NINETEEN Ann McComber turned out to be a moderately attractive frosted blonde with a haircut like some Olympic ice-skater that Virgil once saw in an Ice Capades show that his second wife made him go to. She was curt with Virgil, slightly less curt with Pweters, and told them that they were not permitted to wait inside Fred Fitzgerald’s shop even though they had to keep Virgil’s truck running to keep their asses from freezing off, a clear waste of gasoline and an environmental hazard, and even though they promised not to eavesdrop on the attorney/client discussion.
“Get a sleeping bag and huddle up together,” she said. “The shared body heat should keep you alive.”
“I’m not sure she’s all that impressed with you,” Virgil grumbled an hour or so later, as he watched the 4Runner’s exhaust fumes drift down the street. The insides of the windows were frosting up from their breath.
Pweters was reading a tattered copy of Gun & Garden, which Virgil had stolen from his dentist, in the light from the overhead lamp. “Bullshit. She could hardly hold back from throwing me on the floor and having her way with me right there in the foyer.”
“I didn’t notice that,” Virgil said. He checked his cell phone for the time. “Man, they’ve been in there for a long time.”
“That’s good, right? They must have something serious to talk about.”
“Could be,” Virgil allowed.
A few minutes later, an SUV, with its high beams on, pulled up behind them. Virgil asked, “Who’s this?”
“Don’t know, but the asshole has his brights on.”
“Why don’t you get out and look?” Virgil suggested.
“I’ll do that. With my hand on my gun,” Pweters said.
He did, and a moment later stuck his head back inside the truck and said, “It’s Bret Carlson. McComber called him to come down.”
“And didn’t call us? Left us out here?”
“Okay, she’s the bitch from hell. I’d still turn her upside down,” Pweters said.
Virgil tended to agree. “Bitch from hell” and “Turn her upside down” were two distinctly different categories.
Carlson was out of his truck, and Virgil got out, and Carlson, whose face appeared no larger than a saucer in his parka hood, said, “Agent Flowers. Causing more trouble, I see.”
“It’s the town, actually,” Virgil said. “It’s absolutely murderous. I’m only here to help out.”
“I’m sure our previous school board would disagree,” Carlson said. He was wearing leather gloves, and he clapped them a couple of times and said, “Let’s get out of the cold, shall we?”
The school board members had been convicted of murder in the county court by a special prosecutor appointed by the state attorney general. Carlson had been asked to step aside because of his close relationships with all the board members. He’d done that but hadn’t been happy about it.
Carlson led the way to the shop door, where they knocked once and went inside. McComber and Fitzgerald were on the second floor, and McComber called, “Bret, come on up.”
All three of them climbed the stairs, and McComber said to Pweters, “I see you survived,” and Pweters snapped, “No thanks to you, Ann,” and Virgil saw a spark of surprise on McComber’s face. She’d thought she had Pweters safely tucked away for possible use at a later date.
“Well,” she said, “let’s go see Fred. He’s in the living room.”
She led the way down a dark, unadorned hallway that smelled of onion rings, ketchup, and reefer and into a small living room, where Fitzgerald was perched on a soft, low-backed chair.
When they were all seated except Pweters—he was the junior official, and they’d run out of chairs, so he propped himself in the doorway—Carlson said, “What’s going on, Ann? I have not been briefed on this, except that it has to do with Gina Hemming and Margot Moore.”
“Yes. The situation is, my client has done something he shouldn’t have, for fear of the police—specifically, Agent Flowers. His transgression is relatively minor but probably not without consequence. I’ve already done some online research, and Fred could possibly be charged with a gross misdemeanor, if you chose to prosecute him. I’ve advised him not to speak to you, or the police agents involved, unless we can make a no-pros deal with you. I have reason to think that the information he would provide could be helpful in the investigation of the death of Gina Hemming.”
Carlson’s eyebrows went up. “But not Margot Moore?”
“No. Not Margot.”
