SIXTEEN Before Virgil had a chance to talk to the other town lowlifes, Bea Sawyer called and said she was coming down the hill into town. Halfway to Trippton, she said, she’d stopped at a café to get coffee and had run into the dive team and their truck.
“Clay said they’d be here by noon; they’re moving slower than I was.”
“Do you have the address for Hemming’s house?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah, we do, and I’ve spotted it on my iPad.”
“I’ll see you there,” Virgil said.
—
Sawyer hadn’t yet gotten to Hemming’s house when Virgil arrived. He peeled the crime scene tape off the back door, went inside, and walked around, looking for anything he might have missed. There wasn’t anything in particular, except awkward traces of the dead woman. It wasn’t the first time he’d been struck by the unexpected interruption of murder: you leave the wine bottles by the sink, thinking you’ll put them in the recycling in the morning, and a week later here they still are because you’re dead. Here’s the silence of the house, with a couple of socks on the bathroom countertop, maybe to wear to bed, and there they still are.
But Hemming’s shade was going away: the most resonant aspect of a woman’s sudden death was often her perfume. Perfume was so personal, and so enduring, that it often lingered like a ghost at a murder scene. Then, after a while, it began to fade, like memories of the murdered person.
Virgil was walking back downstairs when he heard Beatrice Sawyer’s truck pull into the driveway. He walked out the back door to meet the crime scene crew.
—
Sawyer was wrapped in a heavy blue North Face parka. A cheerful, middle-aged woman, she’d worked with Virgil on several cases, and didn’t miss much. Her regular partner, Don Baldwin, looked like the farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting, tall, thin, with watery blue eyes. His major non–Grant Wood aspect was his signature pair of black plastic fashion glasses, bought for the vibe they gave him in the punk revival band he led on his nights off.
Virgil had seen Bill Jensen around the BCA technical area but didn’t know him well. A short, thin man with a goatee, he carried a leather portfolio with him, and he said that unless Hemming had done something unusual with her computer, he should be able to get by her password.
“Main thing we want to look at is emails,” Virgil told him.
“I’ll call you when I get them,” Jensen said.
—
How much have you messed up my crime scene?” Sawyer asked.
“Not so much, but the sheriff’s office has a half-trained crime scene substitute who went through the place,” Virgil said. “Found some blood in the carpet, but that’s about it. I found some B and D paraphernalia in a dressing table up in the main bedroom, which took me to the guy who used it on her. He’s my number one guy, at this point.”
“All right, we’ll handle it despite the mess you guys probably made. Whatever happened to Alewort?”
Alewort was the sheriff’s office regular crime scene man, and Sawyer had met him during the investigation of the school board murders. “He’s up at St. Mary’s, drying out,” Virgil said.
“He did like a drink—most any time of day,” Sawyer said. “Ask me how I knew that.”
“I know how. You’re a highly trained crime scene technician.”
“That’s correct,” Sawyer said.
“Call me the instant—the instant!—that you find anything,” Virgil said. “Progress here has been sorta slow.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sawyer said. “Take off, hoser.”
—
Virgil was sitting in his truck when the divers called and he directed them to the marina, where they could drive down the boat ramp to the river. They said they’d meet him there, and Virgil called Johnson and asked him if he could come along to the dive site. He could. “I wouldn’t miss this for all the canaries in the islands,” Johnson said.
They met at the cabin, got the heavy-weather gear on, cranked up the sleds, ran out to the main river and turned south to the marina. When they got there, they found a Ford F-350 Super Duty sitting on the ramp, a large camper top on the back, fat snow tires at the corners, and three large men hanging around it. Virgil and Johnson pulled up and introduced themselves, and Clay Danson said, “Lead the way. Got about four hours. We don’t dive when it gets full dark.”
Virgil and Johnson got back on the sleds and led the way out onto the river. Johnson had worried that a snowstorm would cover the hole, but with Virgil’s triangulation from the first trip out, they found it in ten minutes, in a patch of wind-scrubbed ice.
Danson, a bulky man with a gold mustache, brought a depth finder from the truck, scraped off a piece of ice and put the transducer on it, and turned it on. A moment later, he said, “Nine meters. Thirty feet, more or less.” He turned to the other two men and said, “All right. Let’s get it going.”
