Deep Freeze

by John Sandford

  Moore went to the stove, where the toddy had been steeping for five minutes. She poured the fiery liquid into tall mugs, sniffing the pleasant steam from the cloves, cinnamon, and the three ample shots of Jack Daniel’s.

  She put the cups next to the other two women and settled into a third chair. “Mix those babies up good. Remember last time, Belle kept getting those ‘Q’s.”

  “Hey . . .”

  Old friends, playing Scrabble, on a cold, snowy night in Trippton.

  —

  The impulse to kill almost seemed to have its own horsepower, like a runaway truck. The elimination of one person would cut through an immediate, otherwise unsolvable threat. Birkmann drove into town, the gun in his coat pocket, snow coming down like a favor from God, muffling sounds, obscuring trucks, with cars moving slowly in the night, all eyes on the slippery roads.

  —

  An odd coincidence, which Virgil would notice later.

  Belle Penney came through with the word “murder,” five letters hooked through the letter “u,” which Sandy Hart had left in the open with her down word, “chateau.” They’d had a brief argument about whether “chateau” would qualify because, basically, it was a foreign word, but an online check said that, yes, it was acceptable for English-language Scrabble.

  That settled, Penney tapped her finger on the word, hushed her voice by a few decibels, and asked Moore, “Have you heard any more about Gina?”

  Moore shook her head. “God, it’s been a nightmare. I’ve been questioned twice by Virgil Flowers, but he knows I didn’t have anything to do with it. He doesn’t have anything to go on, so he’s questioning everybody who went to the reunion meeting, and all of Gina’s friends, people at the bank—everybody. Really putting on the pressure.”

  “He’s supposed to be tricky,” Penney said. “You think he can be trusted?”

  “He’s about a hundred miles better than Jeff Purdy,” Moore said. “If Jeff was investigating, we’d have a mystery for the ages. Nobody would ever know who killed Gina.”

  “Might not be a bad thing,” Penney said, “depending on who did it and why.”

  “Had to be a sex thing,” Hart said.

  “Or a money thing,” Penney said.

  “Or a random attack,” Moore said. “That’s the problem—Flowers can’t even figure out the motive.”

  “Believe me, it was sex,” Hart said.

  Penney: “I think people get more angry and violent about money, especially here in Trippton. Hard times.” She turned to Moore. “Who’d he talk to about money stuff? Other than you?”

  Moore filled them in on Virgil’s investigation, without mentioning whips or handcuffs. Or Fred Fitzgerald.

  —

  Moore had been buried in a client’s investment wish list all afternoon and hadn’t heard the rumors about Corbel Cain, Denwa Burke, and the fight at the Harneys’ house, but Hart worked at the courthouse and had pieces of the story.

  “Do you think Corbel could be right?” Penney asked after Hart laid it out. “Ryan Harney . . . that seems too unlikely.”

  “Corbel supposedly told Flowers that Ryan had an affair with Gina,” Hart said. Hart and Penney both looked at Moore. “You think that’s true?”

  Moore said, “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  Hart said, “Margot . . . it’s us.”

  Moore said, “You can’t tell anyone.”

  “Of course not,” Penney said.

  “They had a relationship, but it was years ago,” Moore said. “Completely over with. Gina says that Ryan told Karen about it and she forgave him.”

  “I don’t see that happening,” Hart said.

  —

  Penney said, “From what I’ve heard, Flowers thinks that one of the people at your meeting must have done it. Who do you think?”

  Moore was shaking her head. “No one. It must have been an outsider. I mean, maybe somebody here in town, but nobody from that meeting. Something else is going on that we don’t know about.”

  “That makes it even more scary. A killer on the loose, with no known motive,” Penney said. “What if he’s a nut? He could come after anybody.”

  Hart said, “Single women, living alone.”

  Moore: “I’ve got a gun under my bed.”

  Penney said, “Mine’s in the side table. A nine-millimeter. Kelly Brenner showed me how to shoot it and load it and all. It kinda scares me, knowing it’s there. It’s like looking from a high bridge and thinking you might jump.”