Carlson looked at Virgil. “Ann is usually truthful enough, if not always. She has been known to cut things fairly thin when she’s defending an indigent client . . . but she doesn’t usually tell an outright lie.”
Virgil: “If Fred didn’t kill the women, I don’t care about a misdemeanor. Even a gross misdemeanor. I’m here to catch an active killer.”
Carlson said, “Okay . . . Ann, I’ll want to record this . . . Virgil?”
Virgil had two high-fidelity recorders in his truck. He went down and got them, set them up in the living room, ran a quick test. The lawyers talked lawyerly bullshit for a couple of minutes, then McComber said, “Fred, you can tell them what you told me.”
Fitzgerald: “I don’t go to jail?”
“Not if what you tell them is limited to what you told me. If it turns out you actually participated in the murders . . . no, you wouldn’t be protected.”
“I didn’t do nothing but what I told you,” he said to McComber.
She said, “Then . . .” and made a “Let’s roll” motion with a hand.
—
Fitzgerald exhaled and looked at Virgil and said, “On Thursday night, I was supposed to meet Gina for a little . . . session.”
Virgil: “A sexual encounter involving what they call bondage and discipline?”
Fitzgerald: “Yeah, I guess.”
“Wait . . . You guess? Was that what it was or was it something different?” Virgil asked.
“Ah, that’s what it was. Nothing harsh. She liked to get . . . restrained . . . and spanked a little bit. Hey, this is kinda embarrassing with a chick sitting here.”
McComber rolled her eyes.
“She’s familiar with these things, I’m sure . . . in her job,” Pweters said.
“I am,” McComber said, as she stabbed Pweters with a glare.
Virgil said to Fitzgerald, “Okay, go ahead. You went there for a sexual encounter.”
“Right. Anyway, she told me to come over around nine-thirty. She said she had a meeting that night, for her class reunion, but she said she’d get everybody out of there by nine o’clock. I was running a little late when I got there. I parked behind the house—she always wanted me behind the house instead of where people could see my truck—and I went up to the door and knocked. Nobody answered, but all the lights were on. I knocked some more, but she never came, and I thought she might be upstairs in the bath. She was kind of a clean freak, you know? Everything had to be scrubbed up . . .”
Pweters said, “You mean, your bodies. For sex.”
Fitzgerald nodded, and Virgil said, “Mr. Fitzgerald has nodded, indicating that he means to answer yes to Officer Pweters’s question. So, Mr. Fitzgerald, what happened next?”
“Nobody answered, so I tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. I was kinda surprised because it had never been unlocked before. Anyway, I went in,” Fitzgerald said.
—
Once Fitzgerald started talking, he sank back and closed his eyes, and the words rolled out like a repellent dream, riveting Virgil, Pweters, McComber, and Carlson in their chairs, viewers at a horror movie.
Fitzgerald dressed carefully for his assignations, he said: tight jeans, black T-shirt that would show his muscle, black leather jacket, heavy black boots by Daytona. Black thong underpants. He enjoyed looking like a movie biker, but the movie bikers he emulated tended to ride in Southern California or Arizona. If he stood outside in Trippton in the winter in his Southern California assignation gear, he’d freeze his nuts off.
He thought about that as he drove to Gina Hemming’s house. He liked messing with Hemming, and he liked the two hundred and fifty dollars she paid him for each therapy session, but he didn’t want to freeze his nuts off. Would she still be hot for him if he showed up in a North Face parka and hood, in trapdoor long johns and fleece-lined rubber boots? Maybe not.
He took his Jeep up the incline to Hemming’s back drive, parked, got a plastic baggie with a couple of joints from under the front seat, hustled up the back steps of the house, and knocked. He was shivering from the cold when he finally tried the doorknob, which, to his surprise, was unlocked. He pushed inside, into the warmth of the kitchen. “Gina?”
No answer. She was upstairs in the bathroom, he guessed, and he went that way. “Gina?”
And found her body at the bottom of the stairs.
He froze, called to her across the twenty feet that separated them. “Gina? Gina?”