Danson and a man named Blue got in the camper and shut the back door, while the third man, Ralph, brought out an ice auger, a chain saw, and a pair of ice tongs. Virgil and Johnson stood around, being useless, as Ralph drilled a hole through the ice and used the chain saw to cut out a square five feet on a side, with cuts spaced roughly a foot apart. He used the ice tongs to pull the blocks of ice out. It was heavy work, and Johnson volunteered to help, but Ralph said, “Naw.”
He stacked the blocks of ice to one side, and Johnson said, “You could build a pretty good igloo with those.”
Ralph said, “Go ahead.”
That ended the conversation until Danson and Blue climbed out of the back of the camper wearing dry suits, which covered them from head to toe in heavy black neoprene, with the exception of a small oval around the face.
Ralph got a thick yellow nylon rope out of the truck, lashed one end of it to the truck’s bumper, as Danson and Blue pulled on single-tank scuba outfits and rounded up lights and swim fins. Before Virgil felt quite ready for it, they were dangling their feet through the ice into the freezing river water and sealing up their face masks.
Danson grunted, “Ready?” and Blue said, “Yup,” and Danson dropped the end of the rope, which was tied to a rusty, fifteen-pound dumbbell, into the river and followed it down. Blue was ten seconds behind him and immediately out of sight. Ralph got a heavy-duty, sealed plastic bubble out of the truck, with its own lead weight. It turned out to be a battery-powered LED light, and he clipped it to the rope and dropped it in the water and it slid down the rope and out of sight.
“Muddy water,” Ralph said.
They all stood around and looked at the hole for a while, Ralph as quiet as the Sphinx, until Johnson said, “I bet you guys have some really great conversations in the truck, huh?”
Ralph scratched his nose and shrugged and said, “Oh . . . no.”
Two minutes after that, one of the divers—impossible to tell which—surfaced and threw a dark object onto the ice, and went back down. Virgil squatted over it: a woman’s purse with a metal clasp. He opened it and found it full of the usual female junk, including a wallet. He opened the wallet and found himself looking at Gina Hemming’s driver’s license.
“Son of a bitch,” Johnson said. “This really is the place. I sorta didn’t believe it.”
A diver surfaced again two minutes later and threw a high-heeled shoe out on the ice, and went back down.
“Well, she wasn’t kidnapped when she went out for a walk,” Virgil said, as he looked it over. “She wouldn’t have been walking in that, not on that night.”
Twenty minutes passed, and Ralph went to the truck and brought back a ladder like those that are hung off the back of sailboats except this one had spikes at the curled top end. He stuck it into the water and jammed the spikes into the ice. Another five minutes, and one of the divers surfaced and climbed the first two rungs of the ladder, and Ralph grabbed him by the shoulders and helped him up the rest of the way.
Danson took off his face mask and said, “I think that’s gonna be about it. We did a grid ten to fifteen yards upriver, twenty yards down, ten yards on either side, and that’s what we got. Don’t think there’ll be any more.”
“You got what we needed,” Virgil said. “This is where she was dumped.”
“Yeah, I figured that when I spotted the purse,” Danson said. Blue surfaced, and Ralph and Danson helped him up the last steps.
Johnson said, “How cold are you?”
Danson shrugged. “Not cold at all.”
“This is cool,” Johnson said. “I’m gonna try it.”
“Lots of people tell me that, but then they don’t,” Danson said.
—
Danson and Blue went back to the camper and climbed inside to change back to street clothes, as Ralph piled up the gear at the back of the truck. Ralph also got them a black plastic bag for the purse and shoes, began slotting the blocks of ice back into the hole he’d cut.
“Always do that?” Johnson asked.
“Yup.”
“How come?” Johnson asked.
“Liability.”
“What . . .”
Ralph gushed, “Guy comes zooming across the lake on a snowmobile going ninety miles an hour, hits a big pile of ice blocks, wrecks his snowmobile and kills himself, and his old lady sues our butts for everything we got. Liability.”
“Got it,” Johnson said.
