TEN Virgil’s next stop was at Rhodes Realty on Main Street. He angle-parked and went inside, where a blue-haired woman was poking at a computer keyboard and looked nearsightedly at Virgil when he came through the door. “Can I help you?”
The receptionist was sitting in a little corral, maybe ten feet across. A hallway went down one side of the office, with doors leading off to a half dozen individual offices. Some of the doors were open, some closed. Virgil said, “Is, uh, Justine Rhodes in?”
The receptionist lowered her voice and said, “In the office, he’s Justin. Are you one of his friends?”
“I’m an investigator for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “Is he in?”
“Yes. Let me call him. He’s very upset about Gina. He’s been crying for three days straight.”
—
She called Rhodes, who poked his head out of one of the offices and called, “Come on down.”
His office was a bit larger than the receptionist’s corral, but not much. He had a compact desk with two visitors’ chairs, one of them occupied by a sallow-faced Hispanic man with shoulder-length black hair and dark eyelashes. Virgil looked from one to the other. The Hispanic man didn’t offer to leave, and Rhodes pointed at the other chair and asked, “Isn’t this awful? Isn’t this terrible?”
Virgil said, “Maybe we should talk privately.”
Rhodes shook his head. “I don’t keep anything from Rob. And you might want to talk to him, too, so he might as well be here . . . Rob Knox . . .”
Knox said, “Yeah. But we reserve the right to get an attorney.” He may have had Hispanic ancestors, but his accent was straight Minneapolis.
Rhodes was a tall man, with a short straight nose, a square jaw with a dimple in his chin, a heavy shock of brown hair slicked straight back with gel, and brown eyes rimmed red. He was wearing a pale blue suit, which seemed a little summery for January, and a red necktie that matched the rims of his eyes. He was also wearing the faintest hint of makeup. Virgil told him about the investigation, asked him where he was when Hemming was murdered.
“I was at her house for the meeting, I’m sure you know that, and then I was at home. By myself. Until ten o’clock or so, when Rob got home. I know that’s not a good alibi, but that’s where I was. Rob was down in Prairie du Chien, at a class on French cooking, with people who know him. Every winter, when it becomes intolerable here, I read boring books—last year it was Moby-Dick, this year it’s Proust. I know that won’t hold much water with you people . . .”
“We run into it all the time—people with no alibis,” Virgil said. He wanted to encourage Rhodes to talk, so he added, in a friendly way, “They’re usually innocent, because guilty guys try to fix up an alibi for themselves. The more elaborate they are, the more suspicious we are.”
Virgil looked at Knox. “And you were . . . where? At a class?”
“Yeah. In Prairie du Chien. I didn’t get home until late. After ten o’clock.”
“Were there a lot of people at the class?”
He shrugged. “Six or seven, I guess, not including the two instructors. I talked to most of them, I’ve got some names for you, if you need them.”
“I will,” Virgil said. “I really have to check everything. How long did the class run?”
Knox looked away. “Three hours. Mostly in the afternoon.”
“The afternoon? Why were you so late? Can’t be more than an hour from here.”
“It’s more than an hour even without the snow. More like two hours, and, with the snow, longer than that. I lived there for a couple of years, I hooked up with some friends and we hung out at their restaurant.”
“Gonna need those names.”
Knox was sullen. “You can have them. Check away.”
Rhodes had watched the interplay and now opened a desk drawer and took out a Kleenex tissue, huffed his nose into it, and threw the tissue into a wastebasket. “The thing is, Virgil, Rob really doesn’t know Gina,” he said. He looked at Knox. “I mean, have you even talked?”
Rob said, “Yeah, we talked that one time at the farmers’ market. When we got those pies.”
“That was five minutes,” Rhodes said. “God, why did they kill Gina? It must have been jealousy . . . Or maybe some crazy farmer who wasn’t paying his debts.”
Virgil: “When you say jealousy . . .”
“Gina was a fabulous-looking woman. She was smart and successful . . .”
“And you were married to her.”
“Yes. We loved each other, but at some point I became . . . confused . . . about exactly who . . . inhabits this body.” He slipped his hands down his chest. “My body. We didn’t clash over it, we didn’t argue about it, I think she sensed the problem even before I did. Oh, God . . . Anyway, we were going to get divorced so we both could explore alternative realities, but we remained the closest of friends.”
“I have to ask you this, but it’s a little embarrassing,” Virgil said. “Did you and she ever engage in . . . rough sex?”
Rhodes had started to slump but now straightened. “Was she . . . did somebody . . . before she died . . . ?”
“Sometime before she died. A week or so.”
“Well, it wasn’t me,” he said, his voice indignant. “We haven’t had sex for a long time. When we still slept in the same bed, I sometimes . . . helped her along.”
