Deep Freeze

by John Sandford

  Cain thought about it, and seriously, but hadn’t gotten there yet.

  —

  As Virgil was getting ready for bed that night, Cain was disturbing the peace at George Brown’s bowling alley.

  After Brown cut him off, Cain struggled out into the parking lot, where, with his oldest pal, Denwa Burke, at his side, they mutually agreed that they needed more excitement in their lives, because, honestly, when you thought about it, too much was never enough.

  Driving drunk usually provided solid entertainment. Because bars were such a large part of Trippton’s economy, the cops generally stayed away from drivers who might have an extra cocktail under their belts as long as they didn’t run into anything too expensive or uninsured.

  Cain got in his Jeep Rubicon, fired that mother up, and five minutes later launched himself and Burke onto the frozen Mississippi River. Once clear of the first ice village, he aimed the truck north and dropped the hammer. The Jeep bucked and thrashed and occasionally went airborne off the windrows of snow, Burke screaming his approval—and chipping a tooth on a bottle of Stoli—until they hit the main channel, where the wind had cleared most of the bumps.

  There, running the Jeep up to fifty, Cain cut sharp left, and the Jeep spun down the ice like a top. He did it again and again, then the snow came, and they were essentially flying blind, but still working the ice, until Burke shouted, “Stop, stop!” and Cain yelled back, “You pussy!” and Burke shouted, “No, stop, stop!” Cain got the Jeep stopped, and Burke popped open his door, got out, and barfed most of several beers, a pint of Stoli, and four or five hot dogs onto the ice, got back in the truck, wiped his chin with his parka sleeve, and said, “I’m good.”

  “’Preciate that,” Cain said, and, “Pass the bottle.”

  Denwa passed it, Cain took two long swallows, passed the bottle back, and dropped the hammer.

  Once, a few minutes before he’d gone out on the ice with his truck, a deputy asked him, “Why do you do that, Corbel? Drink and fuck around on the river?”

  Cain answered, “Because that’s what we do. We’ve always done that.”

  —

  Off the ice, but no less hammered, Cain pulled the Jeep to the side of the street and said to Burke, “I gotta tell you something, Denwa. Not exactly a secret, but kinda like that.”

  “Go for it,” Burke said.

  “You know Ryan Harney?”

  “The doctor? He did my hemorrhoids,” Burke said. “What’s the secret?”

  “A few years back, he was fuckin’ Gina Hemming.”

  Burke looked at him slack-jawed, puzzled by the importance of this secret. “Yeah? So what?”

  “So what? So everybody in town knows he’s got trouble with his wife, and what I think is, Gina told him she was gonna come out with the news, and his wife was gonna find out, so he killed her and threw her body in the river.”

  “No shit,” Burke said. He held up the bottle of Stoli, realized there was less than half an inch left. He finished it and threw the bottle out the window, where it shattered on the street. “What’re we gonna do about it?”

  “Go kick his ass,” Cain said.

  “Let’s do it,” Burke said. “Motherfucker can’t go around killing our women.”

  Cain dropped the hammer, and the Jeep lurched away from the curb.

  “Say,” Burke said, “Didn’t I hear from somebody once that you used to fuck Gina? Might have been your wife said it.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t kill her. She needed me, because . . . Justine.”

  “Huh. Justine,” Burke said. He burped. “You know, if he gets the operation, I could go for a piece of that.”

  “What?”

  “Good-looking woman . . . or whatever,” Burke said.

  Cain didn’t want to hear it. And had an idea that he wouldn’t remember it anyway. That was a good thing.

  —

  They showed up at Harney’s house, a sprawling tan-brick affair with a three-car garage and a couple of bay windows poking out on either side of the recessed front door. There were lights on at both ends of the house. Cain pulled into the driveway, killed the engine, the two men piled out, and Cain led the way to the door. He rang the doorbell and pounded on the door, and a minute later the door popped open, and Harney was there in a robe and slippers, the open robe showing the top of a pair of blue pajamas.

  He asked, “Somebody hurt?”

  “You motherfucker,” Burke shouted. “You killed Gina Hemming. You motherfucker . . .”

