Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(14)
Pretty people, Virgil believed, both male and female, had a totally unwarranted, unearned lifelong advantage over average and ugly people. The advantage began in their earliest years—What a pretty baby!—and persisted for most of their lives. Quite often, they didn’t believe in their advantage. Oh, they knew they were pretty, but they took it as their God-given right rather than an unearned gift.
Jesse McGovern was being forgiven even as she apparently, and repeatedly, broke and evaded the law, even if the lawbreaking in this case seemed trivial to most people, including Virgil’s friends.
Gina Hemming had also been a pretty woman and well-off since birth. Both Johnson and Clarice had described her as haughty, better than thou, assuming appearance, brains, and money not only as her righteous heritage but as weapons to be used.
Hemming might very well be dead because of all that, Virgil thought. Rich and pretty attracted attention, not all of it good.
Why would a just God allow this to happen? Was it all part of an evolutionary clockwork that God allowed to work through itself, unguided, an enormous experiment of some kind, for good reasons that humans couldn’t perceive?
Not something Virgil could work out in one night.
—
Virgil got up early the next morning, looked out the window at the thermometer—one below zero. He could see dead brown leaves fluttering on a riverside oak, so there was some wind, too, which would make things worse. He cleaned up, pulled on his long underwear, wool socks, put on his Pendleton wool shirt, jeans, and insulated boots, parka, double-layer watch cap, and driving gloves, with his ski gloves carried in the parka pockets.
He had breakfast at Ma and Pa Kettle’s—scrambled eggs, toast, sausages, and Diet Coke—and read last week’s Republican-River. The newspaper didn’t have a word about the murder, not because it was a crappy paper—though it was—but because it was a weekly and came out on Thursday mornings and Hemming had disappeared Thursday night.
As he ate, Virgil wrote down a list of names. He needed to talk to Jeff Purdy, the Buchanan County sheriff who also provided law enforcement services to Trippton; Justin (Justine) Rhodes, Hemming’s husband; and, he thought, he might make a quick visit to an elderly lady named Janice Anderson. It wasn’t much of a list, but it was a start.
He was finishing his Coke when Margaret Griffin came through the door, looked around, spotted him sitting by himself. She asked a waitress to bring her coffee and an omelet, sat down across from him, and asked, “What can you do for me?”
“I’ve been out at CarryTown before, so I know where it is,” Virgil said. “This guy who warned you off . . . what trailer is he in?”
“Number 400. I don’t know what his name is. I was going to ask at the post office. You want me to come along?”
“Better if I go by myself. I’ve got to give priority to the murder case, but when I get a break, I’ll run out there,” Virgil said.
“Okay. I looked you up on the Internet last night and found those stories about the school board . . . That sounded like quite the unusual situation,” she said.
“Not something you run into all the time,” Virgil said.
“I never ran into anything like it when I was a cop,” she said.
“Where were you a cop?” Virgil asked.
“L.A. Six years on the street, and things got so rough I finally said screw it. Started off to law school, ran out of money—didn’t much like it anyway—but that helped me get my private investigator’s ticket, and I’ve done okay,” Griffin said. “I do a lot of background checks for executive employment. Mattel is one of my big clients, so when they asked me to do this, I could hardly say no.”
They chatted for another ten minutes, then Virgil said, “You take it easy while you’re poking around, Margaret. This woman, if she’s in town, is going to hear about you, if she hasn’t already, and the people out here have guns.”
“You think there might be a real threat?”
“Oh, no, not really. Minnesota’s generally a peaceful place,” Virgil said.
“Except for a whole bunch of serial killings that you’ve looked at over the years, and Vietnamese spies killing people, and a school board that murders its critics, and now this woman who was murdered and thrown in the river . . .”
“Well . . . yeah. We’re not perfect.”
—
When Virgil got up to go, Griffin asked, “You don’t carry a gun yourself?”
“I’ve got one, but it’s, you know, heavy,” Virgil said.
She squeezed the bridge of her nose for a moment, muttered, “Okay.”
What she was thinking, Virgil thought as he walked away, was “hick cop.”
—
Virgil pulled on his ski gloves and walked over to the law enforcement center. A balding deputy was sitting behind a panel of bulletproof glass reading a book called Techniques in Home Winemaking, which he put down when Virgil walked in.
He pushed an intercom button and said, “Virgil. Here to solve the murder?”
“That’s one thing. Is Jeff in?”
“Yeah, he’s back there. Be happy to see you, I believe. I’ll buzz you in.”
The working area of the sheriff’s office was behind a sturdy black steel door. When the lock buzzed, Virgil pushed through and heard the deputy call, “Hey, Jeff—that fuckin’ Flowers is here.”