Deep Freeze

by John Sandford

  “Be where?”

  “On the raid,” Jenkins said. “You know, these Barbie-Os. That’s your case, right?”

  “Not really. I’m not going on any raid that I know of,” Virgil said. “What the hell is going on?”

  Virgil heard Jenkins and Shrake talking in their truck but couldn’t make out what they were saying, then Shrake came up and said, “Virgil, we got a search warrant from the attorney general’s office to search a farm down there in Buchanan County. Specifically, the barn. There’s a PI down there who’s hooked into the governor’s office . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, Margaret Griffin. I talked to her last night and she was at a dead end. How did this get going?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but she got a phone number for the ringleader of the Barbie-O people and got a GPS reading for this barn.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “Well, we got the call at nine o’clock this morning, so it was before that. We went over and picked up the search warrant from an assistant AG, got it signed, and hit the road. We’ll be there in an hour and a half or so, if my nav system is correct. We thought you knew all this.”

  “I didn’t know any of it,” Virgil said. “I probably won’t be on the raid—I’ve got these murders. Listen, guys, take it easy.”

  “Heard something about you getting beat up,” Shrake said.

  “Yeah, I did. The people who hurt me were a bunch of women who are making these dolls. These are people who are desperate for income. I don’t think they’d fight you, but take care. This could be more complicated than knocking on a door.”

  Shrake said, “Huh. We were led to believe it was a door knock.”

  “It probably will be. But be careful, for Christ’s sakes. Don’t hurt anyone. They’re mostly housewives.”

  “We’ll take care,” Jenkins said.

  “If you’re still down this evening, have dinner with me,” Virgil said.

  “See you then,” Shrake said. “Keep your ass down.”

  “You, too.”

  —

  Virgil sat in his truck, heater running full blast, getting madder and madder. He thought he knew what had happened: he’d told Margaret Griffin that he’d gotten a call from Jesse McGovern, and Griffin, as an experienced PI, had a hacker somewhere who could look at phone records.

  They’d gotten into Virgil’s and had spotted the incoming call from the night before. He’d known that could happen—in theory, at least—and every PI he’d ever met had ways of getting into supposedly confidential, law-enforcement-only online records. It was illegal, but so common as to be ordinary. He shouldn’t have mentioned McGovern’s call to Griffin. He’d screwed up.

  He had to think for a moment before he remembered where he’d seen a pay phone—there was one in Brown’s Bowling Alley—and he went that way, still thinking about what he was going to do. If he got caught, he could lose his job. But Griffin had betrayed him.

  The bowling alley was mostly deserted; only three alleys were in use, but there was a gathering at the bar. Virgil, coming in the door at the far side, stopped at the pay phone, thought about it some more, and dropped in a quarter.

  McGovern answered a moment later, and Virgil said, pitching his voice up and without identifying himself, “Your barn will be raided in the next couple hours. Somebody may be watching it right now. The phone you’re talking on is being tracked. Take the battery out. The main thing is, make sure nobody gets hurt.”

  He hung up. McGovern might have recognized his voice, but if asked, he’d deny it. Lie. He liked his job and wasn’t ready to go for full-time writing.

  What worried him most was the possibility that somebody would get hurt in the raid. The people making the dolls had shown a willingness to assault cops—there were still three of them on the loose—and if any of them had a gun . . .

  TWENTY-TWO David Birkmann was out on bug patrol, according to the woman who sat in his office, just off Main Street. The office was a simple Sheetrock cube with off-white walls on which were hung a whiteboard, with assignments and messages written on it, and three separate corkboards with all manner of paper litter pinned to them. The place smelled a little funny, Virgil thought, a combination of body odor and bug-killing chemicals.

  The woman’s name was Marge, and she said, “This is prime time for Dave, so he’ll be a little hard to catch. Rest of the year, it’s all about servicing the accounts, which our technicians take care of. January is when Dave signs up the accounts for another year, figures out fees and all of that, and he does most of it personally.”

