Nothing else. Nothing more he could do. Wait: fingerprints on the back door . . .
—
Two minutes later, he was out the back door again, having carefully wiped the doorknob with a paper towel from the kitchen. He walked out to the van, settled into the seat, ran his hand through his hair . . . and it came away sticky with blood.
She’d cut him when she hit him, raked him with her fingernails. He still had the paper towel in his hand and he used it to wipe his hair. More blood, but drying. He again ran his fingers through his hair, found the cuts, two of them, a quarter inch apart. Raw and stinging now, but not bleeding much.
Because of his jobs, he kept a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer in the door pocket. He squirted some of it on the paper towel and used it to clean up his hair as best he could. When he was done, he touched the cuts again and came back with faint specks of red on his fingertips. Done bleeding, he thought.
A car went by, and he turned his face away from the headlights.
In another minute, he was driving out Maple, his mind churning. David knew his CSI shows: if the cops brought in somebody to check for DNA, they’d find his all over the place. And why not? He’d been at the meeting. He’d hugged Gina when he arrived. Well, he hadn’t, actually, but others had, and nobody would have noticed that he hadn’t. He was cool on the DNA.
At the intersection of Maple and Main, he stopped and looked both ways. To the south he saw the glittery lights of Club Gold. He almost froze at that point; almost fled home, to bury his . . . what? Angst?
He didn’t do that. He touched his hair again and this time his fingertips came back clean. After a moment, he drove down to Club Gold, parked in back, and walked over to the back door. The men’s room was there, and he went inside. He looked at his hair in the mirror. The cuts were invisible. He peed, zipped up, turned on the sink water, and waited.
None of it was thought out. He was acting purely on instinct. And from information gleaned from the CSI shows.
He waited some more and, after two or three minutes, heard cowboy boots coming down the hall. Here came a witness. He punched the soap dispenser and began washing his hands. Five seconds later, a guy named Cary Lowe bumped through the door, said, “Hey, Big Dave, how they hangin’?” and eased up to the urinal.
“Free and easy,” Birkmann said, as he rinsed his hands and dried them beneath the hot-air blower.
As Lowe continued to pee, he asked, over the roar of the blower, “You singin’ tonight?”
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
“Good luck, then,” Lowe said. “You do have the voice, my man.”
Karaoke every Thursday and Saturday night at Club Gold. Karaoke and a gold-plated alibi.
Birkmann finished drying his hands, pushed out into the hallway, hung his parka on a coat peg, and ambled out to the main room. He got a beer, signed up to sing. Twenty minutes later, Bob Hart said, “You’ve seen him before, you’ve heard him before, you’ve loved him before. You know what’s coming up now, folks. Here’s Big D—Daveareeno, Daveissimo, the Bug Boy—with Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman.’”
David did a decent “Pretty Woman” and got a respectable round of applause from the . . . witnesses . . . and when he got off the stage went and had another beer or two. And he talked to lots of people. Because everybody knew Bug Boy.
He went home, sobbing against the steering wheel of his van. And at one o’clock in the morning, with a storm coming in, he sat in the living room armchair and drank a last beer of the night, staring at the blank screen of the television.
Right into those dead gray eyes.
Dead. Gray. Eyes.
TWO Ben Potter was an old guy, unshaven half the time, smelling of fried eggs and something fishy—sardines? He occasionally walked around with his fly unzipped, mumbling to himself. His eyes were too pale, wandering and watery, half buried in the flesh of his eyelids. He was always heavily bundled up against the winter cold, a tanker cap askew on his head, fleece earflaps hanging loose. He’d inherited the cap from his older brother, now dead, who’d gotten it the ugly way, in Korea, during the war.
Potter was pushing eighty but got around all right on his two artificial hips. People paid no attention to him, except to say, “Hey, Ben,” or, “Mr. Potter, how’s things?”
Nobody really wanted to hear how things were.
Potter didn’t have many years left, and he’d spend them alone.
