Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(19)
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.