  “Maybe you can help me,” Virgil said. “How many vans do you have?”

  “Maybe you should talk to Dave.” She gave him Birkmann’s phone number. When Virgil called, Birkmann said he was out of town, up on the bluffs. “I could be back in a half hour.”

  “I need the answer to a routine question—how many vans do you have?” Virgil asked.

  “Vans? Six. One for each technician. Can I ask why you’re asking?”

  Virgil ignored the question. “Do the technicians leave the vans at the office or do they take them home?”

  “They drive them home. They check in with their mileage every night before they get off; Marge reads it.”

  “Are they allowed to drive the trucks when they’re off duty?”

  “We discourage it,” Birkmann said. “But they do. No out-of-town trips, but, you know, they’ll stop at the Piggly Wiggly on the way home or run out to a store at night. It’s not really a problem. A small town, it’s only an extra mile on the truck . . . Does somebody think one of our vans was involved in the murders?”

  “We have a witness who says one was parked on the street near Gina Hemming’s house the night of the murder.”

  “That was me,” Birkmann said. “Right at the end of her driveway, off to the right? I was there from about seven o’clock to eight forty-five.”

  “Don’t think it was you, Dave. It might have been someone else, and later than that.”

  “Well . . . do you have a van number?” Birkmann asked. “A license plate? Do you know what the driver looked like?”

  “Not exactly. Are your guys licensed in any way? Do they carry IDs?”

  “Oh, sure. They all have a plastic ID card, with the business name on it and their photos,” Birkmann said.

  “Are there copies of the photos here in your office?” Virgil asked.

  “Yup. I’ll tell Marge to let you look at them, if you want,” Birkmann said.

  “That’d be great,” Virgil said.

  He was about to hang up, but Birkmann said, “Listen, all my guys are good guys. Are you sure it was one of our vans? And, if it was, I’ll bet it was mine. Is it possible that your witness got the time wrong? I mean, my truck was out there for almost two hours . . .”

  “I can’t answer that,” Virgil said. “I’m not putting you off—I really can’t answer the question.”

  —

  He gave Marge his phone, and Birkmann told her to show Virgil the file photos of his drivers. They rang off, and Marge called up a file on her computer, with pictures of all six. Two were blond. Virgil wrote down the names, with their addresses and phone numbers, and put check marks by the two blonds.

  —

  Virgil spent the next hour and a half worrying about the raid of the barn used by the doll makers and trying to track down Birkmann’s pest control technicians.

  The first one, Randall Cambden, wasn’t on the job, and Virgil eventually found him working part-time for a carpet company. “I’m only part-time with Dave in the winter, three days a week,” he said. They were in the back of the carpet salesroom. “I go back to full-time in April.”

  In the meantime, he spent two days a week pulling out worn carpeting and working as an assistant to an installer.

  On the Thursday night that Gina Hemming was
killed, he said, he’d been league bowling, which is why he could answer the question without thinking about it. “I bowl every Thursday. And also every Monday, but that’s a different league.”

  “At George Brown’s place?” Virgil asked. Brown was the guy who drank too much and tried to date twenty-year-olds.

  “Yeah, that’s the only place in town. George keeps the league records and scores,” Cambden said. “I talked to him a couple times that night, and he’ll have my score sheet. We start at eight, finish up around ten-thirty.”

  Virgil would confirm that with Brown but knew that Cambden was telling the truth. Cambden said that he was home with his wife when Moore was killed. Virgil asked him, “Do you guys carry guns in your trucks?”

  “No. Why would we?”

  “Well, you do animal control . . .”

  “We trap them with Havaharts. Squirrels, coons, skunks. If we have a problem with a dog or something, we call the cops. Dave Birkmann shot a deer once but said he wasn’t going to do that again. Too many liability problems. One bad ricochet, killing some guy on the street, and he gets sued and loses the company. If we need to get rid of a deer, we usually have the homeowner contact a bow-hunting club in town. They’ve got a couple guys who can take care of the problem.”