On Saturday afternoon, Potter collected his fishing gear and headed out to the sewage plant. The plant was on the river south of Trippton, and he’d been told any number of times that the water coming out of the effluent canal was clean enough to drink.
He was willing to believe that insofar as catfishing was concerned. He stopped at the Piggly Wiggly for a tub of chicken livers to use as bait and drove out to the plant.
There’d been a heavy snowstorm on Thursday night, followed by light but persistent snow all day Friday and Saturday morning. The sewage plant’s parking lot had been plowed clean, as he’d hoped, and he parked near the gate. He got his gear out of the back of the truck, pulled on his Sorel’s, his insulated overalls, and a parka. Years before, he’d epoxied a cheap thermometer to the back hatch of his camper. He peered at it now: five degrees above zero. He went back into the truck, found a face mask, and stuck it in his pocket in case it got really cold.
Headed downriver, a tough trek for an old guy, carrying poles with one hand and a plastic fishing bucket with a tackle box inside it with the other.
There was normally a walked-in path through the snow, but he was breaking trail now. He could see where the path was but not the individual ruts and rocks that littered it. He nearly fell twice, which he wanted to avoid at his age because getting back up was so difficult. He took fifteen minutes to make the four hundred yards down to where the warm effluent stream cut into the river’s ice, leaving an oblong pool of open, steaming water.
Potter was by himself. Too cold for fair-weather fishermen. Workers at the local tree service, who liked to fish, had set up a dozen cutoff cottonwood stumps around the outflow as chairs. Potter brushed the snow off one of them and sat down to bait his hooks.
That’s when he noticed the burgundy-colored cloth floating slowly in a wide circle around in the open water. The cloth caught the eye because . . . it was the size and shape of a body.
A body?
He kept looking, but the shape was partly submerged, and what he could see was mostly bumps of fabric, now pink against the black water.
Was that a sleeve?
Potter watched for a minute, then looked around. No help nearby. He hadn’t expected any, but he had looked anyway.
A body?
He swallowed once or twice, opened his tackle box, and found a treble-hooked bucktail. He clipped it on, hands trembling with cold and foreboding, cast and watched the bucktail fall in the open water on the other side of whatever it was. He reeled in the lure carefully until the bucktail hit the floating fabric. He set the hook and towed the thing over to his shore. There was weight to it. A lot of weight.
The closer it got, the more it looked like a body.
He got it right up to the narrow rim of ice around the open area, reached out with a bare hand, caught a bare foot, and dragged the body up on the rim of ice.
“Oh, jeez,” he muttered. He was afraid, literally shaking in his boots, his hands trembling so violently that he dropped his fishing rod. He rolled the body over to look at the face.
His hook had gone into the woman’s cheek, a couple inches below her eye. He didn’t try to remove it. He simply gawked . . .
Then, “Gina Hemming? Gina Hemming?”
Horrified, he turned and shouted into the winter’s silence, “Help! Help me!”
No response. There wouldn’t be one, he knew. He stepped away from the body, couldn’t help looking back, and lo
oking again, and again, as he broke into a slow, stumbling old man’s run back to the sewage plant . . .
THREE Virgil Flowers sat uncomfortably hunched over in a camouflaged blind on the banks of the frozen Mississippi, roughly a hundred miles, as the crow flies, north of the Trippton sewage plant. He was wrapped from his chest to his stocking feet in a heavyweight sleeping bag, the lens of his Nikon D810 digital camera peeking out through the blind’s front screen. His boots sat next to him, stuffed with air-activated hand warmers.
Light snow drifted over the riverscape fronting the tent, while to his left, a few hundred yards away, the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant pumped huge volumes of steam into the bitterly cold winter air. Virgil wasn’t sure whether the snow was natural or condensed from the steam.
