TWENTY-TWO David Birkmann was out on bug patrol, according to the woman who sat in his office, just off Main Street. The office was a simple Sheetrock cube with off-white walls on which were hung a whiteboard, with assignments and messages written on it, and three separate corkboards with all manner of paper litter pinned to them. The place smelled a little funny, Virgil thought, a combination of body odor and bug-killing chemicals.
The woman’s name was Marge, and she said, “This is prime time for Dave, so he’ll be a little hard to catch. Rest of the year, it’s all about servicing the accounts, which our technicians take care of. January is when Dave signs up the accounts for another year, figures out fees and all of that, and he does most of it personally.”
“Maybe you can help me,” Virgil said. “How many vans do you have?”
“Maybe you should talk to Dave.” She gave him Birkmann’s phone number. When Virgil called, Birkmann said he was out of town, up on the bluffs. “I could be back in a half hour.”
“I need the answer to a routine question—how many vans do you have?” Virgil asked.
“Vans? Six. One for each technician. Can I ask why you’re asking?”
Virgil ignored the question. “Do the technicians leave the vans at the office or do they take them home?”
“They drive them home. They check in with their mileage every night before they get off; Marge reads it.”
“Are they allowed to drive the trucks when they’re off duty?”
“We discourage it,” Birkmann said. “But they do. No out-of-town trips, but, you know, they’ll stop at the Piggly Wiggly on the way home or run out to a store at night. It’s not really a problem. A small town, it’s only an extra mile on the truck . . . Does somebody think one of our vans was involved in the murders?”
“We have a witness who says one was parked on the street near Gina Hemming’s house the night of the murder.”
“That was me,” Birkmann said. “Right at the end of her driveway, off to the right? I was there from about seven o’clock to eight forty-five.”
“Don’t think it was you, Dave. It might have been someone else, and later than that.”
“Well . . . do you have a van number?” Birkmann asked. “A license plate? Do you know what the driver looked like?”
“Not exactly. Are your guys licensed in any way? Do they carry IDs?”
“Oh, sure. They all have a plastic ID card, with the business name on it and their photos,” Birkmann said.
“Are there copies of the photos here in your office?” Virgil asked.
“Yup. I’ll tell Marge to let you look at them, if you want,” Birkmann said.
“That’d be great,” Virgil said.
He was about to hang up, but Birkmann said, “Listen, all my guys are good guys. Are you sure it was one of our vans? And, if it was, I’ll bet it was mine. Is it possible that your witness got the time wrong? I mean, my truck was out there for almost two hours . . .”
“I can’t answer that,” Virgil said. “I’m not putting you off—I really can’t answer the question.”
—
He gave Marge his phone, and Birkmann told her to show Virgil the file photos of his drivers. They rang off, and Marge called up a file on her computer, with pictures of all six. Two were blond. Virgil wrote down the names, with their addresses and phone numbers, and put check marks by the two blonds.
—
Virgil spent the next hour and a half worrying about the raid of the barn used by the doll makers and trying to track down Birkmann’s pest control technicians.
The first one, Randall Cambden, wasn’t on the job, and Virgil eventually found him working part-time for a carpet company. “I’m only part-time with Dave in the winter, three days a week,” he said. They were in the back of the carpet salesroom. “I go back to full-time in April.”
In the meantime, he spent two days a week pulling out worn carpeting and working as an assistant to an installer.
On the Thursday night that Gina Hemming was killed, he said, he’d been league bowling, which is why he could answer the question without thinking about it. “I bowl every Thursday. And also every Monday, but that’s a different league.”
“At George Brown’s place?” Virgil asked. Brown was the guy who drank too much and tried to date twenty-year-olds.
“Yeah, that’s the only place in town. George keeps the league records and scores,” Cambden said. “I talked to him a couple times that night, and he’ll have my score sheet. We start at eight, finish up around ten-thirty.”
Virgil would confirm that with Brown but knew that Cambden was telling the truth. Cambden said that he was home with his wife when Moore was killed. Virgil asked him, “Do you guys carry guns in your trucks?”
