“Justine,” Cain said.
“Rhodes.”
Virgil stood up, and Cain said, “We gotta catch the motherfucker who did this. Gina could be a pain in the ass, but you don’t get the death sentence for that.”
“No, you don’t,” Virgil said. “I don’t want you messing around with this, Corbel . . .”
“I’m a free man and I do what I want,” Cain said. “I’ll be seeing you around.”
He stuck out a hand as Virgil was leaving and Virgil took it. Cain’s hand was like a rock, but not big enough a rock to have made the dent in Hemming’s skull.
Out in the office, with Cain a few feet behind, Virgil asked, “Say, does anybody know where I can find Jesse McGovern?”
The two women and the man behind the counter, and Cain, all shook their heads.
“I didn’t think so,” Virgil said. He turned back to Cain. “You take it easy, there, Corbel.”
“You, too, Virgil.”
—
He worried a little about Cain, but Virgil had heard that kind of revenge talk before from friends of victims. Nothing had ever come of it, not in Virgil’s experience.
He went to his truck and sat a moment. A video of the body being thrown into the Mississippi was too much to hope for. Virgil knew that, even as he started the truck and drove south through town to the sewage plant.
And he was right. He talked to the plant superintendent, who told him that the cameras were pointed at the chain-link front gate, which was locked shut at night. The effluent channel was several hundred yards farther south.
The superintendent, a burly man in striped coveralls, said, “She wasn’t thrown in there anyway. I knew who she was and she probably weighed one-forty, one-fifty. You would have had to walk a half mile on a bad slick-icy path in the middle of the night with a hundred-and-fifty-pound body on your back. In a blizzard? No way.”
“You have to walk it?”
“Yup. You park in our parking lot here, and there’s a path that runs along the river. Not a government path, not a sidewalk—a path that’s been walked in.”
“How do you know it was in the middle of the night?” Virgil asked.
The guy cocked his head. “You think somebody walked a half mile down a slick-icy path in the middle of the day with a hundred-and-fifty-pound woman’s body on his back?”
“Well . . . no.”
“There you go,” he said.
“The guy who found her . . . he fish down there much?” Virgil asked.
“Ben Potter? Yeah, once or twice a week, year-round. He’s probably eighty. Saw her jacket, snagged her with a lure, pulled her in, called the cops.”
“He doesn’t have any problems with the idea of fishing, you know, in the effluent stream?”
“Hey. When it goes out of here, that stuff is as clean as springwater,” the superintendent said. “You could drink it.”
“You ever do that?” Virgil asked.
“I’m confident about our water quality, but I’m not crazy.”
“You know Jesse McGovern?”
The guy’s eyes went flat. “Who?”
—
On his way back through town, Virgil stopped at the public library, where a chubby blond librarian said, “Virgil Flowers! Welcome back. Are you here on the Gina Hemming thing?”
She’d helped him out on a previous case, and he appreciated it. Virgil said, “Yeah, I am. You know her?”
“Sure. I mean, I’ve talked to her a time or two. She mostly knew my folks; they had a mortgage from the bank. We had a little ceremony when the folks paid it off, and Gina gave us the paper in person.”
“Huh. All right. Let me ask this: do you have yearbooks from the high school?”
“Sure. I’ve heard rumors about the reunion meeting. You’d want Class of ’92,” she said. “Let me show you.”
She took him back in the stacks and showed him two shelves that, between them, contained fifty or sixty high school yearbooks. Virgil said, “Thanks, I can take it from here.”
“Class of ’92 right here,” she said, touching one of the books. “If you need more help, ask me.”
When she’d gone, he pulled off a book a foot farther down the shelf than the ’92, cracked it open, and looked at the index. Janice Anderson had been right: Jesse McGovern was in the same class as Virgil. He found her senior picture, spent some time looking at it—the photo was in color, and McGovern had a thin, foxy face, freckles, and auburn hair—until he was sure he’d recognize her, then put the book back.