—
Virgil and Johnson hung around until Danson and Blue were back out of the camper, and Danson said, “We’ll bill you.”
“Do that,” Virgil said. “And thanks.”
“Easier and better than our usual calls,” he said.
Johnson bit. “What are your usual calls?”
“We’re usually looking for bodies.”
—
When all the equipment was stowed, the three men got back in the truck and took off for St. Paul, and Virgil and Johnson rocketed back to the cabin on the sleds. When they got there, they found Griffin sitting in her car, the engine running, reading the Republican-River.
As they pulled in and killed the engines of the sleds, she got out of her car, walked over, and said, “Well, I’ve now read the worst newspaper in the country, from top to bottom and end to end. The most important thing I found was that if you act now and buy one turkey at full price, you can get a second turkey of the same size or smaller at half price.”
Johnson said, “For real? At Piggly Wiggly?”
“I thought the name was a joke, but that’s what the paper said.” She turned to Virgil. “You’ve got to help me out. The guy who owns the ice-fishing house, or tent or whatever it is, this Duane Hawkins, where you found the voice recording, has gone on vacation to Florida. So his neighbor says. I don’t believe it.”
Virgil said, “You know, Margaret, I’ve got a murder case . . .”
“You’ve also got a governor who told my boss at Mattel that you’d make it a priority to help out, and you’ve got a case of assault on an officer of the law that needs to get solved. That would be your case. You could probably solve it all at once by driving out to CarryTown and talking to the guy in trailer 400. Besides, tell me what you’d do on the murder case if you didn’t spend a half hour round-trip-driving out to CarryTown?”
Johnson said, “She’s got you there, Virgil. You ain’t got shit on the murder.”
Griffin said, “See? Even this lunk thinks you ought to help out.”
Johnson: “‘Lunk’? I represent that comment.”
Virgil: “Jesus, Johnson. The line is either ‘I resent that comment’ or ‘I resemble that comment,’ but it’s not ‘I represent that comment.’ Could you try to keep that straight?”
“Okay,” Johnson said. “I’m sorry.”
“You only say you’re sorry to make me feel bad.”
Griffin said, “You sound like teenage girls.”
—
They all went in the cabin, Johnson and Virgil stripped out of their snowmobile gear, and Johnson said, “I like that diving shit. I did a few tanks down in the Virgin Islands one winter. I’d be more interested in looking for sunken boats, though. Not so much bodies.”
“I believe if you’d asked him, he’d tell you that you can see about four feet down there. It’s not the Virgin Islands,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, well. You might be right. Did it help you at all?”
“Might,” Virgil said. “It’s another place and time that I know the killer was at.”
“As an experienced big-city police officer, I can tell you that what you found doesn’t mean anything unless you have a specific sighting of the guy driving out there with a body on the back of his snowmobile,” Griffin said. “Since you wasted that time, why don’t you take a few minutes to drive out to CarryTown? I’ll not only be out of your hair, I could be out of Trippton entirely.”
“Okay, okay. Let me call my crime scene crew and see if they need me for anything. If not, I’ll drive out there and see what’s what,” Virgil said.
“I’ll follow you,” Griffin said. “And please—please!—put a gun in your pocket.”
—
Virgil called Bea Sawyer and found that she had been trying to call him, but he hadn’t heard the phone ring or felt it vibrating through the thick snowmobile gear. When she answered, she said, “Virgil. Bill has the computer open. And we have an anomaly.”
“You know how I like those, Bea,” Virgil said.
“Then you’ll like this one. You want to come by? It’s easier to see than it is to explain.”
“Ten minutes,” Virgil said. He hung up and turned to Griffin and said, “Clue.”
“Ah, shit. Well, I’m still coming with you. After you look at this so-called clue, we can still go out to CarryTown.”
—
At Hemming’s house, they left their vehicles in the street, and Griffin followed Virgil up the driveway and around to the back door. In the kitchen, he introduced Griffin to Sawyer, explained that she was a former cop, and they all stepped into the living room, where Baldwin had set up a camera tripod and was photographing what looked like a piece of vacant green carpet.
Bill Jensen was sitting in a corner, reading a Surface Pro.
