TWENTY-EIGHT Virgil said good-bye to Johnson and called Jenkins. “You back in St. Paul?”
“Yup. What’s up?”
“I want you to run out to Stillwater,” Virgil said. Stillwater was the state penitentiary. “There’s a guy out there named Buster Gedney, doing five years on the school board murder case—he was manufacturing silencers and making full-auto modification kits for .223s. I need you to ask him a question about who he sold a silencer to.”
“I can do that. When do you need it?”
“Today.”
—
Even knowing who the killer was, Virgil had a major problem to deal with: it was perfectly possible to know who committed a murder without any chance of getting a conviction.
Virgil didn’t count on getting much from Gedney, a sad-sack machinist who’d been out on the periphery of the board murders. But Margot Moore’s friends who were at her house at the time of her murder said that the sound of the shots that killed her were as quiet as handclaps. Knowing whether Gedney sold a silencer to Virgil’s major suspect would be another good piece of the puzzle.
Virgil had realized something else: everything in the case depended on working out the precise time line Hemming was killed.
The Moore murder, on the other hand, had been so efficient that he’d have to name and arrest the killer before he could hope to find any evidence, because the only evidence would be the gun that was used to kill her, a semiautomatic .22. Semiauto .22 long-rifle pistols were made by a variety of manufacturers, including Ruger, Browning, Walther, Smith & Wesson, Sig, and Beretta. Ruger also made a semiautomatic .22 rifle, probably the most popular .22 in America, though Virgil doubted the shooter used a rifle. The firing pin’s impact mark made on the .22 shells found by the crime scene crew might give them the brand, which could be important.
But he had to get enough evidence to obtain a search warrant before he’d find the gun . . .
—
Virgil got on his phone, called Lucy Cheever. “You were absolutely the last to leave Gina Hemming’s house. If you had to make your best guess, what time was it? Down to the minute.”
Cheever said, after thinking about it, “Three or four minutes to nine.”
“Before nine o’clock?”
“Yes. People started leaving probably around eight-thirty or quarter to nine, but nobody stayed much longer after that. Gina said a few things to Margot and to Justin at the last minute, and then we had a few words, but I still think it was probably before nine when I left.”
“Did you make any phone calls or anything while you were driving home?”
“No. No, I didn’t. I was only a few minutes away; I drove straight home. If you really need an exact time, Justin is always on his phone, and I left before he’d gotten all the way down to the street. He might be able to tell you closer than I can . . .”
—
Virgil called Rhodes.
When he left Hemming’s house, Rhodes said, he’d driven home to continue reading Remembrance of Things Past in Knox’s absence. “I was probably halfway home when I called Rob to find out if he was on his way back to Trippton in the snow. He said he was . . .”
“Look at the ‘Recents’ on your phone and tell me what time the call went through.”
“Okay, hang on . . .”
A few seconds later, Rhodes said, “The call went through at nine-oh-two.”
“You were halfway home?”
“Well, maybe not exactly. I was driving home . . . I mean, I didn’t call him the minute I left Gina’s . . . It was some ways.”
“What time do you think you actually walked away from Gina’s? What time did you leave Lucy Cheever there with Gina?”
“I . . . guess . . . maybe eight fifty-five? If the call was at nine-oh-two, I had to walk down to my car and I said something to Margot, who was ahead of me a little, getting into her car, saying good night . . . So, yeah . . . eight fifty-five or thereabout.”
—
Virgil called David Birkmann. “When you left Hemming’s house, did you make any phone calls? Anything that would tell you the exact time that you left?”
“No . . . I didn’t have anybody to call. I just drove down to Club Gold. There were a bunch of people there who could probably tell you when I got there . . . Probably ten minutes to nine. Something like that. Why?”
“I realized I have to nail this time line down. I hadn’t understood how important it is.”
“Well, I walked down the driveway with Sheila. Maybe she made a call.”
“Thanks, Dave, I’ll check.”
—
Club Gold was closed when Virgil got there, but a couple of people were working inside. He banged on the glass door until an impatient man came trotting over—Jerry Clark, the manager. He opened the door and asked, “Virgil?”
“Yes. I need to talk to you about last Thursday.”
“Ooo-kay. Uh . . .”
Virgil followed Clark back to the bar’s office, closed the door, and said, “I don’t want you talking about what I’m going to tell you. ’Cause you could get killed.”
Clark was a thin man with a weathered face and knife-edge nose. His Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times, and he said, “I won’t talk to nobody.”
“I’m trying to nail down a time line and I need to know what time David Birkmann got here. Is there any way we can do that?”
“Depends on how close you need the time.”
“How close can you get me?” Virgil asked.
