EIGHT Hemming’s house was set higher than the street, a robber baron’s well-preserved Victorian mansion that looked out over the town, like a proper banker’s should. A red-brick driveway, perfectly cleared of snow, ran straight up past the house to a parking circle in back. A detached three-car garage, all yellow clapboard with a circular window above the center door, sat next to the parking area. A covered, fifty-foot-long swimming pool was visible on the far side of the lot, edged with now barren lilac bushes.
Virgil was impressed by the Victorian: a beautiful house, if you liked that style, yellow with blue trim, a level of snazz you didn’t often see outside of San Francisco. Hemming had spent some time getting it right, he thought.
He let himself in using the keys he’d gotten from Purdy.
Of the crime scenes Virgil had visited, Hemming’s house was one of the neater; even better, it didn’t carry the common odor of death or the disruptions of a crime scene crew. The kitchen did smell faintly of old food—garbage. There were two empty wine bottles and one half full, plus two empty beer bottles on the kitchen counter with a half dozen wineglasses showing traces of red wine. A wooden tray held a couple of Triscuits and two dried slices of white cheese.
Virgil checked a tall drawer in the counter and found a bag-lined garbage can with a crumbling cylinder of coffee grounds on top. There’d been little effort to clean up after the party, but there’d been some. Given the general tidiness of the house, it suggested that Hemming had been killed shortly after the party ended . . . but some time afterwards.
In the living room, Virgil found a blood spot on the carpet, no bigger than a quarter. She’d bled a bit from her ear canal, Thurston had said, accounting for the small size of the stain.
Nothing much in the living room to look at—a Steinway grand, one of the small models, furniture that was elegant but not particularly eye-catching, and nothing that might have been used as a club and then put back.
The room looked like a stage setting, as though it were only used by rare visitors. He found an office in the back, with a wide antique desk, an iMac computer, and a file cabinet. He turned on the computer, which asked for a password. He left it on, hoping he’d find a password as he went through the desk and files.
The first drawer of the cabinet was precisely arranged, red, yellow, and blue hanging files all carefully labeled—Car Insurance, House Insurance, Vanguard, Tax Estimates, Charitable Deductions, Expenses—and so on. Another drawer was half filled with boxes of used check duplicates, another filled with office supplies.
Nothing that looked like a password. He really wanted to get into the computer, so he called Duncan at the BCA and asked for a crime scene crew and a computer tech.
“Is the scene sealed up?”
“Can be, yeah,” Virgil said. “The locals have already walked through it, though.”
“Seal it, then. Bea’s out west, and Sean’s crew is all the way up in Grand Marais and won’t be back for at least a couple of days. I’ll get them going when I can, but it’ll be a couple of days anyway.”
“Do what you can,” Virgil said. “I’ll talk to the sheriff and put some tape on the doors, but sooner is better than later.”
Off the phone, he continued prowling the house. There were two identical doors in a hallway off the kitchen. Virgil popped the first one open and found a laundry room, along with a wall lined with pegs on which were hung a variety of coats and jackets. Three pairs of boots and one pair of moccasins sat under the coats, and two umbrellas were propped in a corner.
He closed the door. There wouldn’t be much in there, he thought, and he’d leave it for a qualified crime scene crew.
The second door revealed a set of steps to a basement. He turned on the lights, and at the bottom of the stairs he found a narrow room that had been fitted out as a gym, with a Livestrong elliptical machine facing a wall with an older flat-screen TV. A weight bench sat nearby, with some light dumbbells, and a yoga mat stretched out on the floor by the dumbbells. Another door led into a mechanical room. Again, nothing to catch the eye.
—
Virgil went back upstairs to the second floor, where he found three expansive bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms. All three had views of the frozen river and the bluffs of Wisconsin on the far side. Two rooms were apparently for guests: a pair of double beds in each, made up but unused-looking, bathrooms with toilets that showed a bit of sediment at the bottom of the bowls.
Hemming’s bedroom featured a king-sized bed, with an elaborate bathroom, including a sauna, and a walk-in closet with a dressing table. Virgil worked through the closet, looking for anything of interest, though he had no idea of what it might be. He saw some men’s neckties lying in a roll on a countertop and they made him wonder if a man were spending enough nights here to warrant leaving neckties?
He unrolled them, found four inexpensive ties, not especially attractive, all nylon rather than silk, like you might find in a discount store. Something was missing. Four ties, but no other male clothing. Odd.
He put the ties back and worked around the rest of the bedroom, found nothing that particularly interested him except a large, and empty, jewelry box, and an empty wall safe with an open door—had the sister taken the jewelry? Probably. Surely the sheriff’s investigator would have noticed the empty box and safe, and Purdy would have mentioned it if it were important.
