TWENTY-ONE The next morning, Virgil met Pweters at Ma and Pa Kettle’s. They both ordered pancakes and link sausages and extra syrup, and Virgil told him about an anonymous phone call from the night before, with the tip about a blond guy in a GetOut! truck.
“You gonna talk to Birkmann about his employees or hit Fred Fitzgerald’s place?” Pweters asked. “I’ll tell you, Fitzgerald will be back on the street before noon.”
“Then let’s do his place first—maybe he’s got something about this B and D ring he had going. Maybe there were more people involved than Hemming and Moore.”
They talked about that, finished breakfast, and headed for Fitzgerald’s. On the way, Virgil called Jeff Purdy and asked, “You know that we’re gonna search Fred Fitzgerald’s place this morning?”
“Yes. Pweters has the warrant.”
“I know, we just had breakfast. Anyway, Fitzgerald’s got a computer up there, and the warrant covers it. Could you send somebody down and ask him what the password is? So we don’t have to break into it?”
“Get back to you in five minutes.”
He did, and Virgil wrote the password—Tatooine—on a piece of paper and put it in his pocket.
—
The day was dark and cold, the wind whistling down the Mississippi from the northeast, but there was no snow. Fitzgerald’s place was right across the street from the railroad tracks and the river, and a squadron of snowmobiles went by on the river as Virgil was pulling up.
Pweters had the warrant and Fitzgerald’s key ring, which had been confiscated at the jail, and they let themselves in. They spent twenty minutes on the first floor—the work area—not expecting to find much, and didn’t, except for a gun safe. The safe was keyed, and the key was on the key ring; when they opened the safe, they found no guns but, instead, a collection of action figures.
Virgil took out an eighteen-inch-high Joker figure, shook it a few times to see if something might be concealed inside, but it seemed solid. Pweters pointed him at the comic-book posters on the shop walls: Star Wars stormtroopers, Wonder Woman, Serpentor, Aquaman. “He’s a comics guy.”
They climbed the stairs and took in Fitzgerald’s living quarters more carefully. While Virgil scanned the bedroom, Pweters looked at an aging Apple iMac. He tried a couple of passwords but nothing worked. “I got no ideas,” Pweters said. “I’ve tried one, two, three, four, five . . . his initials . . . his name . . . tattoo . . .”
Virgil said, “Let me in there.”
Pweters moved, and Virgil tapped in a few letters into the password space, and the machine opened up. “Look at his emails, see who he’s talking to,” Virgil said.
“Holy shit, how’d you do that?” Pweters demanded.
“Password was Tatooine—you know, the Star Wars planet, and a pun on ‘tattoo.’ Couldn’t miss it, with those posters on the wall downstairs.”
“Hey, I’m fuckin’ impressed, man.”
“Routine, when you know what you’re doing,” Virgil said.
—
Virgil found a collection of B and D equipment, including some crappy handcuffs, in a box in a living room closet; also a folding massage table and several books on massage. Fitzgerald appeared to have a variety of sidelines, but that wasn’t unusual in an isolated small town.
“Got something here,” Pweters called.
Virgil went over to look as Pweters clicked through a list. “I put ‘spank’ in the search field, which would cover ‘spanking’ and other variations, and I got seventeen emails up. Looks like four or five different women . . . although, some of the emails could be guys, I guess . . . Jeez, I bet that’s Janet Lincoln, the JLinc one.”
“You know her?”
“Yeah, everybody does. She runs the Sugar Rush; it’s a candy store downtown. And ice cream and so on. She’s a little chubby . . .”
“Guess chubby people like to get spanked, too,” Virgil said.
Pweters laughed. “I was hoping to find McComber on the list.”
“Didn’t seem to go all that well last night,” Virgil said.
“Ah, I got her,” Pweters said. “She pushed me and I pushed her back. Now she’s worried that I’m not interested. So she’ll flirt with me next time and I’ll be cool. A little distant. Eventually, I’ll get her. I mean, she doesn’t have a lot of choice down here—last night she was out with a guy who does satellite TV installations.”
“You’re walking a thin line there, Pweters. Women do not like rejection.”
“Oh, I won’t reject her—I’ll make her work for it. I know she basically wants my body.” Pweters tapped the computer screen. “Say, look at this one. Cripes, I wonder if that’s Lucille Becker.”