Trembling in the sudden presence of death, he stepped across to her, squatted next to her body, touched her neck with a knuckle: still warm but obviously dead, one side of her head crushed flat.
She’d only been dead for a few minutes, he thought. He stood, took his phone from his pocket to call the cops. And then thought twice about that.
Nobody had seen him arrive; it was snowing hard enough that he could probably get away clean. If the cops found him here, they were likely to think that her death had been something more than an accident. His reputation in town was not the best, and that prick Jeff Purdy would be happy to get rid of him for whatever reason.
Then he noticed the blood. A spot of blood marred the carpet, five feet from Hemming’s head. He wasn’t a doctor, and he thought for a moment that it was possible that she’d fallen, hit her head on the stairway bannister, and had landed where the blood was . . . had staggered somehow out into the room. What—and pushed herself backward to where she now lay? Not likely, not with the damage to the side of her head.
And, finally, he noticed the shoe.
One high-heeled pump lay on the stairs, as if it had come off when she’d fallen. The other was still on her foot. But the shoe on her foot was on the wrong foot—like it had been put there by mistake, by somebody hastily faking the fall.
By the killer.
Fitzgerald looked around, suddenly frightened. She had been dead only a few minutes. Was the killer still in the house? Maybe upstairs, looting the bedroom?
He carried a switchblade, which were legal in Minnesota. He clicked it open, listened, and heard nothing but the wind. After a few minutes, he crept up the stairs and into the bedrooms, a chill between his shoulder blades as he waited for the killer to jump out of one of the many closets, nooks, and crannies of the old Victorian.
He’d never stabbed anyone . . .
But the house was empty.
—
As he worked through the house, he realized that his trouble was deeper than he’d first supposed: his fingerprints were on the outside doorknobs. Had he touched Hemming with his fingers? He knew from watching television shows that fingerprints could sometimes be taken from bodies, along with DNA. And he’d definitely touched Hemming’s neck . . .
Downstairs, he thought about it some more and finally decided he had no choice: he had to get rid of her body. It’d be a mystery, what happened to her. The cops might eventually find out about their relationship, but if a motive couldn’t be found, he should be safe . . . except for those prints.
He had to get rid of the body.
He first made very sure that Hemming was really dead. He checked her breathing and then saw the blood marks on her face, the blood slowly being dragged down by gravity, no longer pumped by her heart.
When he was sure, he went back up the stairs, into a guest bedroom, and took a plaid blanket off a cedar chest, carried it back down, and wrapped her in it. He was trembling again. He carried her in his arms out to the truck, put her in the truck bed. He returned to the house and wiped everything he might have touched with his hands. At the last pass through the house, he spotted her purse and decided to take it—maybe somebody would think she’d gone off by herself. Same with her shoes.
That done, he drove carefully back to his shop, got his auger and his ice chipper, and drove out on the Mississippi. The snow was thick, but he could still see the lights of the lowest level of Trippton when he stopped. Cutting through the ice went quickly enough, and, ten minutes later, he slipped the body into the water and pushed it down. As he did, the blanket floated off. He pushed that under, too, and threw the shoes and the purse after it. When everything was gone, he used his boots to push loose snow into the hole.
Still wearing the leather jacket and T-shirt, and on the edge of frostbite, he drove back to the lights of Trippton. Gripped with fear. A fear that had never gone away.
The cops would be coming, he knew, and he had to work through Hemming’s death, change his fear to puzzlement.
He could handle the cops, he thought, but he wasn’t entirely sure he could handle Hemming’s murder. She’d been the most beautiful woman he’d ever slept with, the most high-toned . . . the prize of his life.
—
I figured she wouldn’t pop up until spring, if she ever came up, and then nobody would remember who was doing what when she died,” Fitzgerald told his audience. “I wouldn’t have to pull some goofy alibi out of my ass. I could say I was out of town, or whatever, if anybody asked.”
Virgil said, “I’m still not clear on why you didn’t call the sheriff’s office. Or walk away from it.”