  “You wouldn’t carry .22s.”

  “Nope. I guess the old-timey guys did, but there are so many rules and regulations now . . . You can get busted for firing a gun inside the city limits, you know. So, no guns. Sorry.”

  The second blond, Bill Houston, was a fifty-five-year-old bachelor and had no specific alibi for nine o’clock on Thursday. “Thursday is church night for me. I never miss, but I’m there only from four to eight. We run a food bank from four to seven, then we have the service, and we get out around eight. After that, I walk back to my apartment and watch TV and go to bed.”

  “So you’re religious?”

  “Somewhat religious. The pastor runs a program for alcoholics, and they got me to stop drinking twelve years ago. I’m grateful for that: they gave me my life back. So, church every Sunday and Wednesday, plus the food bank and the short service on Thursdays.”

  Virgil thanked him and left, scratching his head. He’d check, but he was sure that neither Cambden nor Houston had killed Hemming.

  —

  After thinking it over for a moment, he took his phone out and called the number that Jesse McGovern had used to call him—and got nothing. She’d pulled the batteries on her phone. He called Jenkins and asked, “Where are you guys?”

  “We’re out west of Trippton, setting up to go into this farm. You want to join in?”

  “I’m thinking I might. When are you gonna hit it?”

  “We’re sitting here in our truck, talking to Margaret. We’re only about a half mile away . . . probably two or three minutes.”

  “Give me the location, I’ll meet you there. See what you get.”

  —

  The farm was seven miles west of Trippton, up beyond the river bluffs and back in the hills of the Driftless Area. The farmhouse was a shabby ranch style, with yellow siding overdue for paint. The barn behind it was as shabby as the house, but dirty white instead of yellow. The snow outside the barn’s main doors was covered with tire tracks, but none of the tracks went into the barn. A small access door to the right of the main doors appeared to have a lot of foot traffic.

  The farm’s fields were actually cut into the hillside behind the house; a small apple orchard stretched along the road.

  When Virgil arrived, Jenkins, Shrake, and Griffin were standing outside the barn, and a woman in a heavy sweater, arms crossed over her chest, was walking away from them. When she saw Virgil getting out of his truck, she stopped, glared at him, and went into the house; one of the women who beat him up, Virgil guessed. Virgil bumped gloved knuckles with Jenkins and Shrake, said hi to Griffin, and asked, “What’d you get?”

  “To use official law enforcement terminology, ‘jack shit,’” Shrake said.

  “There’s a big bare spot in the middle of the barn, and a dozen chairs, but not a single doll in sight.”

  Jenkins said, “We talked to Miz Homer there, but all she said was she wants a lawyer. End of story.”

  Griffin was fuming. “You can tell something was going on in the barn. All those chairs?”

  “There’s a propane heater in there, but the heater’s cold and the barn’s cold, so if that’s where they were working, they weren’t working for a while,” Jenkins said. “The farm lady said they had a barn dance, is why they have the chairs.”

  “She’s lying, it’s obvious,” Griffin said. “Who’s going to a barn dance here in the middle of winter? That’s crazy.”

  “Probably. What are you guys going to do?” Virgil asked. Relieved in a couple of ways: nobody got hurt, and he was going to get away with it.

  Jenkins shrugged. “We’re here overnight. It’s a bad trip down, the highways are a mess. We’re still good for dinner if you are.”

  “I am. I’ll get Johnson Johnson, and we’ll make a deal out of it,” Virgil said. To Griffin: “How the heck did you find this place anyway?”

  “Got a tip,” she lied. “I’ve been spreading some money around.”

  Virgil played along. “Get back to your source. I agree that this was probably one of their assembly sites, if this farm lady is already talking about a lawyer. If your guy knew about this one, maybe he’ll know about another. The boys will be here overnight, if you can find the next spot . . .”

