“You keep saying that, but you never pay off.”
“That’s one of your fardels,” Duncan said.
—
Virgil was two hours from home. He called and spent some time talking to Frankie about nothing in particular but including a ten-minute rumination about her sister’s sexual misadventures at the University of Minnesota, which seemed designed to gain her a tenured teaching position. “Absolutely disgusting,” Frankie said. “I sometimes can’t believe that Sparkle and I are even related . . .”
“It’s absolutely awful,” Virgil said. When he got off the phone, he brought up a country music station and fantasized about a Frankie-Sparkle-Virgil sandwich, which should have made him ashamed of himself but didn’t.
Virgil and Frankie spent Saturday evening at the Cine Grand Mankato watching Hacksaw Ridge, then went over to the Rooster Coop for a couple of beers and to chat with people they knew. Between the two of them, that included half the patrons in the place, including three out-and-out barflies and an out-of-tune Eagles cover band.
Frankie was a short, good-looking woman with pale blue eyes and blond hair, which she wore in a fat, Swedish-style single braid. She was once a smart redneck but was now the smart owner of an architectural salvage business, which meant she bought and tore down old houses that had good wood or salable fixtures in them. She also operated a small farm outside Mankato, mostly growing alfalfa.
She had recently bought, for three thousand dollars, in a dying prairie town, an abandoned mansion that had once belonged to a rich quarry owner.
The place was filled with black walnut floors and oak beams, which by themselves would have had her only breaking even on the three grand after paying her employees. The real find had been the library, where all the wood was straight, dry, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Brazilian rosewood, for which she would net an additional thirty thousand dollars from a musical instrument maker.
“You don’t feel bad about screwing the former owner?” Virgil had asked when he heard about the thirty grand.
“The former owner was a Kansas City hedge funder who wanted to get rid of the house and outbuildings so he could plow over another four acres. Would have cost him ten thousand to get a wrecking contractor to tear the place down—instead, they make three thousand.”
“Then screw ’em,” Virgil said.
—
Frankie had a complicated history, which at times had involved minor crime, and which included five children, all boys. The oldest worked as a partner in her salvage business, while the next oldest cheerfully drifted around the United States in a series of casual jobs, good training for what he wanted to ultimately become: an author. He and Virgil talked writing whenever he was in town.
The other three boys still lived at home. The third son, a senior in high school, was in charge of the other two when Frankie spent the night at Virgil’s place.
After an hour at the Rooster Coop, they went back to Virgil’s, fooled around until midnight, then let Honus the Dog back into the bedroom. Honus had been deeply insulted by his temporary exclusion from the room, but he was a good-natured yellow dog of indefinite breed and gave them both a nose and assumed his spot at the bottom center of the bed.
—
At breakfast the next morning, Frankie asked, “Have you ever been to Trippton when you weren’t towing your boat?”
“Didn’t think about that, but I don’t believe I have,” Virgil said. “It’s not the most inviting place in winter. In fact, it’s butt ugly.”
“Well, say hello to Johnson Johnson for me,” Frankie said. “No point in telling you to stay away from him.”
“Hey . . .”
“I know, I know, old college buds and all. But the guy ought to be declared a federal disaster area.”
That was true, so Virgil changed the subject. “I’ve got to get going. Could be gone a few days, and it’s colder than hell,” he said. They both looked out the kitchen window at the snowfields around the house. “Gonna have to take the big bag.”
“Any chance this is more than a onetime deal?” she asked. “The murder?”
“No idea.”
“Then take your shotgun, too,” she said. “I’ll clean up the dishes while you pack, and I’ll walk Honus out at the farm. I’ll check the house every day you’re gone.”
“Good deal.”
—
Virgil wrote checks for a few routine bills, put stamps on the envelopes, sent JPEGs of the owl photos to Wing & Talon, packed his cold-weather gear into a duffel bag, pulled on insulated hiking boots, and made sure he had two pairs of gloves, one for driving and one for outside. Watching the gear going into the big bag depressed Honus, who slunk away to sit next to Frankie.