“Because Jeff Purdy would slap me in jail and call it a day. I’d be good enough for him—another fifty votes for solving the murder so quick. Purdy wouldn’t give a shit about who really did it. All he’d care about would be getting somebody in jail. Anybody. I’d be perfect. If I’d walked away and left her, same deal—he’d find out that we were involved . . . sexually . . . from somebody like Margot, and I’d be in jail.”
“I don’t think you’re being entirely fair to Jeff,” Carlson said. The prosecutor’s forehead was beetled in a frown. “There’s no evidence that we don’t treat all murders with utmost . . .”
“Oh, shut up, Bret,” McComber said.
Virgil: “So you’re saying that when you showed up, about nine-thirty . . .”
“A little later than that, but not much. It wasn’t even nine forty-five. I’d guess . . . maybe nine-forty.”
“At nine-forty, she already had those little blood things under her skin,” Virgil said.
“Yeah.”
“What’s that mean?” McComber asked.
“It’s something that happens after somebody dies, blood stripes under the skin, the beginning of the lividity process. That doesn’t take long, but it takes a little while,” Virgil said. “Unless Fred is lying, she must have been killed right after the meeting ended . . . unless the people at the meeting were lying and she was killed while they were still there.”
Carlson shook his head. “You don’t get to do that again—take down a bunch of good citizens.”
Virgil, annoyed: “Bret, the school board killed several people and stole millions of dollars from the schools. From the kids. Even if they were your good friends, they weren’t good citizens. They’re doing thirty-year sentences for their rotten citizenship.”
“Well, except for that, they were okay,” Carlson muttered.
McComber leaned across to him and whispered, “Bret, this is being recorded,” and Carlson shut up.
—
Virgil, Pweters, Carlson, and McComber continued to push Fitzgerald on the details of his discovery of the body, but after half an hour, there wasn’t much more to learn. Virgil was interested in Fitzgerald’s observation about the shoe, which struck him as very real reportage and not something a killer would extemporaneously think up as part of a cover.
When they were done, Pweters arrested Fitzgerald for interfering with a dead body, a gross misdemeanor. He would be booked at the county jail, Carlson explained, where he would be held overnight, but, at Carlson’s directive, would be released on his own recognizance the following day—after Virgil had gotten a search warrant from a county judge.
Virgil and Pweters took Fitzgerald down to Pweters’s patrol car, and when Fitzgerald was locked in the backseat, Virgil said, “He doesn’t know anything else?”
“I don’t think so,” Pweters said.
“You remember the last time we talked to him and I screwed something up? All of a sudden he wasn’t sweating anymore? That’s because I said somebody saw him on a sled—and he’d driven out in his pickup. He knew I was bullshitting him.”
“Ah. I didn’t pick that up.”
Virgil pulled his gloves out of his pocket and put them on. “You want to get the warrant and help search the place tomorrow?”
“Sure. After breakfast? Meet you at Ma and Pa’s for pancakes?”
“I guess. Damnit, you know what this means?”
“Could mean a lot of things,” Pweters said, “but tell me.”
“I’d eliminated a lot of the possible suspects, like Lucy Cheever and Margot Moore and Sheila Carver, because they were too small to carry a body as heavy as Hemming’s. Turns out, they wouldn’t have had to. All they would have had to do is hit Hemming with a bottle and, probably, be mean or crazy enough to shoot Moore with a handgun. I’m starting again at zero.”
Virgil went back to Moore’s house, where Sawyer and her partner were still at work. “I’ve got nothing much, except we picked up two .22 long-rifle shells from outside the door, in the snow. Haven’t found the third one. But, the shooter was using an autoloader. We’ll look at the firing pin marks, et cetera, maybe get you a make on the pistol. We’ll run the shells for prints, but I don’t see any. That’s about it. You’ll get my report in the morning, but there won’t be much in it other than that. We should get the body off to Rochester, let the ME look at her, and dig out the slugs—no exit wounds. That might get you a little more on the make of the gun.”
“Okay.” Virgil hung around for a while to see if anything amazing came up, but nothing did.