“We do videos of the karaoke. We start at about eight o’clock—maybe not exactly, but close—and we run the camera continuously until we quit at eleven or so. Sometimes we run a little late, or quit a little early, depending on how many people we get singing,” Clark said. “We could run the video forward and see exactly how long it runs before Dave came on . . . but I don’t know if we started exactly at eight, so we could be a few minutes off.”
“Where’s the video now?”
Clark pointed to a shelf hanging on a side wall. “Right there. We keep them on a hard drive. For ten bucks, we’ll email you a copy of your performance. You’d be surprised how many people ask.”
“Let’s take a look.”
—
Clark hooked the hard drive to a laptop, found the video from Thursday, and ran it fast-forward until they found Birkmann, who was climbing up on the stage, smiling and sweating. The video took in that part of the crowd, sitting at round metal tables in front of the stage. Other patrons walked back and forth in front of the camera from time to time. The audience gave Birkmann a brief round of applause and then he did a reasonably creditable version of “Pretty Woman.”
“Well . . . he was up there singing at nine-forty, give or take,” Clark said, looking at the time line running at the bottom of the video. “Probably not five minutes one way or the other.”
“Could he just walk up and get on the stage?”
“No, he would have had to sign up . . . but sometimes there isn’t much of a wait. It’s sorta like a party. We don’t have one person right after another; some guys sing three or four times . . . We don’t always stick right to the list, either, depending on who’s ready to go. He wouldn’t have to wait long.”
If Birkmann went back to Hemming’s house after he was sure that everybody else was out of sight—say, five minutes after nine o’clock—he would have had to kill her, let the body bleed into the carpet for a couple of minutes at least, move the body and arrange it, and get out of there and down to the bar and start singing, all in half an hour. A decent defense attorney would chop that time line to pieces, looking for every excuse to add a few minutes—like with the falling snow. Birkmann would have been driving carefully . . . A good attorney would stick an extra five minutes in there.
While Virgil was thinking about that, Clark muttered, “Let me see if I can . . .”
He ran the video backward, then forwards again, until he found a heavyset blond woman climbing up on the stage. “Okay,” Clark said. “Let’s see if Carroll’s in the crowd. He usually is.”
“What are we doing?” Virgil asked, looking back at the video.
“Looking for Carroll Wilson. That’s his wife, Jeanette, up there singing. Carroll’s usually . . . Yeah, there he is.” He stopped the video and tapped the head of a man who was sitting at a table below the stage but near its center.
When Jeanette started singing, Carroll stood up and took a photo with his cell phone.
“Thank you,” Virgil said. “Where can I find Carroll?”
“He’s got the Stihl chain saw dealership. We can call him.”
—
Carroll Wilson had the photos of his wife on his phone. The first one was taken, he said, right after his wife started singing. The time stamp at the top of the photo said 8:44.
“Don’t mess with that photo, we’ll want to save it as evidence,” Virgil said. “I’ll come by later to talk to you about it.”
“I’ll be here,” Wilson said.
Virgil didn’t say so, but when he said he’d come by to talk to him about it, he meant that he’d give Wilson a subpoena and take his phone away from him.
He and Clark went back to the video, marked the photo at 8:44, and ran the video forward to Birkmann’s appearance onstage. “We must’ve started a little late,” Clark said after they figured out the time line. “If Carroll took that picture at eight forty-four, Dave started singing at nine fifty-one.”
“I’ll need to take the hard drive with me,” Virgil said. “I’ll give you a receipt.”
“Okay, but I’m kinda into this now,” Clark said. “Let me roll back . . . Let’s see if we can spot Dave with his parka on . . .”
They couldn’t. The first time they saw him was when he moved into the video and climbed up on the stage, and he wasn’t wearing the parka.
“So he’d already hung it up,” Clark said.
“Do you have the sign-up sheets?”
Clark shook his head. “Threw them away as soon as we were done. They’re down at the landfill by now.”
They couldn’t think of any more ways of spotting Birkmann’s entrance to the club—no security cameras covering the parking lot—so Virgil was left with the video showing him getting onstage.
—
In his initial interview with Virgil, and the quick phone interview earlier that afternoon, Birkmann had suggested that he left Hemming’s house at around 8:45 and had driven directly to Club Gold and, shortly after, had begun singing. He hadn’t. In fact, if he’d been telling the truth about when he left Hemming’s house, he’d have been at the club for an hour before he went onstage.
Again, a good defense attorney could make a hash out of that. A guy goes to a bar, talks to people, has a couple of beers, signs up for karaoke . . . Who would know exactly how long you’d been there. An hour might seem like fifteen minutes.
Virgil sat in his truck outside Hemming’s house, eyes closed, and tried to imagine the string of events if the killer was David Birkmann, as he now thought likely.
—
Birkmann goes back to the house for some reason. He and Hemming have a quick and ultimately violent argument—money or sex, Virgil thought. Give them ten minutes for that. She slashes him with her nails, he hits her with something round or cylindrical, takes it with him when he leaves.