“No. Why would we?”
“Well, you do animal control . . .”
“We trap them with Havaharts. Squirrels, coons, skunks. If we have a problem with a dog or something, we call the cops. Dave Birkmann shot a deer once but said he wasn’t going to do that again. Too many liability problems. One bad ricochet, killing some guy on the street, and he gets sued and loses the company. If we need to get rid of a deer, we usually have the homeowner contact a bow-hunting club in town. They’ve got a couple guys who can take care of the problem.”
“You wouldn’t carry .22s.”
“Nope. I guess the old-timey guys did, but there are so many rules and regulations now . . . You can get busted for firing a gun inside the city limits, you know. So, no guns. Sorry.”
The second blond, Bill Houston, was a fifty-five-year-old bachelor and had no specific alibi for nine o’clock on Thursday. “Thursday is church night for me. I never miss, but I’m there only from four to eight. We run a food bank from four to seven, then we have the service, and we get out around eight. After that, I walk back to my apartment and watch TV and go to bed.”
“So you’re religious?”
“Somewhat religious. The pastor runs a program for alcoholics, and they got me to stop drinking twelve years ago. I’m grateful for that: they gave me my life back. So, church every Sunday and Wednesday, plus the food bank and the short service on Thursdays.”
Virgil thanked him and left, scratching his head. He’d check, but he was sure that neither Cambden nor Houston had killed Hemming.
—
After thinking it over for a moment, he took his phone out and called the number that Jesse McGovern had used to call him—and got nothing. She’d pulled the batteries on her phone. He called Jenkins and asked, “Where are you guys?”
“We’re out west of Trippton, setting up to go into this farm. You want to join in?”
“I’m thinking I might. When are you gonna hit it?”
“We’re sitting here in our truck, talking to Margaret. We’re only about a half mile away . . . probably two or three minutes.”
“Give me the location, I’ll meet you there. See what you get.”
—
The farm was seven miles west of Trippton, up beyond the river bluffs and back in the hills of the Driftless Area. The farmhouse was a shabby ranch style, with yellow siding overdue for paint. The barn behind it was as shabby as the house, but dirty white instead of yellow. The snow outside the barn’s main doors was covered with tire tracks, but none of the tracks went into the barn. A small access door to the right of the main doors appeared to have a lot of foot traffic.
The farm’s fields were actually cut into the hillside behind the house; a small apple orchard stretched along the road.
When Virgil arrived, Jenkins, Shrake, and Griffin were standing outside the barn, and a woman in a heavy sweater, arms crossed over her chest, was walking away from them. When she saw Virgil getting out of his truck, she stopped, glared at him, and went into the house; one of the women who beat him up, Virgil guessed. Virgil bumped gloved knuckles with Jenkins and Shrake, said hi to Griffin, and asked, “What’d you get?”
“To use official law enforcement terminology, ‘jack shit,’” Shrake said.
“There’s a big bare spot in the middle of the barn, and a dozen chairs, but not a single doll in sight.”
Jenkins said, “We talked to Miz Homer there, but all she said was she wants a lawyer. End of story.”
Griffin was fuming. “You can tell something was going on in the barn. All those chairs?”
“There’s a propane heater in there, but the heater’s cold and the barn’s cold, so if that’s where they were working, they weren’t working for a while,” Jenkins said. “The farm lady said they had a barn dance, is why they have the chairs.”
“She’s lying, it’s obvious,” Griffin said. “Who’s going to a barn dance here in the middle of winter? That’s crazy.”
“Probably. What are you guys going to do?” Virgil asked. Relieved in a couple of ways: nobody got hurt, and he was going to get away with it.
Jenkins shrugged. “We’re here overnight. It’s a bad trip down, the highways are a mess. We’re still good for dinner if you are.”
“I am. I’ll get Johnson Johnson, and we’ll make a deal out of it,” Virgil said. To Griffin: “How the heck did you find this place anyway?”