“Okay,” Sawyer said. “You know about the blood on the carpet over there.” She pointed at four pieces of yellow tape that isolated a four-inch square of carpet. “Don’t get near it. Anyway, that’s the blood that the guy from the sheriff’s department found. What he didn’t find was a smaller bloodstain of the same type at the bottom of the stairs. That’s what Don’s taking pictures of. What we know from the ME is that Hemming sustained a skull fracture when she was struck, and that can result in bleeding from the ear canal.”
“You think she crawled?” Virgil asked. “I was told that death was instantaneous.”
“I’ve been told that. What I do know is, the first bloodstain is quite a bit more substantial than the second one, but their ‘character’ is the same. The first one looks like she bled from her ear into the carpet—from one point source, the ear canal, dripping blood onto a small area on the carpet, which, given the carpet fibers, wound up creating a bloodstain that’s about the diameter of a pencil, extending straight down into the carpet and pooling at the bottom of the fibers. The second stain is smaller in diameter but also extends straight down into the carpet and pools at the bottom. But, they both look like they could have come from the same drip of blood. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was possible that she fell down the stairs, cracked her head on the bannister on the way down, and landed here at the bottom, then crawled to the second spot, where she died.”
“And somebody threw her in the Mississippi why?” Griffin said. “To tidy up?”
Virgil looked up the stairs and shook his head. “I don’t think the ME would buy that idea—the bannister’s got those edges on it, and she was hit by something large in diameter and smooth, like a bottle.”
“So the guy kills her, doesn’t notice the bloodstain, drags her body over to the stairs to make it look like an accident,” Sawyer said.
“Then dusts off his hands, picks up the body, and throws it in the Mississippi,” Griffin said. “I like your murders. They give you something to think about. In L.A., it was BANG! BANG! BANG!, two dead, one of them a gang member, the other a five-year-old girl on her way to buy a Popsicle. Simple, in-your-face nutcake homicide. Here, you’ve got to ‘detect.’”
Sawyer and Virgil and Baldwin were all looking at Griffin, and she said, “What?”
“Nothing,” Virgil said.
Sawyer said, “I like our way better.”
“You find anything else?” Virgil asked.
“Cracked Ping-Pong paddle; could be more B and D,” Sawyer said. “We can check it for DNA, if you want to put in for it. Bill’s got the email up on Hemming’s computer.”
“This way,” Jensen said, putting down the slate. He led the way back to Hemming’s office, tapped the Return key on her keyboard, and the mail came up. “It’s all yours.”
Virgil sat down, and Griffin asked, “How long is this going to take?”
“Probably a while,” Virgil said. “Give me an hour, and I’ll go out to CarryTown with you.”
She went away, and Virgil looked at the message count at the bottom of the screen. Hemming’s in-box showed 8,406 messages, with 3,502 in her out-box.
He started typing in names, beginning with Ryan Harney. There were two recent messages, one to Harney and one back: a notification of the meeting and a note saying he’d be there. There were seventy more messages between them, but they went back five years. Nothing sexual, nothing that would necessarily say “affair,” but they were meeting a couple of times a week, always at Hemming’s house in the late afternoons.
There were far fewer messages to the other people who’d been at the party, with one exception: over the years, she’d sent hundreds of messages to Margot Moore, most of them quick notes setting up more meeting times. There were references to Fred Fitzgerald, but always in a kind of coded language that an outsider might eventually recognize as referring to sexual events: “Had a good time Thursday night, F brought a new toy. Ask him about the ‘mouses.’”
Virgil scrolled through dozens of the notes from Moore to Hemming, both sent and received, and from Fred Fitzgerald to Hemming. The most recent note from Fitzgerald confirmed a 9:30 therapy session. No date or day was mentioned, but the message had been sent the Sunday before Hemming was killed.
But the most interesting of all the notes was from Hemming to Lucy Cheever, sent on Wednesday afternoon, the day before Hemming was murdered.