Virgil pushed him a bit, and Rhodes was willing to explain—actually, seemed happy to explain—until Virgil finally cut him off. He really didn’t want to hear it, and Rhodes said that their last active sexual engagement, which did not include intercourse, had been two years earlier.
Virgil skipped away from the sex to ask, “Do you know who will inherit?”
Rhodes put his elbows on the desk, knitted his fingers together, and looked at Virgil over his hands. “I suppose . . . we never did estate planning when we were married, we were too young . . . but I suppose her sister. I don’t know anything about Gina’s will. I know Rick James was her lawyer. He’d know.”
“Don’t lie to me, Justin,” Virgil said. “It makes me feel bad, and makes you look guilty.”
Justin flushed and said, “Ah, God, I knew somebody would get on me about that. I guess I have something coming. I’ve thought maybe I should decline. Should I decline?”
“I was told by somebody who knows you that you wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Virgil said. “They weren’t so sure about your friend Rob. Do you think Rob could find a use for that money?”
Knox said, “Fuck that. Fuck that.”
A spark appeared in Rhodes’s eyes. Anger? He leaned across the desk and said, “No! Rob is an angel. An angel! He would never!”
Knox settled back in his chair.
—
Virgil took out the list of people who’d been with Hemming the night she disappeared, showed it to Rhodes. “Yes, they were all there. All respectable businessmen and -women . . . Do you think she was killed by a man?”
“That’s my operating theory. Her body had to be moved a substantial distance, no matter where she went into the river. The killer had to be somebody with some strength, unless there were more than one of them.”
“Huh. Well, Ryan Harney is very fit; I see him at the gym. Dave Birkmann is too fat; he’d probably have a heart attack. He might be sorta strong, though . . . I don’t know. George Brown is strong; he could have carried her across the river. Barry Long is fit, I think, but I can’t even imagine why he’d hurt Gina.” He looked up, his eyes unfocused for a few seconds, then said, “Everybody likes Barry. He was the class president for three years, and he’s been in the State Legislature forever. But I’m not sure he’s . . . sexual. He’s not gay, for sure, but I’m not sure he’s heterosexual, either. Huh.”
He looked back down at the list. “None of the women could have moved a body. Margot Moore would be the strongest, but she’s too small. So . . . you know what I think?” He slid the list back toward Virgil. “I don’t think it was any of them. Or me or Rob. For sure, not me or Rob.”
Virgil: “Then . . .”
Rhodes held his hands up, a dismissive gesture. “You’re looking at the wrong people. The economy around here has never recovered from the crash in ’08. We used to have seven Realtors working out of this office, now we have three. A lot of businesses are still in trouble, a lot of places closing down because of Internet sales. Gina had a lot of loans out. A lot. She’s the main source of loan funds around here and she’s had to make serious decisions about people who can’t make payments.”
“I’d thought about that, but it opens up a whole universe of suspects, which is a problem,” Virgil said. “Is there anybody in particular who you think couldn’t pay and might be dangerous?”
“Nooo . . . The people at the bank could help you with that,” Rhodes said. “Now that I think of it, most people would suppose that their problem is with the bank, not with Gina. Kill her and the bank would still collect. Of course, as a decision maker, maybe the anger was aimed directly at her. Lots of people are plain stupid.”
—
Virgil talked with Rhodes for a few more minutes—Rhodes told him that Hemming was a “fussy dresser” and that she would never have gotten up in the morning and put on the same outfit she’d worn the night before—and despite Rhodes’s lack of alibi, Virgil was nearly ready to cross him off the list of suspects.
The fact that he’d been crying didn’t mean much—lots of killers cried after they’d offed their wives—but Rhodes seemed so nakedly open that Virgil believed him. Faking both openness and innocence at the same time wasn’t easy; most hardened sociopaths couldn’t pull it off.
That was not true of Rob Knox, who sat in his chair and smoldered, watching Virgil from the corners of his eyes.
Before he left, Virgil had Knox give him a list of names, the people he’d been with in Prairie du Chien.
—
As Virgil walked back to his truck, he was thinking about a grilled cheese sandwich. He’d gotten a good one at Shanker’s Bar and Grill the last time he was in town, so he went that way. At Shanker’s, he pulled into the parking lot, stopped in the second row of spaces, and climbed out of the truck.
As he did, a red pickup was pulling past him into the first row of spaces right outside the back door. He waited until it was stopped, noticed one of the stickers in the back window that showed a cartoon family: husband, wife, five kids—two boys and three girls, in a variety of sizes—two dogs and a cat.
Frankie had a sticker like that in the back of her truck, with a single woman and five boys, and, lately, a slightly askew sticker of a dog that actually resembled Honus, as much as any cartoon could.
As Virgil walked toward the bar’s back door, a woman got out of the passenger side, wrapped up in an old-style parka with a heavy snorkel hood that left nothing visible but her eyes.