Maybe.
The dressing table had a stack of drawers on each side. There were three electric outlets on the top of the table, with a phone charger still plugged into one. The top drawers were everyday clothing, though a lot of it, while the bottom drawers were filled with specialized gear—summer swimsuits in one, with swimming goggles, and ski clothing in the other. The bottom drawers felt too heavy when he pulled them open. He tried to pull them all the way out of the cabinet but couldn’t do it without breaking off the trim around the drawers.
He pushed on the back panel of one of the drawers, which didn’t move, but as he was doing that his fingers hit a protruding lump on the bottom of the drawer. He lifted out the layer of ski clothing covering the lump and found a pinky-finger-sized metal knob. When he pulled on it, the wooden bottom of the drawer came up, revealing a hidden space below, two and a half inches deep.
Inside were a chrome .38 caliber revolver, fully loaded; ten gold coins in separate square plastic boxes; and three banded stacks of twenty-dollar bills. Virgil had a vague idea that the coins would be worth more than a thousand dollars each for the gold alone, but these, he thought, might be for collectors. The banded twenties, if she hadn’t removed any of the bills, were worth two thousand dollars each.
He crawled on his hands and knees to the other drawer, found a similar knob, and lifted out the overlying stack of swim gear. In the space below, he found several sex toys—but not a vibrating Ken doll—and a whip. The whip had a black handle and foot-long strands of leather but didn’t look dangerous or even particularly punishing.
He called Purdy and told him about what he’d found, and Purdy said, “Goddamnit. We should have found that stuff. What do you want to do with it?”
“Why don’t we put the gun, coins, and cash in your evidence locker until the crime scene people clear them and then you can turn them over to the sister?”
“All right. I’ll have a car there in a few minutes to pick them up. What about the sex stuff?”
“I’m going to leave it for crime scene. Could have DNA.”
“All right,” Purdy said.
“Did you guys, or the sister, clean out the jewelry box and safe?”
“Yeah, the sister did, with Gina’s lawyer,” Purdy said. “They moved the stuff to a bank safe-deposit box until the will’s settled.”
—
Virgil took the coins and cash out of the drawer and stacked them on the dressing table, added the revolver to the collection—had Hemming been worried about her personal safety?—and pushed the drawers back in. He checked the dressing room door: solid oak, with a heavy dead bolt. A safe room, with a revolver, and a spot for a cell phone.
It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen a purse or the phone. He called Purdy again. “No, we don’t have them. I should have mentioned that—I noticed it the first night when I went over to her house.”
Virgil ended the call, walked out of the dressing room into the bedroom, went back and looked at the ties again. They’d been bothering him, and after looking at them a second time, he knew why. Men’s ties got wrinkled on both sides at the front of the neck, where the knot would be, with the short section that went around the back of a man’s neck smooth. These ties, all four of them, were badly wrinkled near the ends.
They had been used, Virgil thought, to tie somebody up—but tie her up comfortably.
Back in the bedroom, he dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. There were several boxes, with a variety of things inside them—the leaves for a table, Christmas ornaments.
He put the stuff back in the boxes and shoved them under the bed again.
One door in the upstairs hallway didn’t lead to a bedroom but to an attic instead. The stairs smelled musty and showed a layer of dust, without footprints, so he left it for the crime scene crew.
—
He continued prowling the house—checked the refrigerator, because women liked to hide things in the freezer, and checked the drawer under the stove—but found nothing more of interest.
He was about finished when a deputy showed up, and they counted out the coins and the cash and the deputy wrote a receipt for them and took them away. Virgil took a last look around, locked up, got some crime scene tape from his truck and put it across the exterior doors.
The house had more or less confirmed what people had been telling him: an impulsive killing by somebody who knew Hemming. Not a robbery—nothing out of place, with valuables left behind—but with some effort to delay discovery, with the removal of the body, phone, and purse.
He got out Purdy’s list, found the cell phone number of Hemming’s sister, and called it. The sister answered on the second ring, and Virgil identified himself and asked when and where they could meet. The sister suggested that Virgil come to their motel. Now would be fine.
—
Ann and Terry Ryan and their two boys had two connecting rooms at the Motel 6, Trippton’s premier hostelry. The boys, watching TV in the second room, looked up at Virgil and went back to the TV. The Ryan adults and Virgil talked in the first room. The Ryans seemed less distraught than tired, and worried, until Virgil mentioned the gold coins.
