THREE Virgil Flowers sat uncomfortably hunched over in a camouflaged blind on the banks of the frozen Mississippi, roughly a hundred miles, as the crow flies, north of the Trippton sewage plant. He was wrapped from his chest to his stocking feet in a heavyweight sleeping bag, the lens of his Nikon D810 digital camera peeking out through the blind’s front screen. His boots sat next to him, stuffed with air-activated hand warmers.
Light snow drifted over the riverscape fronting the tent, while to his left, a few hundred yards away, the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant pumped huge volumes of steam into the bitterly cold winter air. Virgil wasn’t sure whether the snow was natural or condensed from the steam.
He’d been in the blind for two hours, and though he was wearing a parka, his lack of movement let the January chill seep into his shoulders and down his spine. He’d brought the sleeping bag to deal with that problem, and when he’d begun to lose feeling in his butt, he’d taken off his boots and pulled on the bag. Overhead, his breath was condensing into ice crystals on the inside of the tent.
Virgil was a tall man, thin, with country singer blond hair and cool blue eyes. An agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, he was in the final two days of a weeklong winter vacation, which he was using in an effort to get photos of an owl.
As a part-time outdoor writer, Virgil liked all the Minnesota seasons; the best months were the lush August days and the brilliant blue days of February. There was hunting in the fall and spring, fishing almost year-round; and he liked to walk, to simply get out and look at the place he lived.
A birder friend had mentioned seeing a great horned owl fishing over the open water south of the nuclear plant, which they weren’t supposed to do. Great horned owls ate rabbits, not fish. The birder said the owl had been around since a big cold front had come through in mid-December, fishing the whole time.
Virgil wasn’t that much of an owl fancier, but he’d made some inquiries, and Wing & Talon, a magazine focused on raptors, had guaranteed a thousand dollars for good photos of a great horned owl taking a fish, with a short accompanying article.
—
At three o’clock on this sunny afternoon, Virgil still had good light, but it’d be fading quickly over the next hour and a half. He wanted to be out of the blind before sunset, which came at 4:48. Despite an air temperature of minus three degrees, the river in front of him was open, with wisps of steam rising up like cartoon ghosts. The heat came from the nuclear plant’s cooling towers, which used cold water to keep the nuke from turning into a fiery hell pit of radiation and doom. From the cooling towers, the warm water flowed through canals and a couple of ponds and into the river.
Virgil’s girlfriend, Frankie, had said, “You’ll come back with your balls glowing in the dark.”
“Wrong, ignorant farm girl,” Virgil said. “The cooling water doesn’t touch the radioactive part. You could drink it.”
“You know that for sure?”
“Yeah, I looked it up,” Virgil said. They were taking down the Christmas tree, packing the glass ornaments into boxes of Styrofoam peanuts. “Besides, if my balls did glow in the dark, I’d have some light when I get up at night to pee.”
“Or, even better,” she said, “you could lead Santa’s sleigh if something happened to Rudolph.”
She was not only an ignorant farm girl but a wiseass.
—
Virgil’s great horned target had taken up residence in a nearby oak: Virgil could see its hulk as a dark oval through the bare branches. The day before, he’d seen it swoop down over the water twice but hadn’t yet gotten a good shot, hadn’t yet seen it nail a fish. The problem was, the owl didn’t hunt during bright daylight hours, except for the couple of hours before sundown and the hour or so after daybreak.
To shoot at those times, he used a Nikon 400mm f2.8, paid for by the good citizens of Minnesota who’d bought it in the belief that he would use its lens to apprehend the criminal element. The lens cost something like twelve thousand dollars. Should it roll down the riverbank into the Mississippi, he’d be looking at a major hole in his retirement plan.
So here he was, sitting in a camo tent, eating cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, a prefocused, bazooka-like camera lens mounted on a tripod. He hadn’t gotten the owl yet, but he’d gotten several dozen photos of other forms of wildlife—foxes, minks, otters, bald eagles—all pulled in by the warmth of the open water and the fish roiling the shallows near the shore.
He had gotten one great sequence of two coyotes hunting mice, or maybe voles, in the snow-bent wild grass at the top of the bank. The coyotes would move silently across the snowfield, noses down, ears up, listening for movement under the snow. When they heard something, they’d rear up and come down on the mouse or vole with both feet, pinning the unfortunate rodent to the ground.
Best shot: the larger of the two coyotes passing a mouse off to the other one. Mates? Sisters? Couldn’t tell. Great sequence, but great coyote sequences were a dime a dozen, as were great bald eagle shots. Dozens of bald eagles hunted the open water during the winter, and he could easily fill up a memory card with shots.
