll check.”