Lucy,
I’m afraid that we might have to go another direction on the business loan. Frankly, a million’s too large a commitment for our bank, at the moment. I will talk to Marv on Monday, when he gets back from the Cities, and see if he has anything to say that may change our minds, but I don’t think this will happen. You told me that you’d explored the idea of a loan with Lew Andrews up at U.S. Bank in St. Paul, and I did make a quick call to Lew and they are still quite interested in talking with you. Best of luck with that.
Gina
—
Virgil found Marv Hiners’s phone number and got him on the line.
“Has the bank turned down a major loan for Lucy Cheever?”
Hiners said, “No . . . In fact, it’s on its way to approval. I was talking to Elroy Cheever this morning, who wanted to see what effect Gina’s death might have had on their application. I told him that as far as I was concerned, we were good to go. It has to be approved by the loan committee, but that shouldn’t be a big problem. How’d you hear about it?”
Virgil thought about telling Hiners about the email from Hemming to Cheever but held his tongue. Instead, he said, “The possibility came up in all the stuff I’ve been looking at. Thanks, Marv.”
Off the phone, Virgil thought about what Hiners had told him. Hemming was planning to turn down the Cheevers’ loan application, but Hiners hadn’t known that. The Cheevers hadn’t mentioned it, and Hemming’s successors at the bank were about to approve it. For the Cheevers, Hemming’s death had paid off—big-time.
When Virgil was working as a St. Paul homicide cop, he’d known of two separate killings done for single eight balls of cocaine. An eight ball, at the time, was worth maybe a hundred and fifty dollars. Kill somebody for a million? No problem. No fuckin’ problem at all.
—
Griffin stuck her head into the office and said impatiently, “It’s been an hour and a half. I’m waiting patiently.”
“I’ve got some things to think about,” Virgil said.
“Why don’t you think on your way to CarryTown?” Griffin suggested. “It’s a nice, relaxing drive out there.”
—
Virgil had once solved a case involving an Israeli spy, during which he’d been given the definition of “nudnik.” A nudnik, he was told, was like a woodpecker sitting on your ear, pecking at your skull. Like Margaret Griffin. When neither Bea Sawyer or Bill Jensen had any more to tell him, he went out, got in his truck, and drove out to CarryTown, with Griffin close behind him.
CarryTown wasn’t actually a town but rather a collection of mobile homes that had been put up around a country convenience store called the Cash ’n Carry, six miles south of Trippton.
The mobile homes didn’t look too bad under a pristine layer of snow, but when they got out of the vehicles Virgil could smell the unmistakable scent of a badly backed-up septic system. Griffin didn’t seem to notice. She pointed at one of the mobile homes and said, “His name is Joseph Anderson. I was told that he may have gotten some supply packages for the altered dolls.”
“Who told you that?”
“A little birdie . . . to whom I paid one thousand of Mattel’s hard-earned dollars.”
Virgil heard what she said but was focused on a red truck parked at a mobile home three down from Anderson’s: it was almost certainly, he thought, the truck driven by the women who beat him up, right down to the husband-wife-kids-dogs-cat sticker in the rear window.
Griffin picked up the fact that he wasn’t paying close attention to her and asked, “What? What’s going on?”
“That truck,” Virgil said. “When I got beat up, I think the women were driving that truck. No, wait: I’m sure they were driving it.”
“Then we’ve got a second stop . . . You put your gun in your pocket?”
“No, I didn’t think it was necessary. Let’s go knock. And, Margaret, be nice.”
—
Virgil led the way to Anderson’s trailer, which had a couple of concrete blocks for a step. Virgil stepped up, knocked a couple of times, stepped back down as he heard feet hit the floor inside, a heavy person walking toward the door, oil-canning the home’s aluminum floor as he/she walked across it.
A hulking, square-shouldered man pushed the door open, looked past Virgil at Griffin, and growled, “What’d I tell you about coming back?”
Before Griffin could reply, Virgil said, “I’m a cop. I’m looking for information about the people doing unauthorized and illegal alterations of Barbie and Ken dolls.”
“Wouldn’t know nothin’ about that,” Anderson said. “Now, get out of my fuckin’ yard. You want to talk to me, get a search warrant.” His brow beetled, and he said, “You know, I know all the cops in Buchanan County, and you ain’t one.”