Give him an additional ten minutes to react to her death, move the body, run out of the house. According to that time line, he’s probably out of the house by 9:30, down at the bar by 9:37. Fred Fitzgerald arrives at 9:40 . . .
Tight, but workable . . . But he’d need more to get a conviction.
A confession would be good.
—
Virgil opened his eyes, sighed.
He’d been badly fooled by Birkmann’s very vulnerability. His obvious and genuine depression, the fact that the Hemming’s murder had left him distraught. When Virgil asked him about the GetOut! truck seen by Bobbie Cole outside Hemming’s house, he hadn’t tried to deny it—he’d actually insisted that it was probably his and let Virgil decide that Cole was an unreliable witness who’d gotten the time wrong.
He couldn’t have untangled that before Moore was killed—he still hadn’t untangled what that killing was about. Was it possible that it really was a separate problem?
But, no. It wasn’t.
—
He still had a few more people to check: Birkmann’s employees—the non-blonds. He had their names in his notebooks and he spent two hours that afternoon tracking them down. Because Hemming’s murder had been a sensation, all three men knew where they’d been the night of the murder.
Two of them had been at home with their families. The third had been with his girlfriend at the movies in La Crosse. Virgil checked on the La Crosse alibi with a phone call to the girlfriend, while he was still sitting with Birkmann’s employee, and the girlfriend confirmed it. That wasn’t airtight, but Virgil believed it anyway: all three said that they had little previous contact with either Hemming or Moore and had never done business with either of them.
—
Virgil was back in his truck when Jerry Clark, Club Gold manager, called. “I, uh, told my wife about talking to you. I figured when you said don’t tell anybody, you didn’t mean her . . .”
“Well . . . she can’t talk, Jerry. Honest to God, there’ve already been two murders, one in absolutely cold blood.”
“Yeah, okay. Anyway, she said that she’s sure she saw Dave come in from the parking lot with Cary Lowe. She said he still had his parka on. I don’t have Cary’s number, but he works at Home Electric and Appliance here on Main. You might check with him.”
“Great. But don’t tell anyone else.”
“I won’t. Promise.”
—
Virgil had seen the Home Electric store, did a U-turn, and went back to it. The store did both sales and small engine and electric repairs, and Lowe, the store’s assistant manager, was alone in the store’s workshop when Virgil arrived. Virgil asked about Birkmann.
“I do remember that,” Lowe said. “I didn’t see him come in from the parking lot, but I ran into him in the men’s can.”
“Was he still wearing his parka?”
“Yup. I remember that because there’s not a lot of room between the urinal and the sink, and your coats can kinda overlap. Dave was washing his hands, and I had to pee a little sideways to make sure I didn’t spray his coat.”
“Did you make a phone call around then? Something we could use to tell the time?”
“No, but it was probably . . . nine-thirty? Something like that?”
“Nine-thirty. Definitely after nine?”
“Oh, yeah,” Lowe said. “Thursday is store night in Trippton, and I was working until nine. There was no one in the store, so I locked up right at nine. The club’s only two blocks down, so I walked over, had a beer, was watching the karaoke, went back to pee, and ran into Dave in the men’s room. So that was probably . . . nine-thirty, give or take.”
“And he’d just come in from the parking lot?”
“I don’t know that; I didn’t see him come in. He had his parka on, though, and the club’s always warm.”
“Thank you,” Virgil said.
—
Virgil called Pweters, the sheriff’s deputy. “You working tonight?”
“Yeah, I’m three to eleven. You got something?”
“I’ll tell you about it when I see you. I’ve got some stuff to think about, so let’s plan to get together about five o’clock. You know where Johnson Johnson’s cabin is?”
“Yeah.”
“Meet you there at five.”
—
The cherry on the cake arrived a few minutes later when Lucas Davenport called Virgil from the Twin Cities. Davenport was now a federal marshal, no longer working with the BCA, but he and Virgil still talked.
“Jenkins called me,” Davenport said. “He wanted me to tell you that Buster Gedney didn’t sell any silencers to any of the people on your list.”
“That’s not good,” Virgil asked. “Why didn’t he call me himself?”
“Because he remembered something, despite being hit in the head a lot. He remembered that when I was doing the Black Hole investigation, that one of the guys involved in the murders had been a pest control officer.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He had a silenced Ruger .22 semiauto pistol that was made especially for sale to pest control officers. I don’t know if Ruger still makes them, but they did for a long time.”
“One of my suspects—the leading suspect—runs a pest control company,” Virgil said.
“Jenkins mentioned that. Now that we’ve solved your case for you, for which we plan to take full credit, I’d recommend that you go over and pick the guy up.”
“I’ll do that,” Virgil said.
Cherry on the cake.