TWENTY-NINE When Virgil called that afternoon, David Birkmann was sitting in his van outside the Corsair Motel in Rochester. They spoke only a few minutes, but Birkmann thought Flowers was working on an idea and that that idea would take him to Birkmann as the killer.
Birkmann knew as much about guns as the average Minnesota small-town male, which was actually quite a bit: he’d owned two 12-gauge shotguns and a .22 rifle and had shot a dozen deer over fifteen seasons of hunting.
As far as pistols were concerned, he’d forgotten about his father’s old Ruger until he needed it. But if you’d handled other guns, its operation was simple enough, and an hour on the Internet gave him all the information he needed about cleaning and servicing the .22.
It’d worked faultlessly when he killed Margot Moore.
Still, one thing he knew for sure was that if he were going to kill himself, he wouldn’t do it with the .22. Three shots in the forehead might reliably kill, but his research on the Internet suggested that a suicide attempt with a .22 might leave him as a vegetable rather than painlessly dead.
One of the shotguns would work, of course, but they’d blow most of his head off. He wanted something tidier than that: he was thinking a .38. A cheap gun would be fine because he didn’t plan to target-shoot with it or even shoot it more than once.
He’d also considered going up to the I-90 bridge and throwing himself off. The fall onto the ice would kill him instantly. But . . . he was afraid of heights. The idea of looking down to the point of impact made him nauseated even thinking about it.
This is where he’d gotten to a week after he’d killed the only woman he’d ever really loved and killed another woman who really hadn’t deserved it. He’d killed Moore when he still had fantasies of getting away with it all . . .
The fantasies were going away, and he was going to kill himself. He couldn’t bear the thought of being led into the county court in an orange jumpsuit and chains, his friends and neighbors peering at him in disbelief.
—
Birkmann had been to gun shows several times—they were social events in Trippton—and the show in Rochester was like all the other ones, if larger. Private dealers worked out of individual motel rooms, usually showing ten or twenty weapons of a particular type. The “big room” had fifty dealers set up on a spiral of tables, selling everything from T-shirts and bumper stickers—“Honk If You’ve Never Seen a Gun Fired From a Vehicle,” “If Babies Had Guns, They Wouldn’t Be Aborted”—to tiny derringers for ninety dollars and massive .50 caliber Barretts for ten thousand.
He circled past the T-shirt, decal, bumper sticker, and knife sellers in the big room, looked in confusion at the array of AR-15 parts, watched a woman demonstrating a speedloader for a .44 Magnum pistol as long as her forearm, and eventually found what he wanted in one of the private dealer rooms: a table full of Ruger revolvers.
He knew he wanted a simple .38 but, being Minnesotan, wound up with a diminutive chrome Ruger revolver that would shoot both .38 specials and .357 Magnums.
“No tax on that, this is a private sale,” the dealer said. “Won’t have to fool around with the background check, so you can put it right in your pocket and take it home. Plus, of course, it chambers those .357s for home defense as well as .38s for practice.”
Birkmann made himself smile, a rare thing for the past week, when he went for the .357 because it would shoot both rounds. In other words, a deal: two-for-one. Not like he really needed the bargain, if he was only going to fire it once, but if you were Minnesotan you went for the deal.
Birkmann bought the gun and a box of .38s, which would be more than sufficient for a suicide, and, without exactly putting his finger on the reason why, a box of .357s. He’d almost gotten away with it, he thought. That didn’t make him much happier.
David—he thought of himself as David rather than Big Dave, Daveareeno, Daveissimo, D-Man, Chips, or Bug Boy—didn’t consider himself a killer.
Not a real killer. Even when it came to suicide.
—
Birkmann drove back to Trippton, whimpering from time to time, with the gun on the passenger seat, tricking up the truck with dark energy. And he thought about the past week.
Gina Hemming, the rich, arrogant, divorced bank chairwoman of the board and president of the Second National Bank and Class of ’92’s Most Likely to Succeed, and David Birkmann, financially okay divorced owner of GetOut! and a Main Street donut shop, ’92’s class clown—one of them carrying a spectacularly unrequited love . . .
Then Margot Moore . . . He’d been at the Dunkin’ Donuts store when Moore jogged across the street from Moore Financial wrapped in a business jacket, good enough for a quick two minutes in the cold. They’d talked for a while about Hemming’s murder, because everybody was talking about it, and they talked about Virgil Flowers’s investigation.
“He’s pushing everybody. He’s heard about stuff that nobody else ever knew about, about who’s been sleeping with who,” Birkmann confided to Moore. “He even asked me about that spanking thing, the D and B . . .”
“B and D,” Moore said, correcting him. “I think what he’s basically doing is working out a time line to see who was the last to leave Gina’s place, who might have gone back, who might have seen somebody else driving around . . .”
Birkmann shook his head. “Don’t know about that. By nine o’clock, I was already down at Club Gold, doing the karaoke.”
Moore frowned. “I thought you left after me. I thought your van was still there when I pulled out.”
Birkmann shook his head. “Naw, I was out of there early. I’m not a meeting guy. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Make me run around in circles with a committee and I get this need to escape.”
Moore nodded, and they talked about the possibility that Hemming’s death was an accident. There’d been rumors she’d fallen down the stairs.
Even as they talked, Birkmann’s heart felt as though somebody had gripped it in his fist and squeezed. Moore remembered that he hadn’t been gone at nine o’clock, that he’d been the last to leave. Sooner or later, Flowers would hear about that.
He hadn’t wanted to kill Moore—he liked her—but it was a matter of survival. He hadn’t deserved what had happened to him with Gina Hemming, it had been an accident, but there was no possibility of walking away from it. At least with the .22, it had been quick.
Three shots and he was off . . . panicked, hiding out at home, the .22 wrapped in rags and stuffed behind some rafters in the basement. He heard the next day, at the donut shop, that there had been two women in the kitchen when he killed Moore at the front door. That was a shock, but . . . nothing happened.
Nothing. Had. Happened.
Then Flowers had come asking about a blond man sitting in a GetOut! truck after nine o’clock at Hemming’s house. Birkmann wasn’t blond, and he had no idea why Flowers was looking for a blond, but, sooner or later, he’d be back to Birkmann.
But Birkmann would be gone . . .
Wouldn’t he?