Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(26)

Knox said, “Fuck that. Fuck that.”

A spark appeared in Rhodes’s eyes. Anger? He leaned across the desk and said, “No! Rob is an angel. An angel! He would never!”

Knox settled back in his chair.

—

Virgil took out the list of people who’d been with Hemming the night she disappeared, showed it to Rhodes. “Yes, they were all there. All respectable businessmen and -women . . . Do you think she was killed by a man?”

“That’s my operating theory. Her body had to be moved a substantial distance, no matter where she went into the river. The killer had to be somebody with some strength, unless there were more than one of them.”

“Huh. Well, Ryan Harney is very fit; I see him at the gym. Dave Birkmann is too fat; he’d probably have a heart attack. He might be sorta strong, though . . . I don’t know. George Brown is strong; he could have carried her across the river. Barry Long is fit, I think, but I can’t even imagine why he’d hurt Gina.” He looked up, his eyes unfocused for a few seconds, then said, “Everybody likes Barry. He was the class president for three years, and he’s been in the State Legislature forever. But I’m not sure he’s . . . sexual. He’s not gay, for sure, but I’m not sure he’s heterosexual, either. Huh.”

He looked back down at the list. “None of the women could have moved a body. Margot Moore would be the strongest, but she’s too small. So . . . you know what I think?” He slid the list back toward Virgil. “I don’t think it was any of them. Or me or Rob. For sure, not me or Rob.”

Virgil: “Then . . .”

Rhodes held his hands up, a dismissive gesture. “You’re looking at the wrong people. The economy around here has never recovered from the crash in ’08. We used to have seven Realtors working out of this office, now we have three. A lot of businesses are still in trouble, a lot of places closing down because of Internet sales. Gina had a lot of loans out. A lot. She’s the main source of loan funds around here and she’s had to make serious decisions about people who can’t make payments.”

“I’d thought about that, but it opens up a whole universe of suspects, which is a problem,” Virgil said. “Is there anybody in particular who you think couldn’t pay and might be dangerous?”

“Nooo . . . The people at the bank could help you with that,” Rhodes said. “Now that I think of it, most people would suppose that their problem is with the bank, not with Gina. Kill her and the bank would still collect. Of course, as a decision maker, maybe the anger was aimed directly at her. Lots of people are plain stupid.”

—

Virgil talked with Rhodes for a few more minutes—Rhodes told him that Hemming was a “fussy dresser” and that she would never have gotten up in the morning and put on the same outfit she’d worn the night before—and despite Rhodes’s lack of alibi, Virgil was nearly ready to cross him off the list of suspects.

The fact that he’d been crying didn’t mean much—lots of killers cried after they’d offed their wives—but Rhodes seemed so nakedly open that Virgil believed him. Faking both openness and innocence at the same time wasn’t easy; most hardened sociopaths couldn’t pull it off.

That was not true of Rob Knox, who sat in his chair and smoldered, watching Virgil from the corners of his eyes.

Before he left, Virgil had Knox give him a list of names, the people he’d been with in Prairie du Chien.

—

As Virgil walked back to his truck, he was thinking about a grilled cheese sandwich. He’d gotten a good one at Shanker’s Bar and Grill the last time he was in town, so he went that way. At Shanker’s, he pulled into the parking lot, stopped in the second row of spaces, and climbed out of the truck.

As he did, a red pickup was pulling past him into the first row of spaces right outside the back door. He waited until it was stopped, noticed one of the stickers in the back window that showed a cartoon family: husband, wife, five kids—two boys and three girls, in a variety of sizes—two dogs and a cat.

Frankie had a sticker like that in the back of her truck, with a single woman and five boys, and, lately, a slightly askew sticker of a dog that actually resembled Honus, as much as any cartoon could.

As Virgil walked toward the bar’s back door, a woman got out of the passenger side, wrapped up in an old-style parka with a heavy snorkel hood that left nothing visible but her eyes.

As Virgil passed the truck, another woman got out of the backseat on the passenger side, and as he walked up to the door, he found that the truck had held four women, all bundled heavily against the cold. He didn’t think about the fact that the truck would be heated, and they certainly wouldn’t have needed the hoods inside it . . .

He got to the back door of the bar and politely held the door open, and the first woman coming through, half turned away from him, whipped back toward him, leading with her fist, and knocked him on his ass.

He was still sitting up, surprised as much as stunned, when the other three piled on, what he later estimated to be roughly six hundred pounds of woman flesh, and he tried to roll over but could barely move, felt the breath being squeezed out of his lungs.

Then they beat the hell out of him.

He couldn’t hear much, except a soprano voice squeaking—“You fucker, you fucker, you fucker”—keeping time with the blows.