  Burke seemed to have lost the thread at “motherfucker,” and Cain stepped up. “We know all about it, Harney,” he said. “Gina was going to turn you in, to your wife, and you decided to shut her up.”

  “You guys are drunk.”

  “Damn right,” Burke said.

  Harney’s wife, Karen, showed up in a robe behind Harney and asked loudly, “Ryan, what’s going on?”

  “There she is,” Burke shouted. “Your old man killed Gina Hemming because he was fuckin’ her and he didn’t want you to find out.”

  She crossed her arms. “What?”

  “Not true, not true, none of it’s true, they’re drunk idiots,” Harney said. As Cain shouted, “Who you callin’ idiots?” Harney turned to his wife. “You know everything that happened, it was years ago, and these assholes are drunk . . .”

  “Who’s an asshole?” Cain shouted, and he punched Harney in the forehead. Harney went down in the entryway, and his wife stumbled over to the entryway closet and began throwing coats at Burke and Cain, who fought through them, undamaged, until she pulled the five-foot-long dowel rod out that the coats had been hanging on and swung it like a baseball bat. Cain managed to duck, but the rod hit Burke in the teeth, breaking off several of them and knocking him down.

  “You bitch,” Cain shouted.

  He moved on her, but Harney tripped him and he fell down. From the back of the house, a young boy was screaming, “Mom? Dad?” and Cain began to get the feeling that he might have screwed the pooch.

  He tried to get up, but Karen Harney hit him, hard as she could, across the back, and he went down flat, and Ryan Harney sat on his head and told his wife, “Call the cops.”

  “If we call the cops . . .”

  Cain said, “If you don’t call the cops, we’ll go away.”

  “Call the cops,” Harney said.

  His wife said, “I’m talking to Taylor first thing in the morning.” Taylor Miller was their divorce attorney.

  “Call the cops,” Harney said. Burke had struggled to a sitting position; blood was pouring out of his mouth and down his chest. Cain shouted, “Get the fuck off my head.”

  “Call the fuckin’ cops,” Harney said. He felt really, really tired.

  His wife went to call the cops.

  —

  The snow that night came through in ten-mile-wide pulses, accompanied by occasional thunder. Virgil didn’t sleep well in the strange bed, with the wind blowing through the eaves and thoughts of the murder investigation prodding him awake.

  The first wave of snow had already gone through when he got back to the cabin, and he could see stars overhead. He got out his iPad and opened up Fred Fitzgerald’s criminal file, as downloaded to the BCA site by the duty officer. The details were unique to Fitzgerald, but the pattern was familiar enough—a small-town biker thug whose proclivities led to bar fights and minor crime.

  He finished the file, made a couple of notes on the iPad, then spent some time reading Thomas Perry’s The Old Man, talked to Frankie for a while—it was snowing at the farm, and her third-oldest son would be getting up at five a.m., before school, to plow a dozen driveways—and finally went to bed at midnight.

  He woke three times during the night to look out the bedroom window. Twice it was snowing, once it wasn’t, and when he got up in the morning, he found a sullen gray sky and
six inches of new snow on the front porch and covering the truck.

  He put on his camo suit, spent fifteen minutes shoveling off the porch and steps and brushing the snow off the 4Runner. His leg and hip still hurt, but the pain in his nose seemed to be going away. When he was done clearing snow, he went back inside and ate an oversized bowl of oatmeal, with cinnamon and raisins, and read the news and weather on his iPad. The National Weather Service said the day would be cold and windy, as would the rest of the next week, with a chance of snow every night.

  As Virgil was shaving, Jon Duncan called from the BCA. Virgil put him on speaker, and Duncan said, “Bea Sawyer is on the way down to take a look at the house and she’s bringing Bill Jensen with her to look at the computer. Clay Danson—he’s a diver—is on the way down with a dive crew. Danson is costing us an arm and a leg. With the snow on the highway, they might take a while.”

  “They got my number?”

  “They do, and they’ll call as soon as they get into town.”

  Beatrice Sawyer was the lead crime scene tech for the BCA; Virgil had never heard of Danson.