—
Virgil was looking at the Safari browser on his iPhone when the owl made its first move of the day. Virgil caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, went to the camera’s viewfinder, picked up the bird, and turned the lens with the bird’s flight and hit the trigger, which fired an automatic sequence of shots, and BANG!
Nothing.
The bird’s talons had touched the water but come up fishless. The owl flapped its great silent wings a couple of times and returned to its perch onshore.
“Get a fish, you incompetent motherfucker,” Virgil muttered. The owl sat on the branch, its head swiveling as though on ball bearings, then cocking sideways.
Virgil, under his breath: “Go, go, go . . .”
The bird made a small downward movement, as though cocking itself, and dropped back toward the water, and BANG! This time, it came up with a flapping fish, probably a small white sucker. Virgil shot thirty frames, starting from the owl’s launching point, to the water, and back. He burned up a few more frames of the bird tearing the fish apart, sat back, and chimped the results.
Not bad, he thought, as he flipped through the images on the camera’s LCD screen. In fact, excellent. One thousand American dollars, unless the good folks at Wing & Talon had been shining him on.
—
Back at his truck, he put the folded blind away and the lens back in its case, pulled his iPad out of the backseat and transferred the photos. He also kept them on the memory card as a backup and, when he got home, would move them to the Cloud as even further insurance.
He started the truck and was backing out to the road when the phone burped. Frankie wouldn’t be calling, because he’d asked her not to call between three o’clock and sundown when a call could disturb the owl. He picked up the phone and looked at the screen: Jon Duncan, his nominal boss at the BCA. He was on vacation, so the call could be social. Maybe. Okay, maybe not.
“What’s up?” Virgil asked.
“Man, I know you’re on vacation—”
“No, no, no! Get somebody else.”
“It’s down in Trippton, your old stomping grounds. I’ve got to ask you to take a look. Do this for me, take the rest of your vacation when it’s done,” Duncan said. “The big boss says nobody will check if you take a bunch of undertime on top of your vacation.”
“Undertime” was a concept widely used in state government: it was like overtime, but instead of working more, you worked less, while still getting paid. The real artists took undertime while on the clock for overtime, thus getting time-and-a-half for not working.
“How much undertime?” Virgil asked.
“However much you want . . . that isn’t outright theft.”
“I gotta talk to Frankie. We were going out tonight.”
“Go out,” Duncan said. “There’s no point of getting down there before tomorrow morning anyway. Since tomorrow’s a Sunday, you probably don’t even have to get there early.”
“Gimme the short version,” Virgil said.
“Short version: forty-two-year-old almost-divorced female bank president disappears Thursday night and is dumped in the Mississippi, only to emerge as a block of ice this afternoon.”
“How’d she emerge?” Virgil asked. “The river’s frozen solid all the way down to Iowa.”
“A sewage plant effluent stream creates open water a couple miles south of Trippton. Some guy was out there fishing when she floated by.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Yeah, I’m told it wasn’t exactly pleasant.”
“I meant fishing in the effluent stream,” Virgil said. “Do they know what killed her? Shot, or drowned, or what?”
“The ME has her in Rochester; he says she died of a fractured skull. He finished the autopsy about ten minutes ago. Wasn’t an accident, wasn’t a fall or anything. She was wearing a burgundy-colored dress and was barefoot. The sheriff said that when she was last seen in that dress, Thursday night, she was wearing high heels. She wasn’t walking around on river ice in four-inch heels and a Donna Karan jacket.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “If Frankie gets pissed, I’m gonna blame it on you.”
“That’s one of the fardels I must bear,” Duncan said.
“What?”
“You must not be familiar with Hamlet,” Duncan said. “You know, by Shakespeare.”
“Oh, that one,” Virgil said.
“Yeah. One of my ancestors is in Macbeth.”
“I’ll buy a copy, maybe you can autograph it for me,” Virgil said. “I’ll call you back tomorrow night about the banker lady.”
“Virgil, I owe you.”
“You keep saying that, but you never pay off.”
“That’s one of your fardels,” Duncan said.
—
Virgil was two hours from home. He called and spent some time talking to Frankie about nothing in particular but including a ten-minute rumination about her sister’s sexual misadventures at the University of Minnesota, which seemed designed to gain her a tenured teaching position. “Absolutely disgusting,” Frankie said. “I sometimes can’t believe that Sparkle and I are even related . . .”
