NINE Corbel Cain’s heavy-equipment yard had a variety of yellow John Deeres and Caterpillars lined up at one edge of the two-acre lot, including a huge excavator with a claw at the end of its boom instead of a bucket. Probably used for demolition, Virgil thought. If you needed a house ripped apart, right now, that would do it. A sprawling gray metal building stood on the back of the lot, and two men in battered canvas work clothes were working on a bulldozer’s hydraulics, pumping steamy breath out into the cold air as they worked.
The company office was inside a low, unadorned concrete-block building with narrow barred windows. Virgil went to the front door and pushed through, found two women and a man working behind a wooden service counter. The place smelled of diesel exhaust and multipurpose cleaning liquid.
“Can I help you?” one of the women asked.
“I need to talk to Corbel Cain,” Virgil said. “Is he in?”
“Can I tell him what it’s about?”
“It’s private,” Virgil said. He held up his ID. “I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and I’m hoping Mr. Cain can help me out.”
“Really? Well, hang on a minute.” She picked up a phone and said, “Corbel, you’re needed in the office.” As she spoke, Virgil heard her voice ringing through a speaker outside. She hung up and said, “He ought to be here in a minute or two.”
On the way across town, Virgil had called the duty officer at the BCA and had given him Corbel Cain’s name. “Don’t know his birthday, lived his life in Trippton, Minnesota. I do have an address, which should give you his DOB from his driver’s license.”
The duty officer called back as Virgil was leaning on Cain’s shop counter. “We show three arrests involving domestics, no convictions, two DWIs, paid fines on both of those, the last one was in 2010. Not a lot of detail on the domestics, but it appears that the charges were withdrawn by the victim.”
Virgil rang off, and five minutes after the woman had called for him, Cain pushed through the front door. His face was red from the cold, and he was wearing a heavy yellow canvas work jacket over a hoodie and cloth work gloves. He nodded at Virgil and said, “I’m Corbel. Can I help you?”
Virgil repeated what he’d told the woman, and Cain said, “Well, come on back.” He led Virgil through a door at the back of the building and into an office that smelled of cigarettes and was decorated with a couple of stuffed muskies, a twelve-point deer head, and an ancient, carefully preserved Snap-on Tool calendar.
Cain stripped off his jacket, dropped it on the floor, sat behind his desk, pointed at a plastic visitor’s chair, and asked, “What’s this about?”
“About Gina Hemming,” Virgil said, as he settled into the chair.
“I don’t want any shit about that, from you or anybody else, especially that dipshit Purdy,” Cain said. “I’m really serious. I liked her, she was an interesting woman, and I’m more than a little pissed about what happened.”
“I don’t know yet if I’m going to give you shit, Corbel, but I’ve got some questions and I need some answers,” Virgil said.
Cain was an inch or two shorter than Virgil, but wider and thicker. He had a strong-boned face, and wore his hair longer than Virgil’s, halfway down his neck. His face and hands were heavily weathered, and he had a piece of paper medical tape stuck to one cheek over the hint of a nonstick pad. He put a leg up on a corner of his desk, the cleats pointed at Virgil’s face, scowled, and said, “If you’re here, you know I used to sleep with Gina. I haven’t for years. The murder’s got nothing to do with me.”
Virgil said, “A couple of people have mentioned that you and Gina had an off-and-on sexual relationship. You also have several domestics on your record, so . . .”
Cain shook his head. “I don’t know who told you about the affair, but they must not have told you it’s been over for quite a while. We broke it off three years ago, and I’ve hardly seen her since—never, except on the street. When we saw each other on the street, we usually had a good laugh. I never would have hurt her. I never would have. I liked the pussy, but we were never like a big passion or anything.”
“Three years?”
“About three . . . except it was in the summer when we broke it off . . . It could be two and a half, could be three . . . Let me think.” He scratched at the bandage and said, “Three. Yup, three years. Three and a half. I didn’t have to shut her up to hide her from my wife or anything stupid like that because Janey already knew about it. You can ask her, if you want.”
“Purely out of friendly curiosity, where did that bandage come from? On your face?”
“Why? Did she fight back and cut somebody?”
“Where—”
“She did, didn’t she? She was a tough girl. Good for her.” Cain reached up and touched the bandage. “Mohs surgery, they cut out one of those basal cell panorama things. Takes six or eight weeks to heal up. I can give you the doctor’s name and all kinds of people have seen it on me, for three weeks now. Looking at you, by the way—you’re gonna get some real-time experience with the Mohs. Blond and too much sun will do it every time.”
Virgil asked him a few more questions—Cain said he had no idea of who else Hemming had dated recently. Virgil mentioned the signs of a B and D relationship, and Cain’s eyebrows went up. “Really? That’s something new. I mean, that girl really liked to get moved around, if you’ll pardon the expression, but she never even hinted she’d be interested in anything like that.”