  A few minutes later, Jeff Purdy called. “We got Corbel Cain and his friend Denwa Burke in jail. They went over to Ryan Harney’s house last night and attacked him. They were trying to force him to admit that he killed Gina Hemming.”

  “Oh, boy. Anybody get hurt?”

  “Denwa got some teeth broken off, Harney got hit on the forehead and has a bruise the size of a pancake, Cain’s been pissing and moaning about his back and neck. Karen Harney hit him with a dowel rod from a closet—you know, that thing they hang the coats off of—the same thing she used on Denwa. Denwa and Corbel got terminal hangovers. That’s about it.”

  “Why did they think—”

  “Seems Ryan had an affair with Gina Hemming, years ago. Corbel thinks he killed Gina to keep Gina from telling Karen, but it seems that Harney confessed all, years ago, and Karen knew about it. But now that it’s come up again, kinda publicly . . . Karen’s talking divorce.”

  “Harney had an affair with Hemming? He told me he barely spoke to her.”

  “I don’t know how much they talked, but they apparently spent some serious time screwing each other.”

  “I’ll be down to the jail to talk to Corbel. Can you hold him until I get there?”

  “Yeah, he’s got to wait for Sam Jones to order bail, and bail hearings don’t start until eleven o’clock, so he won’t get out until after noon. We’ve got him here in a holding cell; we haven’t transferred him to the jail.”

  “I’ll be down right away,” Virgil said.

  —

  Corbel Cain looked fairly discouraged when he was retrieved from his holding cell and brought out to an interview room, where he dropped into the plastic chair. He nodded at Virgil, rubbed the back of his neck, and said, “That didn’t work out so good.”

  Virgil was sitting across the interview table. “What were you doing, Corbel? I understand the Harneys beat the shit out of you and your pal . . .”

  “Mrs. Harney. Mrs. Harney—she ambushed us with a baseball bat . . .”

  “It was a stick, Corbel. A dowel rod from a closet, for Christ’s sakes,” Virgil said. “Jeff Purdy says your friend looks like a vampire, with all his broken teeth . . .”

  “Yeah, he took it bad. That fuckin’ Harney tripped me, and Mrs. Harney hit me with that baseball bat . . .”

  “Stick . . .”

  “Felt like a baseball bat,” Corbel said. “I might have to go to Harney to fix me up because he sat on my head. I don’t think my neck’s gonna recover for a month. You ever try to lift up your head when there’s two hundred pounds sitting on it?”

  “No, I never have,” Virgil said. “Now, tell me what you were doing.”

  “I will if you’ll get me a bottle of water. My mouth feels like the Sahara Desert . . .”

  Virgil got a deputy to fetch a bottle of water, and Cain said, “Well, when I was fooling around with Gina, it came out, I don’t remember how, that she’d had a thing with Ryan Harney. She made me promise not to tell anyone, but what I figured was, they had this party, for the class reunion, or this meeting, whatever it was, and she said something to Harney that made him think it was all gonna come out. So he left, waved good-bye to everyone, and he came back and killed her. Or maybe she was friendly at the party, and he came back, thinking he was gonna get laid, that they could start up again, and she told him to fuck off, and he picked up a wine bottle they had there and whacked her with it.”

  “How do you know they had wine bottles?”

  “Hell, everybody in town knows everything that happened at that meeting. They were drinking heavy.”

  “Not from what I’ve figured out,” Virgil said. “They had eight people there, and when Jeff Purdy went in Saturday night, there were two empty wine bottles on the kitchen counter, and one half full. Maybe fifteen glasses of wine split up between eight people over an hour and a half or two hours? They weren’t drinking much. I’ve asked them: nobody thinks anybody else was drunk.”

  “Did you ask that question specific about Harney?”

  Virgil hesitated, then said, “Okay. He might have had a little more than the others.”

  Cain leaned across the table. “See, that’s what happened. Harney’s got an unhappy home life. He’s already been caught fuckin’ around on his wife . . .”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Found it out last night. Kinda came out in . . . the conversation.”