As Virgil passed the truck, another woman got out of the backseat on the passenger side, and as he walked up to the door, he found that the truck had held four women, all bundled heavily against the cold. He didn’t think about the fact that the truck would be heated, and they certainly wouldn’t have needed the hoods inside it . . .
He got to the back door of the bar and politely held the door open, and the first woman coming through, half turned away from him, whipped back toward him, leading with her fist, and knocked him on his ass.
He was still sitting up, surprised as much as stunned, when the other three piled on, what he later estimated to be roughly six hundred pounds of woman flesh, and he tried to roll over but could barely move, felt the breath being squeezed out of his lungs.
Then they beat the hell out of him.
He couldn’t hear much, except a soprano voice squeaking—“You fucker, you fucker, you fucker”—keeping time with the blows.
They didn’t exactly know what they were doing, and his ribs did have some padding from his parka, or they would have hurt him much worse, but, as it was, they hurt him badly enough.
He kept trying to roll so he could get to his knees, but they kept hitting him in the face and knocking him flat on his back. He got in a couple of short punches, but the heavy parkas on the women soaked up the impact.
The woman in a blue parka did most of the hitting, with her big, hamlike fists, while the other three kept him pinned, one of them struggling to her feet and starting to kick him in the hip and legs. The woman in the blue parka broke his nose, and blood went everywhere all over his face, and one woman actually squealed at the sight.
Nearly blind now, he got his hand inside one of the hoods and grabbed some hair and yanked it out of the woman’s scalp, and the woman screamed and rolled away from him, but Ham Fist hit him in the forehead, and someone kicked him some more, and finally a woman with a nice soprano voice said, “Stay away from Jesse, you prick.”
The weight suddenly lifted, leaving him lying on a dirty crush of snow and ice, trying to catch his breath. The women ran back to the truck, one of them saying, “He yanked my hair out, I’m bleeding,” and then the four doors slammed shut. The truck started crunching across the gravel lot, but he couldn’t see it because of the blood in his eyes, and he was afraid they were going to run him over, so he blindly rolled toward the building until his back was against the concrete-block wall. He was low enough that the bumper couldn’t get him, close enough the wheels couldn’t get him . . . he hoped.
If he’d had a gun, he might have tried to shoot at the truck, but he didn’t have a gun. A few seconds later, the truck was gone.
Virgil wiped the blood from one eye, ran his tongue along his teeth. None seemed broken or loose, though he could taste blood. He found with some probing that his lower lip was cut, apparently on his own teeth.
He managed to get to his knees and crawl to the back door of the bar but couldn’t reach high enough to get hold of the handle. He scratched at the edge of the door until he got his fingers around an edge and pulled it open—smeared blood on the glass, found both hands were bleeding from the gravel in the parking lot. He crawled into the back hallway, where he fell flat again.
A man came out of the men’s room and stepped over him and said, “Hey, buddy, you had a little too much there . . . Oh, holy cats.” And the man started shouting, “Shanker! Shanker!”
A minute later, the bar owner was there, and he looked at Virgil and said to somebody Virgil couldn’t see, “This is Virgil Flowers. Get an ambulance. Get an ambulance . . .”
Everybody in town knows me, Virgil thought vaguely, and, safe for the moment, he let himself relax and let other people take care of him.
—
He was aware of the transfer to the ambulance, although he felt himself to be some distance from that event. Once in the ambulance, he tried to sit up but found that he was held down by a safety harness. A man’s face loomed over him and said, “Easy, there. Stay down.”
A minute later, they were at the Trippton Clinic, not his first visit. When they rolled the gurney inside, a familiar doc looked down at his face and said, “Virgil fuckin’ Flowers. How are those stitches holding in your scalp?”
Virgil said, “Aw, jeez . . .”
The doc said, “Good. You’re talking. I’m going to wash your face here.”
He did, and Virgil could see from both eyes, and again tried to sit up, but the doc put a hand on his chest and said, “Count backward from ninety-five by sevens.”
“I couldn’t do that unhurt or sober,” Virgil said.
“Okay, good, you’re not too concussed . . . But you’re going to have amazing black eyes. I’ve got to do something about your nose . . . Do you hurt anywhere else?”
“Hip.” Virgil had one hand free enough that he could pat his right hip.
The doc said to somebody Virgil couldn’t see, “Let’s get his clothes off,” and to Virgil, “We’re going to give you something to relax you. You’ll feel a little sting . . .”
—
When Virgil woke up, he was in a small room with a lot of electronic equipment, some of which was attached to him. He had a needle at the crook of his elbow, and a tube that led back to a bag on a rolling rack. A nurse stuck her head in the door and said, “You’re awake.”
“I could use some water,” Virgil said, his voice sounding like sandpaper on Sheetrock.