“I’m with the state,” Virgil said. “I will be back with a search warrant. We’ll cuff your ass, sit you in the county jail until we have time to talk to you—could be a couple of weeks, with everything else going on—and tear your home apart, see what we find. If we find anything, of course, we’ll be talking prison time.”
He paused, waited for an answer, but Anderson simply looked confused and, after a moment, asked, “Virgil?”
“Yeah, Virgil. Instead of doing all that other shit, you could talk to us for a couple of minutes.”
Anderson put an earnest look on his face and said, “Listen, I don’t know nothing about this, Virgil. The lady behind you came and knocked on my door and said I got some UPS packages with illegal stuff in them. Well, I don’t know nothing about illegal stuff. My neighbor wasn’t home, and I told her I’d take the packages for her.”
“Which neighbor?” Virgil asked.
Anderson ducked his head and pointed to the next trailer down. “Jesse McGovern. She was in the process of moving out and said it was too late to change the address on the UPS packages, so I took them for her. She come out and picked them up a couple days after they got here.”
“She’s moved?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, yeah. She’s been gone a couple months now. Heard she moved to . . . New York.”
Griffin said, “Oh, bullshit. He’s lying, Virgil. The boxes came here, not to the next trailer. They had Anderson’s address on them. She’s still around here someplace.”
“It’s a ‘manufactured home,’ not a ‘trailer,’” Anderson said. “And I hate to break the news to you, but there’s only one address here. None of these lots are legal addresses—it’s all one lot, and one address.”
“You’re still lying about Jesse,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you, Joe. I may have to come back out here and take your ass to jail. You don’t look like a bad guy, and I’d hate to do it—but, not to put too fine a point on it, Mattel has asked the governor to stop this crime and the governor has agreed.”
“The fuckin’ governor? Why would he give a stinkin’ wet shit about this deal?”
Virgil looked to his left, to his right, then back at Anderson, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know the details.”
Anderson said, “Oh, I see. Somebody paid the little prick, didn’t they? Donated to his campaign, or whatever they call it now.”
“That’s entirely unwarranted speculation,” Griffin said.
Anderson said, “Well, maybe we both have warrants in our future—me and the governor. Come and get me when you’ve got mine.”
He stepped back inside and closed the door.
Griffin, her arms akimbo, asked, “Well, what are you going to do, Virgil?”
Virgil said, “If you can come up with enough for me to get a search warrant, I’ll come back, like I said. We’re not there yet.”
—
They’d turned back to their vehicles when a door slammed down the way and they both looked, and a large woman in a parka was standing on her stoop, her back to them, locking the door of her mobile home. The mobile home with the assault wagon parked outside.
Virgil went that way. “Hey.”
The woman turned, looked at him, and said, “Virgil fuckin’ Flowers.” She came down off the steps and added, “How about I kick your ass again?”
Virgil opened his mouth to reply—something soothing and noncombative—but that apparently wasn’t how they did it in L.A. Margaret Griffin, standing next to him, flicked her hand, and a two-foot-long steel wand snapped open.
Griffin said, “Come and get us, bitch.”
Something about Griffin caused the woman to step sideways, circling to her left, which gave her a clear shot at Virgil, and suddenly she was moving more quickly than her size would have suggested, with newly painted and pointed fingernails flashing with Dior’s Victoire 758 right at Virgil’s face.
Virgil had his feet set, and he punched her.
—
A lot of great punches were thrown in the twentieth century. One of the most famous was captured in the painter George Bellows’s iconic work Dempsey and Firpo, also known as Dempsey Through the Ropes, in which Luis Ángel Firpo, the “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” knocked Jack Dempsey entirely out of the ring in the first round of their 1923 fight.
Then there was Rocky Marciano’s 1952 knockout of Jersey Joe Walcott in the thirteenth round of their heavyweight fight, called a one-punch knockout by everyone, though there were really two; to say nothing of Muhammad Ali’s 1974 knockout of George Foreman in what some people call the greatest boxing match ever.
Virgil’s punch, though nearly a century after Firpo’s, was on that scale. The woman came straight at him, talons flashing, the brightest thing around under the sullen winter sky, but Virgil had five inches’ reach on her and had had time to set his feet.
