Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(12)

“Thanks. I want to wind this up and get back to L.A.,” Griffin said.

“What are you doing?” Virgil asked. “I didn’t get an exact description of the problem.”

“Virgil’s down here to solve a murder,” Clarice said. “It’ll take him a week or so.”

Margaret Griffin seemed not impressed: “A murder? What happened?”

Johnson told her, and she asked, “How’d she get in the river? As far as I could tell, the river is a solid chunk of ice.”

Virgil nodded at her. “Excellent question. I will ask that tomorrow morning first thing. Now, what are you doing here?”

“Trying to serve a federal cease-and-desist order,” Griffin said. “I’ve been here a week, and I get nothing but the runaround, including from the sheriff. I was out to where I think the target might be, a place called CarryTown, and a man came out of his mobile home and said if I kept sneaking around I could get hurt.”

“That’s not good,” Clarice said.

Virgil: “What are you trying to get stopped?”

Griffin said, “I represent Mattel, the toy company. Maker of Barbie dolls.” She accepted a microwaved cider from Clarice, popped open her briefcase, and pulled out a Barbie doll—a nude one.

“A regular old Barbie,” Clarice said. “I had about four of them when I was growing up. They broke a lot.”

“Seeing one naked makes me feel kinda funny,” Johnson said.

“You put your finger right on the problem,” Griffin said. “It’s not a regular Barbie.” She turned it over to show them a series of small holes drilled in Barbie’s back. And, below that, a pink plastic button.

“What does that . . .” Clarice began.

Griffin pushed the button, which operated a tiny digital recording. Barbie said, “Ohh, God. Ohh, God. Give it to me harder! Give it to me, big boy, harder. Ohh, God, you’re so big, don’t stop . . .”

That went on for a while, then Barbie’s orgasm ran out of steam, ending with a vocal Erp. They all stared at the doll for a minute, Johnson finally saying to Clarice, “Some sonofabitch has recorded us, babe.”

“In your dreams,” Clarice said.

“Battery-operated,” Griffin said. “They call this one the Divine model because she says, ‘Ohh, God. Ohh, God.’ There’s a Negative model that says, ‘Ohh, no. Ohh, no,’ and a Positive model that says, ‘Ohh, yes. Ohh, yes.’”

Clarice said, “There’s probably a fake orgasm one that says, ‘Ohh, Johnson. Ohh, Johnson.’”

Johnson said, “Funny.”

Clarice laughed merrily and said, “It really was. Sometimes, I slay myself.”

—

Will you guys take this seriously?” Griffin said. She looked around at them. “Somebody up here is manufacturing these things by the hundreds, the recorder components shipped in from China. They call them Barbie-Os. We leaned on a few Internet retailers and they pointed us at Trippton. I asked around, and nobody helps much, but I eventually came up with a name—Jesse McGovern. Can’t find her. Nobody seems to have heard of her. But how could you run an operation that makes hundreds of these things, in a town the size of Trippton, and nobody knows her?”

“You know what I think?” Clarice said. “I think you have the wrong town. Between me and Johnson, we’ve lived here most of our lives. If there was a Jesse McGovern in town, we’d know her.”

Johnson scratched his forehead. “There was a Jesse that lived down at the pumpkin farm . . .”

“She’s long gone,” Clarice said. “That’s Jesse Hammer. She’s a nurse up in the Cities.”

“Hammer doesn’t seem right,” Johnson said.

Clarice: “That’s because she used to be Jesse Wagner before she got married. The Wagner pumpkin farm. She married Larry Hammer, Joe and Barb Hammer’s boy.”

Johnson ticked a finger at her. “That’s right. I got it now.” They sounded so small-town that even Virgil was impressed.

Griffin said, “That’s the first Jesse I’ve heard of. You’re sure she’s up in the Twin Cities?”

“She was for sure,” Clarice said. “Her folks still live here, if you want to talk to them. The Wagner farm is a couple miles south, right down the highway. There’s a big orange plywood pumpkin sign out front. Can’t miss it.”

“I might check with them,” Griffin said. “All I need to do is hand this Jesse a piece of paper. After that, I go home, and she goes to jail if they keep putting these things out. Mattel is really, really pissed. You can’t go around cutting up Barbie and Ken without taking some serious heat.”

Clarice: “They cut up Ken?”

Griffin hesitated, then dipped into her bag again and came up with a Ken doll, wrapped in newspaper. She pulled the newspaper off and put the doll next to Barbie.

“My God,” Clarice said. “That’s not something you see every day.”

“They call him Boner Ken,” Griffin said. Back to the bag, she pulled out the top of a Ken doll box. The regular label had been pasted over with a similarly colored patch that read “Boner Ken . . . the Ken of your dreams.”

“Not very realistic,” Virgil said of the doll’s most prominent appendage.