Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(24)

“Well . . . no.”

“There you go,” he said.

“The guy who found her . . . he fish down there much?” Virgil asked.

“Ben Potter? Yeah, once or twice a week, year-round. He’s probably eighty. Saw her jacket, snagged her with a lure, pulled her in, called the cops.”

“He doesn’t have any problems with the idea of fishing, you know, in the effluent stream?”

“Hey. When it goes out of here, that stuff is as clean as springwater,” the superintendent said. “You could drink it.”

“You ever do that?” Virgil asked.

“I’m confident about our water quality, but I’m not crazy.”

“You know Jesse McGovern?”

The guy’s eyes went flat. “Who?”

—

On his way back through town, Virgil stopped at the public library, where a chubby blond librarian said, “Virgil Flowers! Welcome back. Are you here on the Gina Hemming thing?”

She’d helped him out on a previous case, and he appreciated it. Virgil said, “Yeah, I am. You know her?”

“Sure. I mean, I’ve talked to her a time or two. She mostly knew my folks; they had a mortgage from the bank. We had a little ceremony when the folks paid it off, and Gina gave us the paper in person.”

“Huh. All right. Let me ask this: do you have yearbooks from the high school?”

“Sure. I’ve heard rumors about the reunion meeting. You’d want Class of ’92,” she said. “Let me show you.”

She took him back in the stacks and showed him two shelves that, between them, contained fifty or sixty high school yearbooks. Virgil said, “Thanks, I can take it from here.”

“Class of ’92 right here,” she said, touching one of the books. “If you need more help, ask me.”

When she’d gone, he pulled off a book a foot farther down the shelf than the ’92, cracked it open, and looked at the index. Janice Anderson had been right: Jesse McGovern was in the same class as Virgil. He found her senior picture, spent some time looking at it—the photo was in color, and McGovern had a thin, foxy face, freckles, and auburn hair—until he was sure he’d recognize her, then put the book back.

He hoped Janice Anderson never figured out what she’d given away. She was a nice old lady, and he liked her. She’d be upset if she knew he’d played her.

—

On the way out the door, the chubby librarian leaned across the checkout desk and asked, with a lowered voice, “What happened with Gina? You can tell me—I won’t tell anybody else.”

Virgil had long disagreed with the usual cop technique of keeping everything quiet about an investigation. The people of a small town—he mostly worked in small towns—knew more about their places than any outsider ever could. He often went to the locals for help even when that meant filling them in on the investigation.

Virgil looked around. The library was empty except for one old man reading a newspaper, so he told the librarian what he’d gotten so far. She lit up when he mentioned the possibility of bondage. “Ooo. That’s interesting.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. She was so proper, she was almost stuffy. I mean, even when she laughed it was like ‘Ha-Ha-Ha’ like she’d practiced it in a mirror. Getting tied up and spanked? That’s a whole new thing right there.”

“I’d very much like to know who her partners were,” Virgil said.

The librarian wiggled her eyes at Virgil. “Me, too.”

Made him laugh, which made him feel a little guilty, too. It was, after all, a murder investigation. He said good-bye to the blonde and headed for the door. As he got there, he turned and said, “Say, how would I look up Jesse McGovern?”

She shook her head and said, “Never heard of her.”

“There’s a surprise,” Virgil said.

The Jesse McGovern question was like a bad joke.





TEN Virgil’s next stop was at Rhodes Realty on Main Street. He angle-parked and went inside, where a blue-haired woman was poking at a computer keyboard and looked nearsightedly at Virgil when he came through the door. “Can I help you?”

The receptionist was sitting in a little corral, maybe ten feet across. A hallway went down one side of the office, with doors leading off to a half dozen individual offices. Some of the doors were open, some closed. Virgil said, “Is, uh, Justine Rhodes in?”

The receptionist lowered her voice and said, “In the office, he’s Justin. Are you one of his friends?”

“I’m an investigator for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “Is he in?”

“Yes. Let me call him. He’s very upset about Gina. He’s been crying for three days straight.”

—

She called Rhodes, who poked his head out of one of the offices and called, “Come on down.”

His office was a bit larger than the receptionist’s corral, but not much. He had a compact desk with two visitors’ chairs, one of them occupied by a sallow-faced Hispanic man with shoulder-length black hair and dark eyelashes. Virgil looked from one to the other. The Hispanic man didn’t offer to leave, and Rhodes pointed at the other chair and asked, “Isn’t this awful? Isn’t this terrible?”