Deep Freeze

by John Sandford

  Moore nodded, and they talked about the possibility that Hemming’s death was an accident. There’d been rumors she’d fallen down the stairs.

  Even as they talked, Birkmann’s heart felt as though somebody had gripped it in his fist and squeezed. Moore remembered that he hadn’t been gone at nine o’clock, that he’d been the last to leave. Sooner or later, Flowers would hear about that.

  He hadn’t wanted to kill Moore—he liked her—but it was a matter of survival. He hadn’t deserved what had happened to him with Gina Hemming, it had been an accident, but there was no possibility of walking away from it. At least with the .22, it had been quick.

  Three shots and he was off . . . panicked, hiding out at home, the .22 wrapped in rags and stuffed behind some rafters in the basement. He heard the next day, at the donut shop, that there had been two women in the kitchen when he killed Moore at the front door. That was a shock, but . . . nothing happened.

  Nothing. Had. Happened.

  Then Flowers had come asking about a blond man sitting in a GetOut! truck after nine o’clock at Hemming’s house. Birkmann wasn’t blond, and he had no idea why Flowers was looking for a blond, but, sooner or later, he’d be back to Birkmann.

  But Birkmann would be gone . . .

  Wouldn’t he?

  THIRTY Pweters showed up exactly at five o’clock and found Virgil fitting new batteries into his twin voice recorders. Fred Fitzgerald’s statement about moving Hemming’s body had been transferred to the prosecutor’s files, and had also been transcribed to paper.

  “What’re we up to?” Pweters asked. His face was red with the cold. He brushed snow off his shoulders and added, “Starting to snow again. Wish it would quit for a while.”

  “We live in Minnesota,” Virgil said. “We’re gonna go see David Birkmann and see if we can bullshit him into a confession.”

  “Birkmann?”

  “Yeah. He lies well, but I worked my way through it,” Virgil said. “I’m ninety-seven percent that he killed Hemming and Margot Moore. I don’t know exactly why he killed Moore, but I suspect it was to cover up something.”

  “Well, shoot. Didn’t actually see this coming,” Pweters said. “You want to tell me about it?”

  Virgil told him and Pweters said, “A hat? I mean . . .”

  “Not only the hat. It’s the silenced .22. It’s the fact that he was in love with Hemming forever—according to George Brown anyway—and she . . . disdained him . . . and that can lead to violence. When Corbel Cain accused him of killing Hemming, what’d Birkmann do? He grabbed a microphone stand and broke Corbel’s arm with it. If he’d hit him on the head, Corbel would be dead. So we know Birkmann’s capable of violence . . . And, like I said, he’s been lying about the whole time line.”

  Pweters walked in a slow circle around the cabin’s living room, then said, “If we just go up there and bust him, what are the chances he’d be convicted? On what you know now?”

  “That’s the weird thing—if he’s put on trial here, I wouldn’t be surprised if he walked. If we put him on trial up in the Cities, where nobody knows him, I think we’d probably get him.”

  Pweters nodded at that. “You’re right. Everybody here knows him, and they’d go in thinking that good ol’ Dave Birkmann would never kill anyone . . . He’d walk.”

  “So we keep the recorders out of sight—I’ve got some lapel mikes that we can clip to the bottom of our coats—and we get him talking. Maybe scare him a little by reading his rights to him.”

  “If he asks for an attorney?”

  “He won’t,” Virgil said. “He’s shocked and freaked out by what he’s done. He’s gonna talk about it some. If he talks about it even a little, we’ll have him.”

  —

  Birkmann had a beer, and he had another, and he twisted the top off a third. He’d loaded the new pistol with the .357 shells, but he’d left it on the kitchen counter, glittering away, catching the eye, like a rattlesnake among the cups and plates. He wasn’t drinking as a way to work up to shooting himself; he was thinking it over.

  He’d seen gun suicides in movies, and, a couple of times, the man about to die wrapped a towel around his head to minimize the mess. The movies made it look like the civilized thing to do, but really? He kept visualizing the two scenarios: one without the towel, his brains splattering all over the wall, and one with it, with his face wrapped like a mummy, the sudden blotch of blood on the outside of the towel . . . and the masked face, the mummy, found by the cops.