“When you say that Gina liked to be moved around . . .”
“She liked it that I was big. And I’m strong. So . . . I could pick her up and turn her around and move her. She was pretty big herself, and she said I made her feel like a girl . . . that’s what I meant. She was married to this guy . . . Justin . . . he didn’t move her around much. If at all.”
“You weren’t exactly sweethearts,” Virgil suggested.
“Like I said, not a big passion. I was having trouble with my wife . . .”
“Involve a shotgun?” Virgil asked.
Cain flinched, then smiled. “Damn, you’ve got some sources there, Flowers . . . Nobody there for that except me and the old man. There wasn’t a shotgun, the time I’m talking about. What I was going to say is, I was having trouble with my wife, I was living at Ma and Pa’s for a couple of weeks. I called up Gina and she blew me off—she was packing for a trip. I got down to pleading with her. Didn’t do any good, she blew me off anyway. Another time, she called me up, but I was going deer hunting and I didn’t want to miss the party we have the night before the season opened, so I blew her off. Made her unhappy. We were like that: we liked the sex, but we weren’t all that romantic about it. Or committed to anything.”
—
Okay.” Virgil pushed him on the charges of domestic violence, but Cain claimed they came in the wake of brawls with his wife, brawls that went both ways. He claimed that she’d attacked him more often than he ever smacked her, and she usually came after him with something that would hurt, like a coffeepot.
“The cops always charge the guy, and after everybody talks to the sheriff and the judge, they usually let it go. That’s what happened with me,” Cain said.
“Don’t do that anymore,” Virgil said.
“What am I supposed to do when the woman comes after me with a coffeepot?”
“Run,” Virgil said. “Seriously. It’s the best answer.”
Cain almost laughed. “Probably the best idea. Last time, though, she had me cornered in the bedroom.”
—
When Virgil finished with the questions, Cain had a few of his own. “How was she killed?”
“Struck once with something heavy,” Virgil said.
“She wasn’t thrown in the river and drowned?”
“No.”
Cain made a twitchy movement with his hands. “You know where Orly Crick is?”
“Yes.”
“I went through the ice there, when I was a kid,” Cain said. “Almost got pulled downstream, under the unbroken ice. I’ve had nightmares ever since, about getting stuck under the ice, trying to break my way up . . . Good she was dead before she went in.”
“Well . . .”
Cain asked, “Have you figured out how she got in the water? River’s froze solid for miles.”
“I don’t know where she went in, but her body came up at the sewer plant outflow,” Virgil said.
“I heard that. You know, the sewage plant has a couple of cameras up there on the roof. I did some work for them once and they said it was okay to leave the Bobcat because there were cameras covering it twenty-four/seven.”
Virgil said, “Thanks for the tip. I’ll go take a look.”
“One more question,” Cain said. “Does Rhodes inherit? They weren’t divorced yet.”
Virgil said, “That’s really private . . .”
“Right. The sonofabitch does get something, doesn’t he? I heard a rumor about that. About how he gets the house.”
“I don’t know.”
“You lie with a straight face. That’s good if you’re a cop, I guess,” Cain said. “I’ll tell you something, Virgil. I did like that woman. A lot. And I’m not one to lay around yanking on my dick when there’s work to be done. I know all about when you were down here the last time, and I guess you’re good at it, the cop shit, but I’m gonna look into this myself. I been thinking about it all day.”
“Corbel—”
“Fuck it. I’m gonna kick some ass and take some names. If I find anything out, I’ll call you.”
“Stay away from Justin Rhodes,” Virgil said.
“That’s something I can promise you,” Cain said. “I’ll stay away from Justin Rhodes.”
—
They sat there, staring at each other, and Virgil was at a loss: he had nothing to use as a crowbar, and Cain had answered all his questions. Still, Cain had the look of a brawler about him, and, by his own admission, was a brawler. If Hemming’s death was an accident, a brawler might be exactly the person you were looking for. Virgil had a feeling that Cain had been telling the truth, that he wasn’t involved in the murder, but Virgil wasn’t yet ready to label him nope. After a moment, Virgil said, “I’m going to hold you to that. Don’t mess with Justin.”
“Justine,” Cain said.
“Rhodes.”
Virgil stood up, and Cain said, “We gotta catch the motherfucker who did this. Gina could be a pain in the ass, but you don’t get the death sentence for that.”
“No, you don’t,” Virgil said. “I don’t want you messing around with this, Corbel . . .”
“I’m a free man and I do what I want,” Cain said. “I’ll be seeing you around.”
He stuck out a hand as Virgil was leaving and Virgil took it. Cain’s hand was like a rock, but not big enough a rock to have made the dent in Hemming’s skull.