He hoped Janice Anderson never figured out what she’d given away. She was a nice old lady, and he liked her. She’d be upset if she knew he’d played her.
—
On the way out the door, the chubby librarian leaned across the checkout desk and asked, with a lowered voice, “What happened with Gina? You can tell me—I won’t tell anybody else.”
Virgil had long disagreed with the usual cop technique of keeping everything quiet about an investigation. The people of a small town—he mostly worked in small towns—knew more about their places than any outsider ever could. He often went to the locals for help even when that meant filling them in on the investigation.
Virgil looked around. The library was empty except for one old man reading a newspaper, so he told the librarian what he’d gotten so far. She lit up when he mentioned the possibility of bondage. “Ooo. That’s interesting.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. She was so proper, she was almost stuffy. I mean, even when she laughed it was like ‘Ha-Ha-Ha’ like she’d practiced it in a mirror. Getting tied up and spanked? That’s a whole new thing right there.”
“I’d very much like to know who her partners were,” Virgil said.
The librarian wiggled her eyes at Virgil. “Me, too.”
Made him laugh, which made him feel a little guilty, too. It was, after all, a murder investigation. He said good-bye to the blonde and headed for the door. As he got there, he turned and said, “Say, how would I look up Jesse McGovern?”
She shook her head and said, “Never heard of her.”
“There’s a surprise,” Virgil said.
The Jesse McGovern question was like a bad joke.
TEN Virgil’s next stop was at Rhodes Realty on Main Street. He angle-parked and went inside, where a blue-haired woman was poking at a computer keyboard and looked nearsightedly at Virgil when he came through the door. “Can I help you?”
The receptionist was sitting in a little corral, maybe ten feet across. A hallway went down one side of the office, with doors leading off to a half dozen individual offices. Some of the doors were open, some closed. Virgil said, “Is, uh, Justine Rhodes in?”
The receptionist lowered her voice and said, “In the office, he’s Justin. Are you one of his friends?”
“I’m an investigator for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “Is he in?”
“Yes. Let me call him. He’s very upset about Gina. He’s been crying for three days straight.”
—
She called Rhodes, who poked his head out of one of the offices and called, “Come on down.”
His office was a bit larger than the receptionist’s corral, but not much. He had a compact desk with two visitors’ chairs, one of them occupied by a sallow-faced Hispanic man with shoulder-length black hair and dark eyelashes. Virgil looked from one to the other. The Hispanic man didn’t offer to leave, and Rhodes pointed at the other chair and asked, “Isn’t this awful? Isn’t this terrible?”
Virgil said, “Maybe we should talk privately.”
Rhodes shook his head. “I don’t keep anything from Rob. And you might want to talk to him, too, so he might as well be here . . . Rob Knox . . .”
Knox said, “Yeah. But we reserve the right to get an attorney.” He may have had Hispani
c ancestors, but his accent was straight Minneapolis.
Rhodes was a tall man, with a short straight nose, a square jaw with a dimple in his chin, a heavy shock of brown hair slicked straight back with gel, and brown eyes rimmed red. He was wearing a pale blue suit, which seemed a little summery for January, and a red necktie that matched the rims of his eyes. He was also wearing the faintest hint of makeup. Virgil told him about the investigation, asked him where he was when Hemming was murdered.
“I was at her house for the meeting, I’m sure you know that, and then I was at home. By myself. Until ten o’clock or so, when Rob got home. I know that’s not a good alibi, but that’s where I was. Rob was down in Prairie du Chien, at a class on French cooking, with people who know him. Every winter, when it becomes intolerable here, I read boring books—last year it was Moby-Dick, this year it’s Proust. I know that won’t hold much water with you people . . .”
“We run into it all the time—people with no alibis,” Virgil said. He wanted to encourage Rhodes to talk, so he added, in a friendly way, “They’re usually innocent, because guilty guys try to fix up an alibi for themselves. The more elaborate they are, the more suspicious we are.”