  Hart said, “Maybe I should get one. I’ve never shot one. Is it easy to learn?”

  “Point and shoot,” Moore said. “An idiot can use one. Look at the news . . . anytime.”

  —

  Birkmann had parked his truck on a side street two blocks away and had walked through the snowstorm with his head down, an anonymous nylon-wrapped blob trudging up the sidewalk in the dark.

  Birkmann had been in Moore’s house a few times on extermination missions—she’d once had a major plague of Asian ladybugs—so he knew the layout. Moore was in her kitchen, the only brightly lit room in the house. As he approached, he thought, Is this really necessary? It was only possible, perhaps not even probable, that Moore would tell Flowers what she knew.

  Then a new thought: thrown in the river? How had Hemming gotten in the river? Had he been thrown into some weird mental state by the killing? Had the trauma wiped his memory? Such things were possible.

  That whole line of thought took another two or three minutes, but he finally shook it off and refocused on the house.

  Still no light, except from the kitchen windows. No real sign of life, either. Maybe she wasn’t home, maybe she’d had left the light on as a security measure or because she didn’t like to get home in the dark?

  A shadow moved across the kitchen curtains . . .

  A sigh, the gun in hand, a fumbling check of the mechanism. A round in the chamber, a bright spot of golden brass in the steel mechanism of the gun. Birkmann walked up the front steps, reached toward the doorbell . . . paused, fled down the steps, stepped behind an evergreen, obscured in the night and the falling snow.

  He stood there for a full three minutes, not really thinking, simply frozen. Another sigh, and he climbed back up the steps.

  This time, he rang the doorbell.

  A moment later, Moore walked through the front room to the door. Gun up, face down, until the last minute. Moore opened the door, a question on her face—her last question—then recognition, and the gun right there, three quick shots.

  Moore toppled backward, landed on the front room rug with a muffled thud.

  Was she dead? She had to be.

  Penney and Hart didn’t immediately react to the gunshots. Penney had gotten up to pour more hot toddy for the three of them, and Moore’s body dropping to the floor sounded like somebody had dropped a package or a sack.

  Only after a minute or two, when they didn’t hear Moore speaking, did Penney call out, “Margot? Margot? Everything okay?”

  Hart walked over to the door that led down a short hall to the front living room and felt the draft of cold air from the open front door. “Margot?”

  She didn’t see the body immediately because it was in the dark space below the storm door and a streetlight was shining in through the glass in the door. She stepped farther into the hallway and saw the lump on the floor, like a rolled-up rug . . .

  “Margot? Margot?”

  —

  After the shooting, Birkmann ran for a half block, seeing nobody in the storm. He slowed, found himself panting. She had to be dead, because she recognized him, he thought, in the split second before he pulled the trigger, and if she wasn’t dead, then he was. So she had to be dead. He hurried down the second block, got in his truck, and, as he was about to pull the door shut, heard the first of the sire
ns.

  What? Had he missed her? No, he hadn’t; he’d actually seen the bullets impact her forehead and her legs failing as she slumped toward the floor. Another witness? My God, they might be right behind him.

  Birkmann, near panic, rolled up the hill and around the corner and headed for home.

  —

  The cops didn’t come for him, so Moore must have been dead. Although, he supposed, she could simply be so injured that she couldn’t speak . . . at least, not yet. The Dunkin’ Donuts opened at seven o’clock, to catch the going-to-work crowd, and he’d be there right at seven, to see what the latest news was.

  In bed that night, Birkmann remembered what Virgil had suggested about talking with God. He tried it. He tried confession, as he’d heard the Catholics did it. He contemplated the meaning of the two deaths: in the world, in the town. He never got an answer to anything. It didn’t make him feel better. There was no peace to be had.

  When he closed his eyes, he didn’t see anything but the little orange things he always saw when he closed his eyes.

  Talking to God. Might work for Flowers, but for the Bug Boy it was just more nerve-jangling horseshit. Better to sit up and watch the late show.

