Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(20)

He crawled on his hands and knees to the other drawer, found a similar knob, and lifted out the overlying stack of swim gear. In the space below, he found several sex toys—but not a vibrating Ken doll—and a whip. The whip had a black handle and foot-long strands of leather but didn’t look dangerous or even particularly punishing.

He called Purdy and told him about what he’d found, and Purdy said, “Goddamnit. We should have found that stuff. What do you want to do with it?”

“Why don’t we put the gun, coins, and cash in your evidence locker until the crime scene people clear them and then you can turn them over to the sister?”

“All right. I’ll have a car there in a few minutes to pick them up. What about the sex stuff?”

“I’m going to leave it for crime scene. Could have DNA.”

“All right,” Purdy said.

“Did you guys, or the sister, clean out the jewelry box and safe?”

“Yeah, the sister did, with Gina’s lawyer,” Purdy said. “They moved the stuff to a bank safe-deposit box until the will’s settled.”

—

Virgil took the coins and cash out of the drawer and stacked them on the dressing table, added the revolver to the collection—had Hemming been worried about her personal safety?—and pushed the drawers back in. He checked the dressing room door: solid oak, with a heavy dead bolt. A safe room, with a revolver, and a spot for a cell phone.

It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen a purse or the phone. He called Purdy again. “No, we don’t have them. I should have mentioned that—I noticed it the first night when I went over to her house.”

Virgil ended the call, walked out of the dressing room into the bedroom, went back and looked at the ties again. They’d been bothering him, and after looking at them a second time, he knew why. Men’s ties got wrinkled on both sides at the front of the neck, where the knot would be, with the short section that went around the back of a man’s neck smooth. These ties, all four of them, were badly wrinkled near the ends.

They had been used, Virgil thought, to tie somebody up—but tie her up comfortably.

Back in the bedroom, he dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. There were several boxes, with a variety of things inside them—the leaves for a table, Christmas ornaments.

He put the stuff back in the boxes and shoved them under the bed again.

One door in the upstairs hallway didn’t lead to a bedroom but to an attic instead. The stairs smelled musty and showed a layer of dust, without footprints, so he left it for the crime scene crew.

—

He continued prowling the house—checked the refrigerator, because women liked to hide things in the freezer, and checked the drawer under the stove—but found nothing more of interest.

He was about finished when a deputy showed up, and they counted out the coins and the cash and the deputy wrote a receipt for them and took them away. Virgil took a last look around, locked up, got some crime scene tape from his truck and put it across the exterior doors.

The house had more or less confirmed what people had been telling him: an impulsive killing by somebody who knew Hemming. Not a robbery—nothing out of place, with valuables left behind—but with some effort to delay discovery, with the removal of the body, phone, and purse.

He got out Purdy’s list, found the cell phone number of Hemming’s sister, and called it. The sister answered on the second ring, and Virgil identified himself and asked when and where they could meet. The sister suggested that Virgil come to their motel. Now would be fine.

—

Ann and Terry Ryan and their two boys had two connecting rooms at the Motel 6, Trippton’s premier hostelry. The boys, watching TV in the second room, looked up at Virgil and went back to the TV. The Ryan adults and Virgil talked in the first room. The Ryans seemed less distraught than tired, and worried, until Virgil mentioned the gold coins.

“Oh, thank God,” Ann Ryan said. She looked like her sister but a few years younger, strong-chinned and blond, close-cut hair. “Those are St. Gaudens twenty-dollar gold pieces. I got ten, and Gina got ten, when Dad died. They’re the rarest ones, and in perfect condition, and worth quite a bit. I didn’t want to mention them to anybody until . . . Well, we were worried . . .”

Terry Ryan stepped in. “We were afraid that if some sheriff’s deputy found them, we’d never see them again. We were going to search the house ourselves.”

Virgil opened his mouth to say something defensive, decided against it. Ann Ryan had grown up in the town and probably had fairly accurate ideas about local law enforcement. Instead, he asked, “Do you have any ideas of who might have done this to Gina? Anything at all, any hint?”

They were both shaking their heads before he finished asking. “We came up here for a week every summer, around the Fourth of July, but other than that we didn’t see Gina that much. She liked the boys, but . . . she had a different life than ours,” Ann said.

“A couple people have mentioned that Gina took the bank over when your father died . . . Is your mother still alive?” Virgil asked.

“Oh, no, she died of breast cancer when she was forty-two. I was ten, Gina was thirteen. Dad never remarried.”

“So . . . who inherits?”

“Oh, boy . . . we looked at the will,” Ann said. “Gina hadn’t changed it since she and Justin broke it off. She didn’t expect to die. The way it works, Dad left the bank to Gina and me, equally, but it was in a trust, and Gina was the sole trustee. So, I owned a third of the shares, and she owned a third, but she got to vote both thirds—she had control. Every year, she’d declare a dividend, and I’d get some money, and the other stockholders would get some money, but she controlled everything. When she died, I became the trustee. I get Gina’s stock and control two-thirds of it. We’ll probably sell the bank . . .”