He’d been in the blind for two hours, and though he was wearing a parka, his lack of movement let the January chill seep into his shoulders and down his spine. He’d brought the sleeping bag to deal with that problem, and when he’d begun to lose feeling in his butt, he’d taken off his boots and pulled on the bag. Overhead, his breath was condensing into ice crystals on the inside of the tent.
Virgil was a tall man, thin, with country singer blond hair and cool blue eyes. An agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, he was in the final two days of a weeklong winter vacation, which he was using in an effort to get photos of an owl.
As a part-time outdoor writer, Virgil liked all the Minnesota seasons; the best months were the lush August days and the brilliant blue days of February. There was hunting in the fall and spring, fishing almost year-round; and he liked to walk, to simply get out and look at the place he lived.
A birder friend had mentioned seeing a great horned owl fishing over the open water south of the nuclear plant, which they weren’t supposed to do. Great horned owls ate rabbits, not fish. The birder said the owl had been around since a big cold front had come through in mid-December, fishing the whole time.
Virgil wasn’t that much of an owl fancier, but he’d made some inquiries, and Wing & Talon, a magazine focused on raptors, had guaranteed a thousand dollars for good photos of a great horned owl taking a fish, with a short accompanying article.
—
At three o’clock on this sunny afternoon, Virgil still had good light, but it’d be fading quickly over the next hour and a half. He wanted to be out of the blind before sunset, which came at 4:48. Despite an air temperature of minus three degrees, the river in front of him was open, with wisps of steam rising up like cartoon ghosts. The heat came from the nuclear plant’s cooling towers, which used cold water to keep the nuke from turning into a fiery hell pit of radiation and doom. From the cooling towers, the warm water flowed through canals and a couple of ponds and into the river.
Virgil’s girlfriend, Frankie, had said, “You’ll come back with your balls glowing in the dark.”
“Wrong, ignorant farm girl,” Virgil said. “The cooling water doesn’t touch the radioactive part. You could drink it.”
“You know that for sure?”
“Yeah, I looked it up,” Virgil said. They were taking down the Christmas tree, packing the glass ornaments into boxes of Styrofoam peanuts. “Besides, if my balls did glow in the dark, I’d have some light when I get up at night to pee.”
“Or, even better,” she said, “you could lead Santa’s sleigh if something happened to Rudolph.”
She was not only an ignorant farm girl but a wiseass.
—
Virgil’s great horned target had taken up residence in a nearby oak: Virgil could see its hulk as a dark oval through the bare branches. The day before, he’d seen it swoop down over the water twice but hadn’t yet gotten a good shot, hadn’t yet seen it nail a fish. The problem was, the owl didn’t hunt during bright daylight hours, except for the couple of hours before sundown and the hour or so after daybreak.
To shoot at those times, he used a Nikon 400mm f2.8, paid for by the good citizens of Minnesota who’d bought it in the belief that he would use its lens to apprehend the criminal element. The lens cost something like twelve thousand dollars. Should it roll down the riverbank into the Mississippi, he’d be looking at a major hole in his retirement plan.
So here he was, sitting in a camo tent, eating cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, a prefocused, bazooka-like camera lens mounted on a tripod. He hadn’t gotten the owl yet, but he’d gotten several dozen photos of other forms of wildlife—foxes, minks, otters, bald eagles—all pulled in by the warmth of the open water and the fish roiling the shallows near the shore.
He had gotten one great sequence of two coyotes hunting mice, or maybe voles, in the snow-bent wild grass at the top of the bank. The coyotes would move silently across the snowfield, noses down, ears up, listening for movement under the snow. When they heard something, they’d rear up and come down on the mouse or vole with both feet, pinning the unfortunate rodent to the ground.
Best shot: the larger of the two coyotes passing a mouse off to the other one. Mates? Sisters? Couldn’t tell. Great sequence, but great coyote sequences were a dime a dozen, as were great bald eagle shots. Dozens of bald eagles hunted the open water during the winter, and he could easily fill up a memory card with shots.