Virgil looked at Knox. “And you were . . . where? At a class?”
“Yeah. In Prairie du Chien. I didn’t get home until late. After ten o’clock.”
“Were there a lot of people at the class?”
He shrugged. “Six or seven, I guess, not including the two instructors. I talked to most of them, I’ve got some names for you, if you need them.”
“I will,” Virgil said. “I really have to check everything. How long did the class run?”
Knox looked away. “Three hours. Mostly in the afternoon.”
“The afternoon? Why were you so late? Can’t be more than an hour from here.”
“It’s more than an hour even without the snow. More like two hours, and, with the snow, longer than that. I lived there for a couple of years, I hooked up with some friends and we hung out at their restaurant.”
“Gonna need those names.”
Knox was sullen. “You can have them. Check away.”
Rhodes had watched the interplay and now opened a desk drawer and took out a Kleenex tissue, huffed his nose into it, and threw the tissue into a wastebasket. “The thing is, Virgil, Rob really doesn’t know Gina,” he said. He looked at Knox. “I mean, have you even talked?”
Rob said, “Yeah, we talked that one time at the farmers’ market. When we got those pies.”
“That was five minutes,” Rhodes said. “God, why did they kill Gina? It must have been jealousy . . . Or maybe some crazy farmer who wasn’t paying his debts.”
Virgil: “When you say jealousy . . .”
“Gina was a fabulous-looking woman. She was smart and successful . . .”
“And you were married to her.”
“Yes. We loved each other, but at some point I became . . . confused . . . about exactly who . . . inhabits this body.” He slipped his hands down his chest. “My body. We didn’t clash over it, we didn’t argue about it, I think she sensed the problem even before I did. Oh, God . . . Anyway, we were going to get divorced so we both could explore alternative realities, but we remained the closest of friends.”
“I have to ask you this, but it’s a little embarrassing,” Virgil said. “Did you and she ever engage in . . . rough sex?”
Rhodes had started to slump but now straightened. “Was she . . . did somebody . . . before she died . . . ?”
“Sometime before she died. A week or so.”
“Well, it wasn’t me,” he said, his voice indignant. “We haven’t had sex for a long time. When we still slept in the same bed, I sometimes . . . helped her along.”
Virgil pushed him a bit, and Rhodes was willing to explain—actually, seemed happy to explain—until Virgil finally cut him off. He really didn’t want to hear it, and Rhodes said that their last active sexual engagement, which did not include intercourse, had been two years earlier.
Virgil skipped away from the sex to ask, “Do you know who will inherit?”
Rhodes put his elbows on the desk, knitted his fingers together, and looked at Virgil over his hands. “I suppose . . . we never did estate planning when we were married, we were too young . . . but I suppose her sister. I don’t know anything about Gina’s will. I know Rick James was her lawyer. He’d know.”
“Don’t lie to me, Justin,” Virgil said. “It makes me feel bad, and makes you look guilty.”
Justin flushed and said, “Ah, God, I knew somebody would get on me about that. I guess I have something coming. I’ve thought maybe I should decline. Should I decline?”
“I was told by somebody who knows you that you wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Virgil said. “They weren’t so sure about your friend Rob. Do you think Rob could find a use for that money?”
Knox said, “Fuck that. Fuck that.”
A spark appeared in Rhodes’s eyes. Anger? He leaned across the desk and said, “No! Rob is an angel. An angel! He would never!”
Knox settled back in his chair.
—
Virgil took out the list of people who’d been with Hemming the night she disappeared, showed it to Rhodes. “Yes, they were all there. All respectable businessmen and -women . . . Do you think she was killed by a man?”
“That’s my operating theory. Her body had to be moved a substantial distance, no matter where she went into the river. The killer had to be somebody with some strength, unless there were more than one of them.”