  “The fight.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, he gets loaded at the party, comes back. She tells him to fuck off. He’s drunk and pissed and whacks her with a bottle.” His eyes narrowed as he thought about it. “Now, Virgil, you really think eight people only drank two and a half bottles of wine in two hours? In Trippton? You got a missing bottle there. Nobody would have walked away with one, you can’t steal from the hostess, somebody would have seen it. He whacks her with the bottle, takes it with him when he goes to throw the body in the river.”

  “Does Harney fish?”

  “Well . . . not that I know of. But I don’t know all the fishing people here,” Cain said.

  “Does he have an ice-fishing shack?”

  “Well, no, I don’t think so.”

  “Snowmobiles?” Virgil asked.

  “Uh, jeez . . .”

  —

  Virgil sent him back to the holding cell, asked Purdy whether Denwa Burke was worth interviewing, and Purdy said no. “He’s got no idea of what happened at that meeting. He’s a hell-raiser and a shovel operator for the port. When I say shovel operator, I mean the kind with a wooden handle.”

  Virgil called Harney’s office to find out if he was in and was told that he was ill and was at home. Virgil called, Harney answered, and Virgil told him they needed to talk.

  “Yeah, I figured you’d be calling. Listen, could you stop and pick up a couple of large lattes at The Roasting Pig? We’ve been up all night and we’re starving here . . .”

  Virgil stopped at The Roasting Pig for the lattes, walked down the block to Dunkin’ Donuts and got a half dozen donuts—two chocolate-frosteds, two glazed sticks, two original sticks, in a bag, and a jelly to eat on the way over to the Harneys. The counter clerk offered him the donuts free again, but Virgil paid. A couple of donuts was okay; seven was a bribe.

  —

  When Harney popped the front door open, he looked as though he’d spent the night in hell. His hair stuck out in all directions, he had a large blue bruise in the middle of his forehead, and he looked like he’d gotten exactly no sleep. He told Virgil to come in, took the two large cups of coffee and handed one to his wife, who’d come up behind him, and they all went into the large kitchen to sit at the dining bar.

  Harney said, “I guess Corbel told you that I had a thing with Gina years ago.”

 
“He didn’t say when it was,” Virgil said. He glanced at Karen Harney, who looked fairly relaxed; he wondered about the possibility of a Xanax or two.

  “Five years ago,” Harney said.

  “While I was pregnant with our second child, you asshole,” Karen Harney said.

  Virgil to Ryan Harney: “You let me think you hardly knew her . . .”

  “I really messed up the middle part of my life when I fell in bed with her,” Harney said.

  “You betcha,” Karen Harney said.

  Harney continued. “But I broke down and told Karen, and we put things back together, after a rough time, and I . . . well, I thought the fact that we’d had an affair, so long ago, wasn’t really relevant. Then that fuckin’ Corbel showed up last night.”

  Virgil told him Cain’s theory that Harney got drunk—and Karen Harney interrupted to say, “He does drink too much”—and got violent after being turned down for sex. “He’d never get violent,” Karen Harney said.

  Harney said, “We’ve been up all night here. This whole thing . . . we’re going to change our lives. We’re not happy here. I’m going to start looking around for a job in the Cities, or in Rochester. Maybe even Denver. Maybe an emergency room gig: get some regular hours, for a change, spend more time with Karen and the kids.”

  “I do love him,” Karen said. “But Trippton’s never been right for us. We need a bigger place.”

  —

  They talked some more, and the Harneys ate four of the pastries and Virgil ate one (chocolate-glazed), and the two Harneys so casually dismissed Cain’s theory as crazy that Virgil decided he wouldn’t get anywhere with them without more facts to back him up.

  As he was putting on his coat to leave, Harney said, “Virgil, you know, I didn’t want to say anything about this because it’s so minor . . .”

  “Nothing’s minor in a murder,” Virgil said.

  “When we were leaving, I was out at my car, and Justin and Margot walked down her porch steps, and Gina was up there alone with Lucy Cheever, and there was something really . . . tense . . . about their body relationships. They looked like they were arguing. But this was only a glance as I drove by. It’s probably nothing.”