Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(16)

Purdy handed him the yellow sheet of paper. “Names, phone numbers, addresses, both home and business, for everybody involved.”

“Saves me a day right there,” Virgil said. “I’d like to look at the crime scene. Do you have keys?”

“I do. They’re in the evidence locker. I’ll get them.”

“Do you know if Janice Anderson is still alive?”

“Shoot, that old biddy is never gonna die,” Purdy said. “You know she wants to end high school football and replace it with art? You know what life drawing is?”

“Drawing naked people?”

“She wants high school seniors doing that—these girls seeing grown-up naked men,” Purdy said.

“You think you got any senior girls down here who haven’t seen a grown-up naked man?” Virgil asked.

Purdy thought it over for a while, then muttered, “Gotta be one or two.”

“Maybe those two could make cookies instead,” Virgil said. “Now, tell me about Jesse McGovern.”

Purdy groaned. “Aw, shit, Virgil, don’t hassle me about Jesse. Please.”

“Where is she?” Virgil asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know,” Purdy said. “You ever run for anything?”

“Not yet.”

“If you ever do, this is what you’ll find out,” Purdy said. “Every year, you piss off one percent of your constituents. No way around it. They’ll vote against you every chance they get. I’ve been sheriff for twenty years, so there’s twenty percent of the electorate who’ll vote against me every chance they get.”

“I don’t think the math would work exactly like that,” Virgil pointed out. “Some of them you’d piss off twice.”

“Okay, okay, not exactly, but I try not to piss off influential people any more than I have to, and pointing you at Jesse would probably cost me five hundred votes,” Purdy said. “So, I ain’t gonna do it. You want her, catch her on your own. To tell you the truth, if I were you, I’d catch whoever killed Gina Hemming and let Jesse McGovern slide. Catching her wouldn’t do nobody any good except some big corporation out in California. Which doesn’t have any votes in Buchanan County.”

He had a point, but somehow it didn’t seem entirely congruent with the American Way, the Rule of Law, and all that. But a job was a job, and times were bad in the small out-of-state towns. Virgil got the keys to Hemming’s house and headed for the door.





SEVEN Janice Anderson wasn’t on Purdy’s list of contacts, but she’d provided key information when Virgil broke the school board case. He didn’t know if she’d have any relevant information on the Hemming murder, the old lady nonetheless keeping her ear to the ground, so instead of going straight to Hemming’s house, he stopped at Anderson’s.

Virgil parked down the street from her house, walked the last two hundred yards—no point in advertising the fact that he was talking to Anderson—pushed through her front gate, and knocked on her bluebird orange door. He heard her moving inside, and a moment later an elderly woman with short, curly white hair and rimless glasses pulled open the inner door, pushed open the storm door, and said, “Virgil Flowers. I knew you’d come snooping around.”

“You gonna leave me standing out here freezing my tits off?” Virgil asked.

“Not at all. Say, did you ever play football?”

“Yeah, in high school, out in Marshall. I was a wide receiver.”

“That explains a lot,” she said. “C’mon in anyway. I wouldn’t want to have any frozen tits on my conscience.”

—

Anderson had spent nearly forty-three years in Trippton as a high school teacher, and since few outsiders moved into Trippton, virtually everybody in town, forty-eight and younger, had been in one of her classes. Since she’d grown up in Trippton, she also knew almost everybody between forty-eight and seventy as friends from her youth.

She led the way into the kitchen and asked, “Coffee or hot cocoa?”

“Cocoa,” Virgil said, as he took a chair at the kitchen table.

“That’s right,” she said. “You get your caffeine from Diet Coke.” She got a can of Hershey’s cocoa out of the cupboard, and as she was putting it together with milk and sugar on the stove she said, “You’re here about Gina Hemming.”

“Yup. What do you know?”

“A few things—which you didn’t hear from me,” she said.

“Of course not,” Virgil said. “By the way, I’ve got a list for you to look at.”

He put the yellow legal pad page out on the kitchen table, and when she’d finished mixing the cocoa and milk with a metal wisk, she picked it up and read down the list.

“If any of these people killed her, it was an accident,” she said. “Though, I guess the cover-up wouldn’t have been an accident, would it? Taking her out and throwing her in the river.”

“No, it wouldn’t. Killing her wasn’t an accident, either, unless you’d consider whacking somebody on the head with a heavy object to be an accident.”

She frowned at that and said, “I hadn’t heard exactly how she was killed. So she was beaten to death?”