When Virgil went back to the kitchen carrying the bag, he found a red-eyed Frankie sitting at the table, the dishes not done, a short stack of papers by one hand. She looked up, and he asked, “What?”
“You left your insurance papers on the sink . . . I wasn’t snooping,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Well, I’m down as the beneficiary,” she said. “And if we’re both killed at the same time, my kids get it . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Stop saying ‘Yeah?’ Made me cry a little bit,” Frankie said.
“I got nobody else who I’d want it to go to,” Virgil said. “Just you and the kids.”
She sighed and said, “You know, Virgil, sometimes we don’t talk enough. I gotta tell you, I’d be totally up for another kid. Especially if it was a girl.”
Virgil sat down because he needed to.
She said, “We don’t have to talk about it now, but so you know: you’d be like the first-best dad in the world. You already sorta are.”
Virgil said, “Ah, boy.”
FOUR With all that, and the fallout, Virgil left late for Trippton.
On the way, he called the medical examiner at the Mayo in Rochester to tell him that he’d be a bit later than he thought. The ME told him not to worry about it, he wasn’t doing much anyway, just another murder.
With frequent snow-covered stretches on the highways, and a stop to get coffee, Virgil took an hour and a half to make the trip. Once in town, he found a parking space in a city parking structure, walked through the Skyway, and then the Subway, to the Mayo.
Since it was a Sunday, there were few people around. The medical examiner, Peter Thurston, said he’d be waiting in the cafeteria. Virgil had worked with him a number of times and had found him a congenial sort, good at his job. Thurston was sitting at a table, reading the New York Times. Virgil gave him a wave and continued on to the food line, where he got a piece of pumpkin pie and a Diet Coke and carried it over to Thurston’s table.
Thurston was a small, dark-haired man with a sleepy look about his heavy-lidded eyes. Virgil said, “I hope this isn’t too much trouble,” as he sat down with his pie. “Being Sunday.”
“I’ll tell you what’s too much trouble,” Thurston said, folding the paper and pushing it aside. “Falling in love. Coming in for an hour on Sunday afternoon? No problem. Falling in love? Big problem. I was a perfectly content single guy, with a six handicap golf habit, and along came Buttercup.”
“That can’t be her name,” Virgil said.
“No, it can’t. Her name is Laurie, and she’s a crazy vegetarian, yoga practitioner, feminist bitch lawyer. Unfortunately, I fell in love with her.”
“When did all this come up?”
“Two or three months ago,” Thurston said. “It seems like it’s been forever. Like I’ve known her forever.”
“I’m familiar with the feeling,” Virgil said. “Been there myself a few times.”
“A few times? Did you love them or was it the sex?” Thurston asked.
“Oh, I loved them,” Virgil said. “I even married them.”
Thurston thought
about that for a moment, then asked, “Then what?”
“After a while, we got divorced,” Virgil said. “The first divorce was bad, took some time to get over that one. The third only took about six weeks to get over.”
“Three divorces?” Thurston was impressed.
“Yeah, I was . . . unsettled,” Virgil said.
Made Thurston laugh. “All right. Finish your pie and let’s go look at Miz Hemming.”
—
Virgil had seen people shot, stabbed, burned, drowned, beaten to death, blown up, run over with cars, and eaten by a tiger. When Thurston rolled Hemming out of the cooler, she looked almost uninjured, if you could ignore the various dismemberments done during the autopsy. Thurston had put her roughly back together, leaving the rest for the funeral home.
Even with the autopsy work, when Virgil looked closely he could see that her head was no longer symmetrical. She wasn’t bloated, like most floaters: in fact, she seemed to have shrunken, and she was pale as a piece of printer paper, except that her lips, eyelids, and the tops of her ears were a distinct blue. She showed one wound, in her cheek, but that was small and bloodless. Her breasts were flattened, her nipples so pale that they merged with the skin around them. She had almost no pubic hair.