  Should he leave a note? A confession? Should he say something about the way Hemming had treated him?

  And he wondered what would happen when he pulled the trigger. He wouldn’t wake up in heaven, he thought, he wouldn’t give himself that. It would be, he thought, like somebody turned off the TV. He’d go wherever a TV picture went. Shouldn’t hurt . . . should it?

  But what if he sorta missed? What if he blew out half his brain and spent the rest of his life as a vegetable, deep in pain and no way to tell anyone? That’s when he put in the .357s.

  He sighed. No point in moving too soon, he thought. If he was going to kill himself, he had plenty of time. All the time in the world.

  He was tap dancing, he knew, the same way he’d tried to tap-dance around the fact that he’d killed Hemming and later had murdered Margot Moore. Maybe something would happen that would help him out . . .

  —

  Virgil and Pweters walked out to their trucks. They’d drive up separately, they decided, and if Birkmann wasn’t home, they’d hit the downtown bars until they found him.

  Virgil led the way up the bluffs and, from half a mile out, saw lights in Birkmann’s house. Pweters would see them, too. Virgil rolled up into the parking area, Pweters a hundred yards behind him. As Virgil got out of the truck, he saw a curtain moving in what he knew was Birkmann’s kitchen.

  “Looks like he’s home,” Pweters said a minute later, stepping across the new half inch of snow.

  “The curtains moved, I think he’s seen us,” Virgil said. “Let’s knock. Is your recorder turned on?”

  “Yeah, I’m all set,” he said, and “Sweet Jesus sitting on the curb eating a peanut butter sandwich, I’ve never walked up to something like this.”

  —

  They knocked, and a moment later Birkmann swung the door open, looming in the doorway. He was in stocking feet, jeans, a plaid shirt, a heavy wool cardigan. He frowned and asked, “What’s up? Virgil? Luke?”

  “We need to talk,” Virgil said. “We need to come in.”

  “Well . . . okay. Have you figured it out?”

  “I think we have,” Virgil said. “We need your help with it.”

  —

  Birkmann didn’t react. He said, “Come in, then. Snowing again, huh? Like the night Gina died.”

  He led the way up the short flight of stairs to the kitchen and around the corner to the living room. He’d been drinking, Virgil thought: he could smell the beer. There were three chairs in the living room, two facing the television, more or less, the same two they’d sat in when Virgil first interviewed Birkmann. Birkmann pulled around a third chair, across from the other two so they could all face one another, and sank into it.

  “Who did it?” he asked.

  Virgil said, “Well, Dave . . . you did.”

  —

  Again, no immediate reaction. The silence stretched taut, and finally Birkmann asked, “How do you figure?”

  “Before I tell you all that, I need to tell you exactly what your rights are here . . .” Virgil said.

  Virgil recited the standard Miranda warning, hesitating long enough for Birkmann to reply but no longer than he had to, and continued with, “We have the evidence, Dave. What we haven’t been able to figure out is why you killed Gina. And, for God’s sakes, why did you kill Margot Moore? What’d she ever do to you?”

 
; “Why do you think it’s me?” Birkmann asked.

  “Because you have yellow hats.”

  “What?”

  “Because Bobbie Cole got off at the Harvest Store at nine o’clock exactly, stopped at Piggly Wiggly, and saw your van parked outside Gina Hemming’s house on her way home after she left the Piggly Wiggly—and that was way after nine o’clock. She said the man inside was a blond, but I cleared both of your blond guys. Then I saw somebody put a blond cap on his head . . . and I remembered sitting down in the steak house and you were wearing a yellow hat that night . . . a blond hat.”

  “That’s it? A hat?”

  “No, we’ve got a lot of other stuff now,” Virgil said. “Once we knew it was you, we began looking at your alibi more closely. We have a videotape of your first karaoke song, and you didn’t go on almost until ten o’clock that night. You’d told me it was more like nine o’clock. We found a guy who took a leak at the same time as you, back in the men’s can, and he didn’t leave work until nine o’clock, and he had time to walk down to the bar and have a beer before you arrived. And we know about the silenced .22. I suspect it was probably your father’s.”