“Huh. Well, Ryan Harney is very fit; I see him at the gym. Dave Birkmann is too fat; he’d probably have a heart attack. He might be sorta strong, though . . . I don’t know. George Brown is strong; he could have carried her across the river. Barry Long is fit, I think, but I can’t even imagine why he’d hurt Gina.” He looked up, his eyes unfocused for a few seconds, then said, “Everybody likes Barry. He was the class president for three years, and he’s been in the State Legislature forever. But I’m not sure he’s . . . sexual. He’s not gay, for sure, but I’m not sure he’s heterosexual, either. Huh.”
He looked back down at the list. “None of the women could have moved a body. Margot Moore would be the strongest, but she’s too small. So . . . you know what I think?” He slid the list back toward Virgil. “I don’t think it was any of them. Or me or Rob. For sure, not me or Rob.”
Virgil: “Then . . .”
Rhodes held his hands up, a dismissive gesture. “You’re looking at the wrong people. The economy around here has never recovered from the crash in ’08. We used to have seven Realtors working out of this office, now we have three. A lot of businesses are still in trouble, a lot of places closing down because of Internet sales. Gina had a lot of loans out. A lot. She’s the main source of loan funds around here and she’s had to make serious decisions about people who can’t make payments.”
“I’d thought about that, but it opens up a whole universe of suspects, which is a problem,” Virgil said. “Is there anybody in particular who you think couldn’t pay and might be dangerous?”
“Nooo . . . The people at the bank could help you with that,” Rhodes said. “Now that I think of it, most people would suppose that their problem is with the bank, not with Gina. Kill her and the bank would still collect. Of course, as a decision maker, maybe the anger was aimed directly at her. Lots of people are plain stupid.”
—
Virgil talked with Rhodes for a few more minutes—Rhodes told him that Hemming was a “fussy dresser” and that she would never have gotten up in the morning and put on the same outfit she’d worn the night before—and despite Rhodes’s lack of alibi, Virgil was nearly ready to cross him off the list of suspects.
The fact that he’d been crying didn’t mean much—lots of killers cried after they’d offed their wives—but Rhodes seemed so nakedly op
en that Virgil believed him. Faking both openness and innocence at the same time wasn’t easy; most hardened sociopaths couldn’t pull it off.
That was not true of Rob Knox, who sat in his chair and smoldered, watching Virgil from the corners of his eyes.
Before he left, Virgil had Knox give him a list of names, the people he’d been with in Prairie du Chien.
—
As Virgil walked back to his truck, he was thinking about a grilled cheese sandwich. He’d gotten a good one at Shanker’s Bar and Grill the last time he was in town, so he went that way. At Shanker’s, he pulled into the parking lot, stopped in the second row of spaces, and climbed out of the truck.
As he did, a red pickup was pulling past him into the first row of spaces right outside the back door. He waited until it was stopped, noticed one of the stickers in the back window that showed a cartoon family: husband, wife, five kids—two boys and three girls, in a variety of sizes—two dogs and a cat.
Frankie had a sticker like that in the back of her truck, with a single woman and five boys, and, lately, a slightly askew sticker of a dog that actually resembled Honus, as much as any cartoon could.
As Virgil walked toward the bar’s back door, a woman got out of the passenger side, wrapped up in an old-style parka with a heavy snorkel hood that left nothing visible but her eyes.
As Virgil passed the truck, another woman got out of the backseat on the passenger side, and as he walked up to the door, he found that the truck had held four women, all bundled heavily against the cold. He didn’t think about the fact that the truck would be heated, and they certainly wouldn’t have needed the hoods inside it . . .
He got to the back door of the bar and politely held the door open, and the first woman coming through, half turned away from him, whipped back toward him, leading with her fist, and knocked him on his ass.
He was still sitting up, surprised as much as stunned, when the other three piled on, what he later estimated to be roughly six hundred pounds of woman flesh, and he tried to roll over but could barely move, felt the breath being squeezed out of his lungs.