“Death was very quick—effectively, instantaneous,” Thurston said. “She was struck on the left side of her head, at her temple, and almost certainly from the front, so it’s better than fifty-fifty that the killer was right-handed. She was struck with something curved and heavy—I’d say there’s a good chance that it was a large, full bottle. A bowling ball or a bowling pin could have done the same kind of damage, but you usually don’t get people being smacked in the head with a bowling ball or pin. Whatever it was, it was larger in diameter than a baseball bat.”
“What’s the cut on her face?”
“Oh, yeah. The guy who saw the body floating in the river was a fisherman; he hooked her with a treble hook and pulled her in. The cops cut the lure off but left the hook. I took it off to see if there was any other, earlier defect beneath it. There wasn’t. All the damage was done by the hook.”
“Is there any way to tell how long she was dead before she was dumped?” Virgil asked.
“I can’t tell you exactly how long, but it was some time. The river water is cold, in the thirties . . . colder than a typical refrigerator. She showed substantial gravity-based internal bleeding toward her left side, which suggests that she was lying on that side for quite some time. Then the river water hit, and when she got cold enough, the bleeding would have stopped. I can’t say four hours, as opposed to two—that would depend on how the body was handled—but I can say it was some time.”
“Okay . . .”
He gestured toward Hemming’s chest and stomach, which had been opened with a Y-shaped incision. “The other thing is, she’d eaten quite a lot of cheese, which she may have liked but apparently didn’t agree with her. Prior to death, she’d already begun to develop intestinal gas, and that process continued after death, although it would have stopped when the body got cold enough. The cold also created some rigidity in her sphincter muscles, so she didn’t pass that gas until we opened her up.”
“Is there a point here?” Virgil asked.
“Yes. It was probably that gas that kept her afloat enough to wind up on top of the water at the sewage plant. If it weren’t for that, she would have been at the bottom of the river.”
“Okay.”
Not much help there. Another man came through the door, a heavyset guy wearing a ski hat, an open parka, and a fulsome neck beard. “Sorry I’m late,” he said.
Thurston said to Virgil, “Karl is our death investigator. He can give you some information on her clothing and the recovery of the body and so on . . .”
Virgil shook hands with Karl Lone, who asked Thurston, “You tell him about the bruises?”
“Getting there,” Thurston said. He took a yellow pencil from his jacket pocket and used it as a pointer. “If you look here, you can see that she had bruises at her wrists . . .” He pointed to them. “And at her ankles.” He pointed again. The bruises were faint but distinct, once you saw them, and circled her wrists and ankles like bracelets. “She also had light striped bruising on her buttocks. They happened some time before her death—days before, maybe a week before. Not hours. We can roll her, and you can look at the bruises if you want . . .”
“No, no,” Virgil said hastily. “I believe you. Are they relevant?”
“It’s possible that they’re from B and D,” Lone said. “Bondage and discipline. She was possibly tied up and spanked.”
Virgil looked at Thurston: “Really?”
“It’s the best explanation,” Thurston said. “You can decide if it’s relevant. Some sex play may have gone too far . . .”
“Not sex play if you whack somebody hard enough to break her skull,” Virgil said.
“But sex, alcohol, a taste for violence, a quarrel . . . somebody brings a bottle over expecting to get laid, she tells him to take a hike, they argue, and WHACK!”
“Okay,” Virgil said. “It’s a possibility.”
Lone stepped up: “The doc won’t tell you this, because he’s a conservative medical doctor who’s careful about what he says, but I’ll tell you what—I’ve seen a couple people killed by B and D during my career, and I don’t know if her . . . sex partner . . . killed her, but I know B and D bruises when I see them. That’s what we’re looking at.”
Virgil turned back to Thurston again, who said, “Umm.”
Thurston said, “Possibly more relevant to your investigation . . . look closely at the fingernails of her right hand. The nails on her ring and middle fingers are cracked and slightly ripped, and that happened at the time of death or slightly before.”