  Birkmann said nothing for a while, finally nodding and saying, “Yeah, it was Dad’s. I’d forgotten all about it until I thought I needed it. It just jumped out of the closet and bit me on the ass. Like it wanted to be used.”

  “Why?” Virgil asked. “You know, you might have beaten the Hemming murder, but you can’t beat Margot Moore’s. That was a completely cold-blooded murder. Why did you have to do that?”

  Birkmann shook his head and said, “I didn’t think I could beat Gina’s death. Even though it was more like an accident than anything else . . . She’d come after me with her fingernails and I was trying to fight her off . . . And Margot saw me there too late for my alibi. She mentioned it to me and I knew eventually it’d get back to you. I was still hoping to get clear of everything.”

  “Tell us about Gina Hemming,” Pweters said. “We were told that you loved her . . .”

  “The only woman I ever truly loved,” Birkmann said sadly. “I’ll tell you something else. I loved her and I thought I loved my ex-wife, at first anyway, but none of them ever loved me. I was Bug Boy. Who’s gonna love Bug Boy?”

  He went on, told them about the killing of Hemming, about the murder of Moore, and, when he was done, began to weep.

  Virgil said, “Dave, I gotta arrest you.”

  Birkmann held up his left hand and said, “Sit down, Virgil. Please.”

  Halfway through his confession, Birkmann had put his hand into his cardigan’s pocket, pulled out a wad of tissue paper, and used it to soak up the tears that had been running down his face. He put his hand back in the pocket and pushed himself out of the chair. When he pulled his hand out of the pocket a second time, it held a chrome revolver. He said, “I think there’s some possibility that I’ll be able to shoot my way out of this.”

  That was no .22 in his hand, Virgil thought. That was a much bigger gun.

  Pweters said, “Dave, don’t even think about it. Not unless you want to die right now.” Virgil risked a quick glance at Pweters. Pweters’s parka was open and his hand was near his holstered pistol, but really not close enough, and he was still sunk in the easy chair, an awkward position from which to draw a gun.

  “I actually bought this gun to kill myself,” Birkmann said, wiggling his gun hand. “Whether I do it or you do it, what does it matter to me?”

  “Because it would be more pointless killing,” Virgil said. “We didn’t come rolling up here without telling anyone. We told Jeff Purdy what we were doing and asked him to get us a search warrant for the .22. Speaking of which, and before you decide to shoot us . . . what did you hit Gina with?”

  “I took over a bottle of champagne,” Birkmann said, looking over at Virgil. “She even laughed at the champagne. I thought it was good stuff, but . . . I guess it wasn’t. She made fun of it and she started screaming at me—what an asshole I was, what a loser—and when she slashed at me with her fingernails, I . . . swung. I didn’t want to hurt her . . .”

  His gun hand moved. He said, “Virgil, I’m sorry it’s come to this.”

  “David, don’t bring that gun up,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a pistol in my jacket pocket and my hand is on it, and if you start to bring that gun up, I’m going to shoot you in the guts.”

  Birkmann looked a little sadder as Virgil said it. “You know what, Virgil? One thing everybody in town knows is, you don’t carry your gun. You keep it locked up in your truck. Everybody knows that.”

  “But not now,” Virgil said. “I’ll shoot you in the guts, David.”

  Birkmann hesitated but then jerked the revolver up, and Pweters went for his gun.

  Before either one could pull a trigger, Virgil shot Birkmann in the guts.

  —

  The blast from the gun was barely muffled by the nylon fabric on Virgil’s parka and, inside the small living room, sounded like a grenade. A split second later, there was a second earsplitting BOOM! and Birkmann took two stumbling steps backward, tripped over the arm of his chair, and fell on his back. The revolver fell from his hand, and he groaned once, and when Virgil got there and kicked the revolver away, Birkmann looked up at him with surprised eyes but said nothing at all.

  Pweters said, “I shot my gun.”

  Virgil: “What?”

  Pweters was there with his gun in his hand. He looked at Birkmann and put his pistol back in its holster and five seconds later was talking to a woman at the 911 center, getting an ambulance and more cops up to Birkmann’s house.