“Looks like a Lucille Becker to me. What else would LuBec be? You know anybody else in town whose name would crunch down like that?”
“No, I don’t. Huh.”
“What does she do?” Virgil asked.
“She’s a fiftyish English teacher up at the high school. Had her my senior year, gave me an A. I could see her in black vinyl.”
“Let’s try to stay professional,” Virgil said. “By black vinyl, you mean the kind with cutouts over the butt?”
“Exactly,” Pweters said. He looked up and said, “I’m starting to feel a little dirty doing this. Violating their privacy.”
“Really?”
“No, not really.” He went back to the computer.
“Attaboy,” Virgil said. “Part of the job. Get those email addresses, check the letters for anything that might apply to the case, and put ‘whip,’ or something, into the search field.”
“I can do that.”
—
Virgil continued to prowl the apartment, stopped periodically to suggest new search terms for Pweters, but they found nothing that would tie Fitzgerald to the murders—nothing like a club that would match the one that must have been used on Hemming. And no guns at all.
He would have gotten rid of the gun, of course . . . The gun. He had to think about the gun. What had the witness said? The gunshots sounded like Moore had been clapping her hands? Twenty-two CBs, both shorts and longs, were quiet, but Bea Sawyer had recovered .22 long-rifle shells. If the inner door had been closed, or mostly closed, when Moore was shot, the sound might have been muffled.
“Hey, Pweters?”
“Yeah?”
“You know anybody who has a .22 pistol?”
“You mean, besides me?”
—
Virgil called the sheriff, asked him to round up Sandy Hart and Belle Penney, the two women who’d been playing Scrabble with Moore when she was murdered, and take them back to Moore’s house. “We’ll meet you there in an hour.”
He and Pweters finished with the search, and Virgil lugged Fitzgerald’s computer out to his truck; they had nine names of possible B and D clients and had found ties both to Hemming and to Moore. Hemming had disguised herself by using a masked account name on Gmail but had slipped up by signing one of her emails with a lowercase “g,” and in another, from the same Gmail account, mentioning that he couldn’t come over at the regular time because she had a meeting that wouldn’t break up until nine o’clock.
Moore had used her regular email account.
In some of the emails, there’d been quite explicit suggestions for upcoming events; Hemming had mentioned neckties, which confirmed what Virgil had thought about the four men’s ties he’d found in her dressing room.
“Doesn’t really help,” he told Pweters. “We’re confirming what we already knew.”
“Can’t believe Fitzgerald had nine clients,” Pweters said. “I mean, how would they find each other?”
“Maybe some kind of female underground communications system?”
“You think?”
Virgil scratched his head. “You know . . . Corbel Cain told me about a guy who knew about some B and D stuff over here. Can’t remember his name—I’ve got it in a notebook—but there are some guys who know about it, too. You’re just not one of them.”
“As far as you know,” Pweters said.
Virgil shook his head. “You’re far too much of a Dudley Do-Right to know about that kind of thing.”
—
Jeff Purdy, Sandy Hart, and Belle Penney were waiting when Virgil and Pweters got to Moore’s house. Pweters had made a quick stop at his apartment to pick up his .22, and Purdy had collected a stack of undistributed newspapers at the Republican-River before going to Moore’s.
Virgil explained what he planned to do, put the two women at the kitchen table, stacked the newspapers on Moore’s porch, closed the inner door all but a crack. Pweters had loaded three rounds into the gun’s magazine; Virgil jacked one into the chamber, and when everybody was ready, fired three quick shots into the pile of newspapers.
That done, he took the magazine out of the pistol, checked the chamber to make sure it was empty, handed the gun and magazine to Pweters, and went back inside to the kitchen. “What do you think?”
“Way louder,” Penney said.
Hart nodded. “Nothing like what we heard.” She clapped her hands quickly, a golf clap imitating Virgil’s three gunshots, and said, “That’s what we heard.”
“Guy’s got a silencer,” Purdy said. “Remember when you were here the last time? The guy selling silencers?”
Virgil said, “Yeah. Goddamnit, that doesn’t sound like . . . I mean, the first killing seemed like an accident. This sounds like, I dunno . . . a professional. Or a semipro anyway.”
Pweters began, “That guy”—he glanced at Purdy and the women, veered away—“who, uh, made the silencers. Did you get a list of people who bought them?”