  EIGHTEEN Virgil had spent the late afternoon processing Carolyn Weaver through the Trippton Clinic and filling out arrest forms when, he thought, he should have been raking the Cheevers over the coals.

  The doc said Weaver’s injury was only superficially like Virgil’s. Weaver’s injury was much worse. She would need surgery to realign the nasal bones at the top of her nose, which had been broken, and to reestablish the contour of the nasal cartilage at the tip. To get that done, she would have to be shipped up to Mayo in Rochester.

  When the doc had finished evaluating her, he put her to bed, and a sheriff’s deputy put a cuff around one of her ankles and locked it to the bed to keep her from running off. The doc took a look at Virgil’s face, said that he was doing fine, and that the squid could be removed . . . “But don’t hit anything else with your nose.”

  Virgil promised to not do that, and the squid came off. He checked himself in a mirror and said, “I’ve lost my luster.”

  “If you had any in the first place, it’ll come back,” the doc said. “You can talk to the admission clerk about insurance.”

  While he was doing that, Griffin sidled up to Weaver’s bed, dropped a sheath of papers on her stomach, and said, “You’ve been served.”

  On the way out, Virgil asked if serving Weaver would be good enough. Griffin said, “I’m talking to our lawyer about that, but I think I’m still gonna have to find that goddamn McGovern. I’m going back with a deputy to Weaver’s place, and we’ll seize those dolls and the parts. I’d like to get that done tonight, if I can.”

  “Stay in touch,” Virgil said.

  —

  As Virgil was driving over to the Cheevers’ Chevrolet dealership, Johnson Johnson called to find out what had happened in CarryTown.

  “I know Carolyn,” Johnson said after Virgil filled him in. “Her old man ran off to Canada a couple years back. She’s a tough old bird, and she needs the money, so I’m not surprised she was working with Jesse.”

  He asked if there was anything new about the murder, and Virgil said there wasn’t, but he was planning to talk to a couple more people who’d been at Hemming’s party. “I’ve got to tell you, Johnson, I don’t expect much. I still think Fred Fitzgerald had something to do with the murder, but I’ve got nothing to pin him with.”

  “Do what you can until seven o’clock,” Johnson said. “Clarice is making Norwegian lasagna.”

  —

  Virgil went over to the Chevrolet dealership to talk to Lucy Cheever about the loan problem she’d had with Gina Hemming, but a salesman said that she and her husband had gone to La Crosse to do some shopping and catch a movie and wouldn’t be home until late.

  Virgil still had a name on his interview list, a divorced guy named George Brown, who owned and operated the town bowling alley, with a summer-only beach volleyball court in back.

  Virgil talked to him in his office at the bowling alley, and Brown, a lazy-looking blond guy with a chunk, claimed to have been behind the bowling alley bar after the meeting at Hemming’s house. He’d been there until closing, at one o’clock. He did have a snowmobile but said he didn’t ice fish and didn’t have an ice auger.

  Virgil pushed Brown about a possible relationship with Hemming, but Brown said, “She was far too good for me back in high school, and she was still too good for me. I run a bowling alley, Virgil, where I allow people to illegally smoke cigars, and I’ve got a minor but persistent drinking problem. In the winter, I sit in the back and drink beer, and, in the summer, I watch twenty-one-year-old girls in bikinis playing volleyball. Sometimes I hit on them. Sometimes they say yes.”

  “You never dated Gina? Never asked?”

  “Never asked. If I had, she’d have told me to get lost,” Brown said. “She was also too old for me. My date line is moving up, but, right now, it’s twenty-one.”

  “Really?” Virgil said. “Mine’s thirty, and I’m six years younger than you are. I mean, if I were out dating.”

  “You lack ambition, Virgil, you really do. If I was your age, my date line would be seventeen,” Brown said.

  “Couldn’t do that,” Virgil said. “She’d be listening to bands like Scouting for Girls.” He shivered.

  “There is that,” Brown admitted. “The last chick I dated didn’t know who the Eagles were. But Gina Hemming? No. Nope. No way. The chemicals were all wrong. You ought to check out David Birkmann. He was there that night and he’s been in love with Gina since forever.”