Out in the office, with Cain a few feet behind, Virgil asked, “Say, does anybody know where I can find Jesse McGovern?”
The two women and the man behind the counter, and Cain, all shook their heads.
“I didn’t think so,” Virgil said. He turned back to Cain. “You take it easy, there, Corbel.”
“You, too, Virgil.”
—
He worried a little about Cain, but Virgil had heard that kind of revenge talk before from friends of victims. Nothing had ever come of it, not in Virgil’s experience.
He went to his truck and sat a moment. A video of the body being thrown into the Mississippi was too much to hope for. Virgil knew that, even as he started the truck and drove south through town to the sewage plant.
And he was right. He talked to the plant superintendent, who told him that the cameras were pointed at the chain-link front gate, which was locked shut at night. The effluent channel was several hundred yards farther south.
The superintendent, a burly man in striped coveralls, said, “She wasn’t thrown in there anyway. I knew who she was and she probably weighed one-forty, one-fifty. You would have had to walk a half mile on a bad slick-icy path in the middle of the night with a hundred-and-fifty-pound body on your back. In a blizzard? No way.”
“You have to walk it?”
“Yup. You park in our parking lot here, and there’s a path that runs along the river. Not a government path, not a sidewalk—a path that’s been walked in.”
“How do you know it was in the middle of the night?” Virgil asked.
The guy cocked his head. “You think somebody walked a half mile down a slick-icy path in the middle of the day with a hundred-and-fifty-pound woman’s body on his back?”
“Well . . . no.”
“There you go,” he said.
“The guy who found her . . . he fish down there much?” Virgil asked.
“Ben Potter? Yeah, once or twice a week, year-round. He’s probably eighty. Saw her jacket, snagged her with a lure, pulled her in, called the cops.”
“He doesn’t have any problems with the idea of fishing, you know, in the effluent stream?”
“Hey. When it goes out of here, that stuff is as clean as springwater,” the superintendent said. “You could drink it.”
“You ever do that?” Virgil asked.
“I’m confident about our water quality, but I’m not crazy.”
“You know Jesse McGovern?”
The guy’s eyes went flat. “Who?”
—
On his way back through town, Virgil stopped at the public library, where a chubby blond librarian said, “Virgil Flowers! Welcome back. Are you here on the Gina Hemming thing?”
She’d helped him out on a previous case, and he appreciated it. Virgil said, “Yeah, I am. You know her?”
“Sure. I mean, I’ve talked to her a time or two. She mostly knew my folks; they had a mortgage from the bank. We had a little ceremony when the folks paid it off, and Gina gave us the paper in person.”
“Huh. All right. Let me ask this: do you have yearbooks from the high school?”
“Sure. I’ve heard rumors about the reunion meeting. You’d want Class of ’92,” she said. “Let me show you.”
She took him back in the stacks and showed him two shelves that, between them, contained fifty or sixty high school yearbooks. Virgil said, “Thanks, I can take it from here.”
“Class of ’92 right here,” she said, touching one of the books. “If you need more help, ask me.”
When she’d gone, he pulled off a book a foot farther down the shelf than the ’92, cracked it open, and looked at the index. Janice Anderson had been right: Jesse McGovern was in the same class as Virgil. He found her senior picture, spent some time looking at it—the photo was in color, and McGovern had a thin, foxy face, freckles, and auburn hair—until he was sure he’d recognize her, then put the book back.
He hoped Janice Anderson never figured out what she’d given away. She was a nice old lady, and he liked her. She’d be upset if she knew he’d played her.
—
On the way out the door, the chubby librarian leaned across the checkout desk and asked, with a lowered voice, “What happened with Gina? You can tell me—I won’t tell anybody else.”
Virgil had long disagreed with the usual cop technique of keeping everything quiet about an investigation. The people of a small town—he mostly worked in small towns—knew more about their places than any outsider ever could. He often went to the locals for help even when that meant filling them in on the investigation.
Virgil looked around. The library was empty except for one old man reading a newspaper, so he told the librarian what he’d gotten so far. She lit up when he mentioned the possibility of bondage. “Ooo. That’s interesting.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. She was so proper, she was almost stuffy. I mean, even when she laughed it was like ‘Ha-Ha-Ha’ like she’d practiced it in a mirror. Getting tied up and spanked? That’s a whole new thing right there.”
“I’d very much like to know who her partners were,” Virgil said.
The librarian wiggled her eyes at Virgil. “Me, too.”
Made him laugh, which made him feel a little guilty, too. It was, after all, a murder investigation. He said good-bye to the blonde and headed for the door. As he got there, he turned and said, “Say, how would I look up Jesse McGovern?”
She shook her head and said, “Never heard of her.”
“There’s a surprise,” Virgil said.
The Jesse McGovern question was like a bad joke.