“No, but he’s available. Up in Stillwater for another three years. If we need him,” Virgil said.
They thanked Purdy and the two women, and Purdy picked up the stack of papers, Pweters went to lock the gun in his truck. Purdy asked if they’d come up with anything at Fred Fitzgerald’s, and Virgil said they hadn’t found anything useful. With Purdy gone, Pweters said, “I almost blurted out that tip you got about a blond guy in a GetOut! truck.”
“I thought that might have been it,” Virgil said. “Good catch. We’ll keep that to ourselves for now. But I’m going to go talk to Birkmann about it.”
“You want me to come? I like this detecting shit.”
“Naw. Take Fitzgerald’s computer somewhere and read any email that looks like it might be something. Don’t think you’ll find much, but we can’t let it go. I’m gonna go find Birkmann.”
—
He was on his way to Birkmann’s office when he took a call from Jenkins, who, with his partner Shrake, made up the BCA’s muscle. Jenkins said, “We’re on our way down. You gonna be there?”
“Be where?”
“On the raid,” Jenkins said. “You know, these Barbie-Os. That’s your case, right?”
“Not really. I’m not going on any raid that I know of,” Virgil said. “What the hell is going on?”
Virgil heard Jenkins and Shrake talking in their truck but couldn’t make out what they were saying, then Shrake came up and said, “Virgil, we got a search warrant from the attorney general’s office to search a farm down there in Buchanan County. Specifically, the barn. There’s a PI down there who’s hooked into the governor’s office . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, Margaret Griffin. I talked to her last night and she was at a dead end. How did this get going?”
“I don’t know exactly, but she got a phone number for the ringleader of the Barbie-O people and got a GPS reading for this barn.”
“When did all this happen?”
“Well, we got the call at nine o’clock this morning, so it was before that. We went over and picked up the search warrant from an assistant AG, got it signed, and hit the road. We’ll be there in an hour and a half or so, if my nav system is correct. We thought you knew all this.”
“I didn’t know any of it,” Virgil said. “I probably won’t be on the raid—I’ve got these murders. Listen, guys, take it easy.”
“Heard something about you getting beat up,” Shrake said.
“Yeah, I did. The people who hurt me were a bunch of women who are making these dolls. These are people who are desperate for income. I don’t think they’d fight you, but take care. This could be more complicated than knocking on a door.”
Shrake said, “Huh. We were led to believe it was a door knock.”
“It probably will be. But be careful, for Christ’s sakes. Don’t hurt anyone. They’re mostly housewives.”
“We’ll take care,” Jenkins said.
“If you’re still down this evening, have dinner with me,” Virgil said.
“See you then,” Shrake said. “Keep your ass down.”
“You, too.”
—
Virgil sat in his truck, heater running full blast, getting madder and madder. He thought he knew what had happened: he’d told Margaret Griffin that he’d gotten a call from Jesse McGovern, and Griffin, as an experienced PI, had a hacker somewhere who could look at phone records.
They’d gotten into Virgil’s and had spotted the incoming call from the night before. He’d known that could happen—in theory, at least—and every PI he’d ever met had ways of getting into supposedly confidential, law-enforcement-only online records. It was illegal, but so common as to be ordinary. He shouldn’t have mentioned McGovern’s call to Griffin. He’d screwed up.
He had to think for a moment before he remembered where he’d seen a pay phone—there was one in Brown’s Bowling Alley—and he went that way, still thinking about what he was going to do. If he got caught, he could lose his job. But Griffin had betrayed him.
The bowling alley was mostly deserted; only three alleys were in use, but there was a gathering at the bar. Virgil, coming in the door at the far side, stopped at the pay phone, thought about it some more, and dropped in a quarter.
McGovern answered a moment later, and Virgil said, pitching his voice up and without identifying himself, “Your barn will be raided in the next couple hours. Somebody may be watching it right now. The phone you’re talking on is being tracked. Take the battery out. The main thing is, make sure nobody gets hurt.”
He hung up. McGovern might have recognized his voice, but if asked, he’d deny it. Lie. He liked his job and wasn’t ready to go for full-time writing.
What worried him most was the possibility that somebody would get hurt in the raid. The people making the dolls had shown a willingness to assault cops—there were still three of them on the loose—and if any of them had a gun . . .