“How can you tell?”
“I don’t want to sound too definite about that, to tell the truth, but it’s what I think,” Thurston said. “There was some instantaneous bleeding behind the nails at the time of the trauma, but the bleeding quickly stopped.”
“Why wasn’t this washed away when she was in the water?” Virgil asked.
“The blood we see is down behind the nails, which sealed up the broken blood vessels.”
“And that’s relevant . . . how?” Virgil asked.
“It looks to me—possibly—that she struck her killer with her hand and raked him with her nails. She has well-cared-for nails, and they’re quite long. There was no tissue of any kind beneath the tips, but that easily could have been washed away in the water because it wasn’t sealed beneath the nails.”
“You’re saying that the killer could have scratches,” Virgil said.
“Scratches, or even nasty cuts, because she hit him hard. Now, it’s also possible that she damaged her nails some other way before she was killed, but in my experience a woman like this isn’t going to walk around with two ragged hangnails. They’ll clip them, or use an emery board to clean them up—and right away. I think the damage happened in a fight at the time of her death.”
Overall, Virgil spent an hour in Rochester, talking to Thurston and Lone, but didn’t get much more that would help with his investigation. Hemming’s body showed no signs of a pre-death struggle, other than the nails: no fresh cuts or bruises on the body, except the scalp; no large amounts of missing hair, although there may be some small bits missing around the point of impact.
Lone said that her clothing was undamaged by anything resembling violence, although it had been discolored by immersion in the river. She’d been barefoot when taken out of the water.
Back in his 4Runner, Virgil spent another hour driving on to Trippton, moving slow through the rough rolling terrain of the Driftless Area, thinking about the ME’s findings. He was thirty miles out when his phone rang: Duncan again, calling from St. Paul.
“Wanted to make sure everything’s okay, that
you made it to Trippton,” Duncan said.
“Not quite there yet,” Virgil said. “I spent more time with the medical examiner than I expected. I’ll be there in half an hour or so.”
“Good, good. Listen, something else has come up,” Duncan said. “Our new governor, God bless him, has been looking around for somebody to help out on a minor crime problem. As it happens, the center of the problem is in the Trippton area. He was trying to deal with it when he was the attorney general, but nothing got done, and you know he likes your ass . . .”
“The new governor is dumb as a box of rocks,” Virgil said. “And that’s an insult to rocks and boxes.”
“Yeah, yeah, but he’s governor now. And because he’s dumb, he’s got lots of people whispering in his ear, telling him about things he needs to do. Somebody wants him to look into this . . .”
“Well?” Virgil said. “What is it, Jon?”
“It’s too complicated to talk about while you’re driving,” Duncan said. “There’s a private investigator, named Margaret Griffin, in Trippton right now. She’s from Los Angeles. She’ll meet you wherever you’re staying and lay the whole thing out.”
Virgil had picked up traces of nervous stress in Duncan’s voice and he said, “Jon, you lying lump of horseshit. You’ve done something to me . . .”
“Not me. The governor,” Duncan said. “The governor did it. I don’t even entirely understand it. Anyway, this Margaret Griffin will meet you wherever . . .”
—
Duncan never did tell the truth, Virgil thought, as he drove down the hill into the Mississippi River Valley and Trippton. Virgil told Duncan that he was staying at Johnson Johnson’s riverfront cabin as a way to save the state some money and that he could meet Griffin that night.
As they were finishing the conversation, Duncan dropped his voice and said, “Virgil, when you’re all done and back home, take a whole week off. I will not tell a single person. That’s two days to make up for lost vacation, plus three days. If you work overtime in Trippton, put in for it. Is that fair or what?”
“That depends on what kind of goddamn sinkhole you’ve thrown me into with this Griffin woman,” Virgil said. “I know something’s up. I can smell it from here. I might be talking to you about a couple of weeks off even if I don’t get shot or something.”
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