  She nodded. “I’ll try. Christ, it’s cold. It’s like Siberia. Why the fuck would anybody live here?”

  “We like it, that’s why,” Jenkins said. “Every March, me’n Shrake fly into LAX and drive over to Palm Springs to play golf. No offense, but L.A. is a shithole. Minnesota isn’t.”

  —

  On that note, they broke up, with Griffin still fuming, Jenkins and Shrake unfulfilled—they liked nothing better than a screaming raid—and Virgil satisfied that he’d worked things through. On his way back to town, Jesse McGovern called. All he saw on his phone was “Unknown,” but he’d wondered if she might call.

  “We got raided this afternoon,” she said.

  “I was there,” Virgil said, putting a little gravel in his voice. Maybe she was checking his voice to see if he was the man who tipped her. “We know goddamn well that you were building dolls down there. Give it up, Jesse.”

  “You tracked me on my phone, didn’t you?”

  “I can’t reveal law enforcement techniques, you gotta know that,” Virgil said. “If you’d stop making those dolls, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “Tell that woman that we’re almost done.”

  “I told her last night,” Virgil said. “She used to be a cop, and she’s getting paid for being here. I don’t think she’s gonna quit until she hands you the paper. You know, you could stop doing the dolls now, knock on her door down at Ma and Pa’s, take the paper, and she’ll be out of here. She doesn’t like the winter. If you can show that you’ve ceased and desisted—take a vacation down to Florida—you’d be in the clear.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  “I got a question for you about that van your guy saw,” Virgil said. “Is it possible that whoever saw it saw it a little earlier than you say?”

  “No.”

  “That sounds pretty definite.”

  “She gets off work at nine o’clock, I won’t tell you where,” McGovern said. “She stopped at Piggly Wiggly to get a rotisserie chicken and some potato salad, which probably took ten minutes, and then saw the van when she was driving home. Probably between twenty after and nine-thirty.”

  “She got off at nine o’clock for sure?”

  “Where she works, they don’t go a minute past nine. Her replacement doesn’t start a minute before nine. That kind of place. She w
alked out no later than nine-oh-one, or however long it took her to put her coat on.”

  “I need to talk to her.”

  “I’ll tell her,” McGovern said and hung up.

  —

  Virgil drove into town, thinking it over. The woman had a job and got off at nine. She had a replacement, a swing-shift worker. That probably meant that the job was either a two-shift or a full twenty-four hours a day. The clinic? A possibility. What else was open those hours in Trippton?

  He called Johnson Johnson and got a list. The clinic, one convenience store, three restaurants, two liquor stores, the bowling alley. Bernie’s Books was open until eleven, but nobody would be working a two-hour shift. And Jimmy worked until it closed, Johnson thought . . . The sheriff’s office . . . The boot factory had once had two shifts but now was down to one, seven to three, and even that shift was light. . . . Other than that, nothing.

  The list was short enough that Virgil ran through it in a hurry. The clinic had regular hours: seven to three, three to eleven, and eleven to seven. The restaurants ran two shifts, as did the liquor stores. No shift at any of the places started or ended at nine o’clock.

  The convenience store . . .

  Virgil found the pear-shaped assistant manager there, and a plumber working on a compressor for a cooler, and the assistant manager, whose name was Jay, said, “Yeah, Bobbie gets off at nine. She works Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.”

  “What’s Bobbie’s last name?”

  “Cole. What’d she do?”

  “Nothing,” Virgil said. “Where can I find her?”

  “She’s standing behind the counter, wearing a red sweater.”

  —

  Virgil introduced himself to Bobbie Cole, a short, stocky woman with chromed hair who was rearranging the candy stacks in front of her cash register. A half-eaten PayDay bar sat on the counter. She said, “Didn’t take long to find me. How’d you do that?”

  Virgil ignored the question and asked, “How sure are you that you saw a GetOut! truck outside Gina Hemming’s house? After nine o’clock?”