—
Virgil was looking at the Safari browser on his iPhone when the owl made its first move of the day. Virgil caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, went to the camera’s viewfinder, picked up the bird, and turned the lens with the bird’s flight and hit the trigger, which fired an automatic sequence of shots, and BANG!
Nothing.
The bird’s talons had touched the water but come up fishless. The owl flapped its great silent wings a couple of times and returned to its perch onshore.
“Get a fish, you incompetent motherfucker,” Virgil muttered. The owl sat on the branch, its head swiveling as though on ball bearings, then cocking sideways.
Virgil, under his breath: “Go, go, go . . .”
The bird made a small downward movement, as though cocking itself, and dropped back toward the water, and BANG! This time, it came up with a flapping fish, probably a small white sucker. Virgil shot thirty frames, starting from the owl’s launching point, to the water, and back. He burned up a few more frames of the bird tearing the fish apart, sat back, and chimped the results.
Not bad, he thought, as he flipped through the images on the camera’s LCD screen. In fact, excellent. One thousand American dollars, unless the good folks at Wing & Talon had been shining him on.
—
Back at his truck, he put the folded blind away and the lens back in its case, pulled his iPad out of the backseat and transferred the photos. He also kept them on the memory card as a backup and, when he got home, would move them to the Cloud as even further insurance.
He started the truck and was backing out to the road when the phone burped. Frankie wouldn’t be calling, because he’d asked her not to call between three o’clock and sundown when a call could disturb the owl. He picked up the phone and looked at the screen: Jon Duncan, his nominal boss at the BCA. He was on vacation, so the call could be social. Maybe. Okay, maybe not.
“What’s up?” Virgil asked.
“Man, I know you’re on vacation—”
“No, no, no! Get somebody else.”
“It’s down in Trippton, your old stomping grounds. I’ve got to ask you to take a look. Do this for me, take the rest of your vacation when it’s done,” Duncan said. “The big boss says nobody will check if you take a bunch of undertime on top of your vacation.”
“Undertime” was a concept widely used in state government: it was like overtime, but instead of working more, you worked less, while still getting paid. The real artists took undertime while on the clock for overtime, thus getting time-and-a-half for not working.
“How much undertime?” Virgil asked.
“However much you want . .
. that isn’t outright theft.”
“I gotta talk to Frankie. We were going out tonight.”
“Go out,” Duncan said. “There’s no point of getting down there before tomorrow morning anyway. Since tomorrow’s a Sunday, you probably don’t even have to get there early.”
“Gimme the short version,” Virgil said.
“Short version: forty-two-year-old almost-divorced female bank president disappears Thursday night and is dumped in the Mississippi, only to emerge as a block of ice this afternoon.”
“How’d she emerge?” Virgil asked. “The river’s frozen solid all the way down to Iowa.”
“A sewage plant effluent stream creates open water a couple miles south of Trippton. Some guy was out there fishing when she floated by.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Yeah, I’m told it wasn’t exactly pleasant.”
“I meant fishing in the effluent stream,” Virgil said. “Do they know what killed her? Shot, or drowned, or what?”
“The ME has her in Rochester; he says she died of a fractured skull. He finished the autopsy about ten minutes ago. Wasn’t an accident, wasn’t a fall or anything. She was wearing a burgundy-colored dress and was barefoot. The sheriff said that when she was last seen in that dress, Thursday night, she was wearing high heels. She wasn’t walking around on river ice in four-inch heels and a Donna Karan jacket.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “If Frankie gets pissed, I’m gonna blame it on you.”
“That’s one of the fardels I must bear,” Duncan said.
“What?”
“You must not be familiar with Hamlet,” Duncan said. “You know, by Shakespeare.”
“Oh, that one,” Virgil said.
“Yeah. One of my ancestors is in Macbeth.”
“I’ll buy a copy, maybe you can autograph it for me,” Virgil said. “I’ll call you back tomorrow night about the banker lady.”
“Virgil, I owe you.”
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