“Got a tip,” she lied. “I’ve been spreading some money around.”
Virgil played along. “Get back to your source. I agree that this was probably one of their assembly sites, if this farm lady is already talking about a lawyer. If your guy knew about this one, maybe he’ll know about another. The boys will be here overnight, if you can find the next spot . . .”
She nodded. “I’ll try. Christ, it’s cold. It’s like Siberia. Why the fuck would anybody live here?”
“We like it, that’s why,” Jenkins said. “Every March, me’n Shrake fly into LAX and drive over to Palm Springs to play golf. No offense, but L.A. is a shithole. Minnesota isn’t.”
—
On that note, they broke up, with Griffin still fuming, Jenkins and Shrake unfulfilled—they liked nothing better than a screaming raid—and Virgil satisfied that he’d worked things through. On his way back to town, Jesse McGovern called. All he saw on his phone was “Unknown,” but he’d wondered if she might call.
“We got raided this afternoon,” she said.
“I was there,” Virgil said, putting a little gravel in his voice. Maybe she was checking his voice to see if he was the man who tipped her. “We know goddamn well that you were building dolls down there. Give it up, Jesse.”
“You tracked me on my phone, didn’t you?”
“I can’t reveal law enforcement techniques, you gotta know that,” Virgil said. “If you’d stop making those dolls, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Tell that woman that we’re almost done.”
“I told her last night,” Virgil said. “She used to be a cop, and she’s getting paid for being here. I don’t think she’s gonna quit until she hands you the paper. You know, you could stop doing the dolls now, knock on her door down at Ma and Pa’s, take the paper, and she’ll be out of here. She doesn’t like the winter. If you can show that you’ve ceased and desisted—take a vacation down to Florida—you’d be in the clear.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
“I got a question for you about that van your guy saw,” Virgil said. “Is it possible that whoever saw it saw it a little earlier than you say?”
“No.”
“That sounds pretty definite.”
“She gets off work at nine o’clock, I won’t tell you where,” McGovern said. “She stopped at Piggly Wiggly to get a rotisserie chicken and some potato salad, which probably took ten minutes, and then saw the van when she was driving home. Probably between twenty after and nine-thirty.”
“She got off at nine o’clock for sure?”
“Where she works, they don’t go a minute past nine. Her replacement doesn’t start a minute before nine. That kind of place. She walked out no later than nine-oh-one, or however long it took her to put her coat on.”
“I need to talk to her.”
“I’ll tell her,” McGovern said and hung up.
—
Virgil drove into town, thinking it over. The woman had a job and got off at nine. She had a replacement, a swing-shift worker. That probably meant that the job was either a two-shift or a full twenty-four hours a day. The clinic? A possibility. What else was open those hours in Trippton?
He called Johnson Johnson and got a list. The clinic, one convenience store, three restaurants, two liquor stores, the bowling alley. Bernie’s Books was open until eleven, but nobody would be working a two-hour shift. And Jimmy worked until it closed, Johnson thought . . . The sheriff’s office . . . The boot factory had once had two shifts but now was down to one, seven to three, and even that shift was light. . . . Other than that, nothing.
The list was short enough that Virgil ran through it in a hurry. The clinic had regular hours: seven to three, three to eleven, and eleven to seven. The restaurants ran two shifts, as did the liquor stores. No shift at any of the places started or ended at nine o’clock.
The convenience store . . .
Virgil found the pear-shaped assistant manager there, and a plumber working on a compressor for a cooler, and the assistant manager, whose name was Jay, said, “Yeah, Bobbie gets off at nine. She works Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.”
“What’s Bobbie’s last name?”
“Cole. What’d she do?”
“Nothing,” Virgil said. “Where can I find her?”
“She’s standing behind the counter, wearing a red sweater.”
—
Virgil introduced himself to Bobbie Cole, a short, stocky woman with chromed hair who was rearranging the candy stacks in front of her cash register. A half-eaten PayDay bar sat on the counter. She said, “Didn’t take long to find me. How’d you do that?”