“Oh, thank God,” Ann Ryan said. She looked like her sister but a few years younger, strong-chinned and blond, close-cut hair. “Those are St. Gaudens twenty-dollar gold pieces. I got ten, and Gina got ten, when Dad died. They’re the rarest ones, and in perfect condition, and worth quite a bit. I didn’t want to mention them to anybody until . . . Well, we were worried . . .”
Terry Ryan stepped in. “We were afraid that if some sheriff’s deputy found them, we’d never see them again. We were going to search the house ourselves.”
Virgil opened his mouth to say something defensive, decided against it. Ann Ryan had grown up in the town and probably had fairly accurate ideas about local law enforcement. Instead, he asked, “Do you have any ideas of who might have done this to Gina? Anything at all, any hint?”
They were both shaking their heads before he finished asking. “We came up here for a week every summer, around the Fourth of July, but other than that we didn’t see Gina that much. She liked the boys, but . . . she had a different life than ours,” Ann said.
“A couple people have mentioned that Gina took the bank over when your father died . . . Is your mother still alive?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, no, she died of breast cancer when she was forty-two. I was ten, Gina was thirteen. Dad never remarried.”
“So . . . who inherits?”
“Oh, boy . . . we looked at the will,” Ann said. “Gina hadn’t changed it since she and Justin broke it off. She didn’t expect to die. The way it works, Dad left the bank to Gina and me, equally, but it was in a trust, and Gina was the sole trustee. So, I owned a third of the shares, and she owned a third, but she got to vote both thirds—she had control. Every year, she’d declare a dividend, and I’d get some money, and the other stockholders would get some money, but she controlled everything. When she died, I became the trustee. I get Gina’s stock and control two-thirds of it. We’ll probably sell the bank . . .”
“But that fuckin’ Justin gets the real estate,” Terry Ryan said. He was a tall, thin man, intense; looked like he’d spent a lot of time on a racing bike.
“Language,” Ann Ryan said to him, glancing through the door at the two boys in the other room. To Virgil: “Gina owns her house, and a condo down in Florida—a very nice condo, in Naples—Justin inherits those. She also had large cash investment accounts—I get those. She and Justin were talking to lawyers about a divorce, but she hadn’t changed her will. She simply didn’t think she was going to die . . .”
“Do you think Justin . . .”
Ann was shaking her head. “I’ve known him forever. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. But he has this boyfriend . . .”
“Rob Knox,” Terry Ryan said. “Justin moved out of Gina’s house last summer and he and Knox moved in together. Knox is a vicious little snake. He also thinks he’s got a great investment mind and he decided Trippton needed a French restaurant.” Terry snorted. “Can you believe that? A French restaurant? He hired some chef from down in Prairie du Chien, and they started a restaurant up here, with Justin’s money. I understand they’re in the process of losing their shirts.”
“You don’t know that,” Ann protested.
“Yeah? Garlic butter snails in Trippton? Are you kiddin’ me?” Terry said. “Truffled squab in sauce le orange? More like fuckin’ bridge pigeons, if you ask me. A hundred dollars a plate? In Trippton? I don’t think so.”
“Language,” Ann said. Virgil decided not to correct the “le orange/l’orange.”
Terry Ryan continued. “You want a tip, Virgil? Rob Knox is an ass”—he glanced at his wife—“a jerk. Would he kill Gina to get the real estate money? Yes. In a New York minute.”
“How much is the real estate worth?”
Hemming owned her house free and clear. The Florida condo had a mortgage on it—but if it were sold, the takeout would be about four hundred thousand dollars, Terry Ryan said. The house would be another six hundred thousand, even in Trippton.
“Altogether, Justin will clear around a million,” Terry Ryan said. “There’s no estate tax on the trust because of the way it was set up. Since the rest of her estate comes in under five mil, there’ll be no estate tax at all. He’ll get the whole amount tax-free.”
Ann said, “We sound greedy. We don’t want to sound that way. We’re not greedy, really. Terry’s a surgeon, and I’m a clinical psychologist, and we have an excellent income, especially for Iowa City. I’ve inherited a bunch, Terry will inherit from his folks when they die. We don’t need the money. But they were getting divorced . . .”
“And Knox is going to get the money from Justin and piss it away,” Terry said. “A guy who had nothing to do with Gina. Nothing.”
They had more to say, and Terry said it with more language to corrupt the boys, but what they said wasn’t of any help to Virgil.
But the inheritance . . . that was more than interesting.
—
Back in his truck, Virgil called Rhodes Realty and was told that Justin Rhodes was out on a call. He thought about Corbel Cain, supposedly Gina Hemming’s rough, on-again, off-again lover.
Time to pay him a visit.