“I’ll get the doctor.”
Virgil didn’t know exactly how long it took before the doctor showed up, but it was long enough for him to realize that his nose hurt so bad that his upper teeth hurt as well. He wiggled his teeth with a finger, but everything felt solid. The doc came in with a bottle of water with a straw, held it while Virgil took a sip, and asked, “How do you feel?”
“Hurt.”
“You’ve got a displaced septum—not the nasal bones—the septum, the cartilage, which has been pushed off to the left. I can’t do much for you now except put a gel retainer on it to hold it in place until the swelling goes down. In two or three days we can take another look and come up with a permanent solution, which will probably involve wearing a brace for a while. In a few weeks, everything ought to be back to normal.”
“Goddamn them,” Virgil said. He would have ground his teeth, but that would have hurt too much. He took the water bottle from the doc and swallowed another sip.
“Yeah, whoever ‘them’ is. We’ve got a deputy hanging around waiting to speak to you.”
“Bunch of women,” Virgil grunted.
“Women?” The doctor’s voice had a query in it as though he suspected Virgil might have taken a harder hit to the head than he’d believed.
Virgil took another pull of the water, added, “Four of them. Red pickup. Caught me behind Shanker’s. Could have hurt me a lot worse. Must’ve weighed six or seven hundred pounds . . . piled on.”
“Ah, I see,” the doctor said, reassured by the detail. “One of them also spent some time kicking you in the right hip and leg. Your leg looks like somebody was hitting you with a baseball bat. No bones broken, but you’ll hurt for a while.”
“Can I walk?”
“Oh, sure. Want to take it easy at first, to make sure all the ligaments and tendons and so on are still hooked up where they’re supposed to be, but we did some X-rays and range-of-motion tests while you were asleep and I don’t see a problem. Wouldn’t want you using any aspirin or other blood thinners for a while.”
When the doctor ran out of diagnoses, Virgil asked, “When can I leave?”
“If you’re concussed, it’s not too bad. I’m told you never completely lost consciousness, although you got your bell rung pretty good. I want you to take it easy here the rest of the day and overnight.”
Virgil didn’t protest because he really felt like he could use the rest. The doctor said, “I’ll check in on you every once in a while, but, right now, go to sleep.”
“Gimme my cell phone,” Virgil said. “As long as my tongue isn’t crippled, I need to make some calls.”
The doc said, “That’s the first thing everybody asks for when they wake up . . . Goddamn cell phones make me tired. Guy’s in cardiac arrest, he wants his phone . . . I’ll give it to you, but don’t use it any more than you have to—you really need the sleep.”
Virgil got the phone, called Johnson Johnson, and told him what had happened. “I need you to get my truck out from behind Shanker’s. You know where the backup key is. There’s guns and other stuff in there, and I don’t want anyone breaking in. Don’t take it to the cabin—take it up to your place, where you and Clarice can keep an eye on it. Then, get my iPad out of the seat pocket and bring it down here.”
Johnson: “Wait a minute. You say a bunch of women beat the shit out of you?”
Virgil said, “Johnson, get the fuckin’ truck, okay?”
When he had Johnson moving, he called Jon Duncan at the BCA and told him, and Duncan said, “Holy crap, Virgil. What are you into now?”
“It’s that goddamn Barbie doll thing you put me on,” Virgil said. “Doesn’t have anything to do with the murder. I’ll be moving again tomorrow. Do not tell Frankie about this or she’ll jump in her truck and come running over here, all worried. We don’t need that.”
“You need Jenkins and Shrake?” Jenkins and Shrake were the BCA house thugs.
“No. Not yet anyway. What I need is some sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow morning and tell you where I’m at.”
“Take it easy, Virgil. Don’t push it. Do what the doctors tell you. If you need more time to recover, take it.”
“Yeah. Call you tomorrow.”
—
While he was talking to Johnson, a woman in a sheriff’s deputy’s uniform stepped through the door. They spent five minutes talking: he gave her what details he had on the attack, and she said she was sorry, they’d try to find the truck. And she went away.
Virgil dropped back on the pillow, thinking about the women who’d attacked him, and about the mysterious Jesse McGovern. From the reactions he’d gotten from Trippton people, he’d begun to push McGovern further down his list of priorities.
As an experienced cop, he was completely aware of the tragedies that sometimes followed a too-slavish application of the law. His own girlfriend had lived on the edge of the law for years, sometimes tiptoeing over the border. But she was a good mother, maybe a great mother, with five kids and no husband. If she hadn’t supported them, if she’d been trucked off to jail, her kids would have been screwed.
What do you do about those situations?
He’d nearly decided to let McGovern slide; the women who had beaten him had convinced him otherwise. If he could find the four of them, they’d be trundling off to the Shakopee women’s prison, and Jesse McGovern could suck on it.