Virgil ignored the question and asked, “How sure are you that you saw a GetOut! truck outside Gina Hemming’s house? After nine o’clock?”
“Positive.” She crossed her arms defensively. “I get off here exactly at nine on Thursdays. I drive past her house every night after I get off. I saw the truck.”
“There was for sure a GetOut! truck there earlier . . .”
“But I wasn’t,” she said.
“How sure are you that the guy inside was blond?”
“Positive. I was coming up behind him when he must’ve put his foot on the brake pedal, because the brake lights came on. And that made me sort of jerk, because I was afraid he was going to pull out. I went past and looked over and could see a man in the front seat. And he was looking at something over in the passenger seat, because his back was turned to me, and his hair was bright yellow. I seen it. And that’s that.”
“No idea about his age or anything? Or anything about the truck . . .”
Jay, the guy who’d been working on the cooler, had come up behind Virgil, stopping back in the Hostess pastries section. Virgil didn’t see him until Cole looked past him and said, “Jay, you still have the time clock cards from Thursday, right?”
“Sure.”
“Virgil here doesn’t believe me when I say I got off at nine.” She looked at Virgil. “The time card will show you the exact minute. My guess is nine-oh-one.”
Virgil: “It’s not that I don’t believe you . . .”
Jay said, “Let’s go look.” There were people out at the gas pumps, and he added, “Bobbie, better stay up here with the register.”
—
Jay didn’t have an office so much as a closet, with a time clock and a couple of file cabinets and a chest-high bench. He pulled the time cards for the previous week, ducked his head back out the door to check on Bobbie. In a low voice he said, “Officer . . . uh . . . You gotta be a little careful with Bobbie.”
Virgil’s heart sank. “In what way?”
“Everybody who comes in talks about Gina getting killed, and now Margot what’s-her-name . . .”
“Moore . . .”
“Yeah, Moore. Bobbie made herself into the local expert on it, she’s heard every rumor there is. I didn’t know about her spotting the GetOut! truck until yesterday—I mean, a week after she saw it. She never mentioned it before. So . . . anyway, there’s this medical truck that goes around from town to town, they’ve got a machine that checks your neck artery to see if it’s getting clogged up or anything. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Yeah, the ultrasound truck.”
“That’s it. Anyway, it’s a drop-in thing. And my doc keeps telling me I ought to get one ’cause, you know, I kinda let myself get out of shape.”
“Okay.”
“Last month, I came in, and Bobbie was behind the counter and says, ‘Jay, the ultrasound truck is down in the Hardware Hank parking lot. Weren’t you supposed to do that?’”
“And I say, ‘Absolutely.’ I leave her in the store and go down to the Hardware Hank, no truck. I went inside and asked at customer service, and the truck was there the day before . . . She’d seen it the day before.”
“Oh, boy,” Virgil said.
“I’m not saying she’s wrong, I’m just sayin’.”
“Got it,” Virgil said.
Jay had been going through the time cards for the previous week and held one up. “Here’s her time card. Out of here at nine-oh-one.”
“So she’s accurate about that,” Virgil said.
“Sure, but . . . she was out of here at nine-oh-one on Wednesday and nine-oh-three on Friday,” Jay said, peering at the card. “People don’t stick around after work, and if their replacement comes in late, the counter people can get nasty about it. Feet hurt, knees hurt. I hate to say it, but it’s sort of a shit job. Nobody gets here late—and everybody gets out of here on time. Every time.”
—
Virgil ran into unreliable witnesses all the time, and Cole seemed like a classic. People could be a close-up eyewitness to a robbery and not be able to tell you whether the robber was black or white, whether he had a gun or a knife. When they were more distant from the event but had been prepped to talk to the cops through rumors and media reports, their information was often useless or, worse, completely misleading.
But not always. Sometimes, they were right on.
—
At the moment, though, he was at a dead end on the blond GetOut! van driver. He’d needed to talk to the Cheevers since the day before, and he left the convenience store and headed over to the Chevrolet dealership.