He focused the punch two inches behind her nose, and she walked straight into it. The punch was so clean, straight, and pure, with Virgil’s wrist and elbow locked up tight, a perfect line of bone between his shoulder and his knuckles, that the woman went down on her back like a wet sack of fertilizer.
Off to the side, Griffin said approvingly, “Whoa!”
The woman on the ground was swinging her arms back and forth as though she were making a snow angel while spraying blood from her nose all over the snow wings; a bloody angel, and making loud gasping and crying sounds. Virgil said, “Keep an eye on her, I’ve got some cuffs in the truck.”
When he got back, the woman had flopped over onto her stomach, bleeding heavily into the snow. Virgil grabbed one wrist, and she tried to push up with her other hand, but Griffin stepped over, put her heel on the woman’s cheekbone, and pushed down. The woman squealed, and Virgil said, “Don’t hurt her,” and Griffin asked, “Why not?”
Virgil said, “She’s hurt bad enough already.” Virgil got the woman’s other wrist and locked it up, and said to Griffin, “Help me get her into the backseat of my truck.”
They lifted the woman to her feet, and Virgil said, “Hold on a second—keep her steady,” and he went back to the truck and got a large-wound bandage from his first aid kit, which looked like an old-fashioned Kotex pad but twice as large, and pressed it against the woman’s nose. The woman screamed and said, “Hurts,” and Virgil said, “Yeah, I know. That’s why I got a blue squid on my face. Remember that?”
“I’d do it again, fucker,” the woman mumbled through the pad.
They helped her get into Virgil’s truck, and Virgil put a leg-iron around one ankle and clipped it to a steel loop welded to the floor. When she was settled, Virgil asked, “What’s your name?”
“Carolyn Weaver,” the woman said.
Virgil said, “Okay, Carolyn, it’ll help if you get some cold on your face to hold down the swelling. I’m going to give you a big chunk of snow to put on it. I’m going inside your trailer to get something to wrap it in. Do you hear me?”
She nodded, and Virgil said to Griffin, “Hold the pad against her face until I get back.”
Virgil went to the trailer, where Weaver’s keys were still in the lock. Inside, the first thing he saw were large cardboard boxes full of Barbie dolls and smaller cardboard boxes full of the tiny voice boxes. He looked around, found a box of garbage bags, took one outside, put a couple of pounds of packed snow in one of them, carried it over to the truck, and said to Weaver, “Lean forward. I’m going to put the bag of snow against the back of the front seat. Push against it with your face—but keep the pad pinned to your nose, too. We want the pad to stop the bleeding, the cold to stop the swelling. You got that?”
“Yeah.”
They did that, and Virgil said, “I’ll get you into the clinic in ten minutes. You have to hold it there until then. Hold it with your face.”
“’Kay.”
Virgil shut the truck door and said to Griffin, “The trailer is full of Barbie dolls and those voice things. She was making them here.”
“Terrific,” Griffin said. “You’ve made my day, Virgil. I’ll get a deputy with a search warrant. And, goddamnit, that was one of the best punches I’ve ever seen. Ever. That was like . . . totally awesome.”
“Thank you. I thought it was a good one,” Virgil said. “I better go lock the trailer.”
Virgil went back to the trailer, and Griffin said, “Give me a peek.”
Before Virgil could say yes or no, she climbed the stoop and pushed the door open. In the next second or so, as Virgil was climbing the stoop, she snapped a few photos with a small Sony point-and-shoot camera, until Virgil told her to stop—“Technically, you shouldn’t be in there.”
“I’m in shock from the fight. I wasn’t thinking. When I saw the contraband, I reacted instinctively to take the pictures,” she said. “That’s my story, and I believe the court will accept it. Where are you headed now?”
“Into the Trippton Clinic,” Virgil said.
“I’ll follow you. As soon as Weaver is done with the doc, I’m going to drop some paper on her.”
The trip to town took fifteen minutes in the snow, and, on the way, Virgil said to Weaver, “I locked up your trailer.”
“Manufactured home,” she said. She began to cry, and hadn’t stopped when they arrived at the clinic.