“It’s absolutely awful,” Virgil said. When he got off the phone, he brought up a country music station and fantasized about a Frankie-Sparkle-Virgil sandwich, which should have made him ashamed of himself but didn’t.
Virgil and Frankie spent Saturday evening at the Cine Grand Mankato watching Hacksaw Ridge, then went over to the Rooster Coop for a couple of beers and to chat with people they knew. Between the two of them, that included half the patrons in the place, including three out-and-out barflies and an out-of-tune Eagles cover band.
Frankie was a short, good-looking woman with pale blue eyes and blond hair, which she wore in a fat, Swedish-style single braid. She was once a smart redneck but was now the smart owner of an architectural salvage business, which meant she bought and tore down old houses that had good wood or salable fixtures in them. She also operated a small farm outside Mankato, mostly growing alfalfa.
She had recently bought, for three thousand dollars, in a dying prairie town, an abandoned mansion that had once belonged to a rich quarry owner.
The place was filled with black walnut floors and oak beams, which by themselves would have had her only breaking even on the three grand after paying her employees. The real find had been the library, where all the wood was straight, dry, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Brazilian rosewood, for which she would net an additional thirty thousand dollars from a musical instrument maker.
“You don’t feel bad about screwing the former owner?” Virgil had asked when he heard about the thirty grand.
“The former owner was a Kansas City hedge funder who wanted to get rid of the house and outbuildings so he could plow over another four acres. Would have cost him ten thousand to get a wrecking contractor to tear the place down—instead, they make three thousand.”
“Then screw ’em,” Virgil said.
—
Frankie had a complicated history, which at times had involved minor crime, and which included five children, all boys. The oldest worked as a partner in her salvage business, while the next oldest cheerfully drifted around the United States in a series of casual jobs, good training for what he wanted to ultimately become: an author. He and Virgil talked writing whenever he was in town.
The other three boys still lived at home. The third son, a senior in high school, was in charge of the other two when Frankie spent the night at Virgil’s place.
After an hour at the Rooster Coop, they went back to Virgil’s, fooled around until midnight, then let Honus the Dog back into the bedroom. Honus had been deeply insulted by his temporary exclusion from the room, but he was a good-natured yellow dog of indefinite breed and gave them both a nose and assumed his spot at the bottom center of the bed.
—
At breakfast the next morning, Frankie asked, “Have you ever been to Trippton when you weren’t towing your boat?”
“Didn’t think about that, but I don’t believe I have,” Virgil said. “It’s not the most inviting place in winter. In fact, it’s butt ugly.”
“Well, say hello to Johnson Johnson for me,” Frankie said. “No point in telling you to stay away from him.”
“Hey . . .”
“I know, I know, old college buds and all. But the guy ought to be declared a federal disaster area.”
That was true, so Virgil changed the subject. “I’ve got to get going. Could be gone a few days, and it’s colder than hell,” he said. They both looked out the kitchen window at the snowfields around the house. “Gonna have to take the big bag.”
“Any chance this is more than a onetime deal?” she asked. “The murder?”
“No idea.”
“Then take your shotgun, too,” she said. “I’ll clean up the dishes while you pack, and I’ll walk Honus out at the farm. I’ll check the house every day you’re gone.”
“Good deal.”
—
Virgil wrote checks for a few routine bills, put stamps on the envelopes, sent JPEGs of the owl photos to Wing & Talon, packed his cold-weather gear into a duffel bag, pulled on insulated hiking boots, and made sure he had two pairs of gloves, one for driving and one for outside. Watching the gear going into the big bag depressed Honus, who slunk away to sit next to Frankie.
When Virgil went back to the kitchen carrying the bag, he found a red-eyed Frankie sitting at the table, the dishes not done, a short stack of papers by one hand. She looked up, and he asked, “What?”
“You left your insurance papers on the sink . . . I wasn’t snooping,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Well, I’m down as the beneficiary,” she said. “And if we’re both killed at the same time, my kids get it . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Stop saying ‘Yeah?’ Made me cry a little bit,” Frankie said.
“I got nobody else who I’d want it to go to,” Virgil said. “Just you and the kids.”
She sighed and said, “You know, Virgil, sometimes we don’t talk enough. I gotta tell you, I’d be totally up for another kid. Especially if it was a girl.”
Virgil sat down because he needed to.
She said, “We don’t have to talk about it now, but so you know: you’d be like the first-best dad in the world. You already sorta are.”
Virgil said, “Ah, boy.”