  The ambulance was there in eight minutes, the first sheriff’s car in nine. In the intervening time, Virgil sat on a hassock next to Birkmann and said, “Dave, close your eyes and don’t talk. You’re going to be bleeding bad and you need to save everything you’ve got.”

  Birkmann’s head twitched once in acknowledgment.

  Pweters said, “I shot my gun. I shot it right through the side of the house. I’m lucky I didn’t shoot myself in the freakin’ leg.”

  —

  Birkmann was on his way to the clinic in fifteen minutes, and one of the EMTs told Virgil that he’d be flown by helicopter to the Mayo at Rochester; the local docs would simply plug the hole as best they could and get him on his way.

  Virgil called Jon Duncan at home and told him about the shooting, asked him to get a crime scene crew to the house. “How solid are we?” Duncan asked.

  “We read him his rights and recorded his confession,” Virgil said. “It was afterwards that we got into all the excitement.”

  “I’m sending everything, man. Right now. They’ll be there by midnight. Uh . . . what about the Barbie-Os?”

  “Jon, I want you to take this in the gentlest, most caring way,” Virgil said. “Go fuck yourself.”

  —

  Virgil and Pweters kept the deputies out of the scene of the shooting, but Virgil took a quick look around the kitchen and spotted an oversized bottle of champagne sitting on a countertop. The paper label on one side was damaged, and there was a hair stuck to it.

  He pointed it out to Pweters, who said, “Let’s hope to hell it stays stuck until your crime scene gets here.”

  It did.

  —

  When Birkmann was gone, and the shooting scene safely blocked off, Pweters started running his mouth while pacing around Birkmann’s kitchen. He didn’t stop talking even when he looked in Birkmann’s refrigerator and took out a carrot, which he munched on as he talked. He’d never seen a shooting take place, he said, although he’d seen a couple of aftermaths. “I mean like, holy shit, here I was sitting in the chair, and he had that fuckin’ cannon in his hand . . . You see that? It’s a freakin’ .357. It would’ve made a hole in you that you could push an orange through . . . I was trying to stretch my leg out so I’d have a
chance at getting my pistol loose after he shot you . . .”

  “He didn’t think I had a gun—he would have shot you first,” Virgil said.

  “Whoa! I didn’t think of that. Man, I was like this far away from going for it.” He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “And then when you shot him, and I thought he’d fired—I was still alive, and nothing hurt—but I didn’t know what the heck had happened and I yanked my gun and damn near shot myself in the leg getting it out. I got my finger in there on the trigger and I was in this huge hurry and I yanked . . . Man, I’m lucky I didn’t kill somebody . . .”

  Virgil let him talk.

  After a while, Pweters ran down and said finally, “I thought you never carried your gun. Like Dave said, everybody knows it.”

  “Not never,” Virgil said. “I knew he had a gun that he’d used to kill Margot Moore. I’d seen him try to hit Corbel with that microphone stand. So I put the gun in my pocket.”

  “Shot him in the guts,” Pweters marveled. “Old Bug Boy won’t be easy on the toilet for a few months. He’s lucky he wasn’t totally . . . exterminated. Know what I’m sayin’?”

  THIRTY-ONE A cop-involved shooting was always messy.

  The Buchanan County sheriff’s deputy who was serving as the temporary crime scene investigator got them to reenact the shooting, filmed it, took a thousand more still photographs, put crime scene tape on everything that didn’t move, and froze the scene until the BCA crime scene crew could get back to Trippton.

  Virgil turned his pistol over to Jeff Purdy, who didn’t want it but would hold it for the BCA shooting team that would be down the next morning. The team would take statements from everybody and collect Virgil’s pistol and the two recorders. The crime scene crew would be right behind them. Birkmann’s pistol lay on the floor where it had fallen and wouldn’t be moved until the BCA crime scene crew picked it up and bagged it.

  Birkmann was given preliminary treatment at the Trippton Clinic, along with a couple of units of blood, and was flown to Rochester. The Mayo surgeons did the best they could to put his guts and hip back together, although he lost a couple turns in his small intestine. His spine had not been involved, as the rapidly expanding bullet narrowly missed the sciatic nerve and knocked a quarter-sized chunk out of his ilium and a big piece of meat out of his butt.