  “Really? David Birkmann? I interviewed him, and he seemed all shook up by her death. You think he’d hurt her?” Virgil asked.

  “Oh, jeez, I don’t want you to think that,” Brown said. “I mean, I spoke out of turn right there. Bug Boy’s always been in love with her, but he’s always been, well, Bug Boy. He had less chance with her than I did and he knew it.”

  “Still . . .”

  “If he’d gotten physical with her, she’d have stuck her hand down his throat, grabbed his nuts, and pulled them out his face. David was not an athlete. He was the class clown, for Christ’s sakes.”

  “Class clown . . . There could have been a lot of resentment built up there,” Virgil suggested.

  “You’ve been watching too many chick flicks, man,” Brown said. And, “Listen, I heard that Corbel Cain got in some kind of fight at Ryan Harney’s place last night, and it was about Gina. Is that right?”

  “Right enough, I guess,” Virgil said.

  “I kicked Corbel out of here last night, cut him off. Didn’t see the Harney thing coming, though.”

  “Probably wasn’t drunk enough at that stage,” Virgil said. “Corbel says they took a bottle of vodka with them, out on the river, and that’s where they decided to go interrogate Harney.”

  “I heard Harney kicked his ass.”

  “Mostly Mrs. Harney, but, yeah, Corbel and his pal didn’t do well. That Denwa guy lost about five teeth.”

  “Denwa is a piece of work. Somebody ought to get a court order to keep those two apart,” Brown said. He glanced at his watch. “Say, it’s after six. You wanna get a drink somewhere? Like here?”

  He wasn’t a nope, but he gave Virgil so many names of patrons who’d seen him behind the bar on Thursday that he thought Brown probably hadn’t done it.

  —

  Virgil left the bowling alley and drove up to Johnson Johnson’s place in the woods, a sprawling, self-designed ranch-style house. Johnson explained that when he designed it, he’d forgotten a few things, which had to be added, and then when he hooked up with Clarice she’d wanted a few more things—like a big bathroom off the bedroom. The result looked like a collection of children’s blocks laid out on rug, but giant-sized.


  There was a barn out back for Clarice’s horses, which she trained and endurance-raced, and an addition to the barn, which housed Johnson’s collection of vehicles.

  When Virgil arrived, Clarice was ready to shove the lasagna in the oven.

  They ate and drank a bottle of red wine—Johnson was only allowed his single glass—and talked about the Hemming murder and the hunt for Jesse McGovern, about movies and possible summer fishing trips, and the past deer season and the possibility that whitetails from Wisconsin would cross the frozen Mississippi and spread chronic wasting disease into Minnesota, and how Clarice wanted to go to Palm Springs, California, at the end of the month, and possible alternatives to that, and about flying the Beaver back from Seattle.

  They were having such a good time that when Virgil’s phone rang and he saw that it was Jeff Purdy calling, he hated to answer. He did anyway.

  “Jeff, goddamnit . . .”

  “I’m sorry, Virgil, but something awful has happened,” Purdy said. “Somebody shot and killed Margot Moore.”

  “What!”

  “Yup. Right in her front room, while two of her friends were sitting in the kitchen at the Scrabble board. I think you better get down here.”

  “I’m on my way,” Virgil said. “I’ll be ten minutes. Gimme the address.” He wrote the address on a notepad that Johnson handed him. “Listen, Jeff. Keep your crime scene guy out of there.”

  Clarice, her eyes wide knowing the news would be bad, asked as soon as he’d hung up, “What happened?”

  Virgil told them, and Johnson said, “Shit!” and Clarice said, “Oh, God . . .”

  “Why would somebody kill her?” Johnson asked. “You already talked to her, right? You said she didn’t know anything.”

  Clarice said, as Virgil was pulling on his parka, “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with Gina.”

  “Pig’s eye,” Johnson said.

  “Maybe she knew something but didn’t know she knew it,” Virgil said. “Or maybe she found something out.”