Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(41)

“Yeah, I see him around from time to time. Works out at the Kubota dealer, mechanic or something,” Johnson said.

They tramped across the ice to the tent, probably fifty yards, but when they got there, there was no one inside.

“Shoot,” Virgil said.

“No lock on the door,” Johnson observed.

“Still would need a search warrant to go in,” Virgil said.

Johnson: “I’m not a cop. I’m an old buddy of Duane’s.”

“Johnson . . .”

Johnson pushed the door open and stepped inside, as Virgil hoped he would. Virgil didn’t go in but stood outside and watched. The tent was furnished with four orange molded-plastic chairs and a wooden gun rack that, instead of holding guns, held erect an array of short ice-fishing poles, ice skimmers, and a chipper. A well-used, gas-operated eight-inch auger lay on an unpainted board. The chairs were made more comfortable with fabric floatation pillows.

Two cardboard boxes sat behind the chairs.

“What’s in there?” Virgil asked.

“Nothing. They’re empty.”

Virgil scanned the village: nobody in sight. He stepped inside, glanced around, and was about to step back out when he saw what looked like a silver coin on the floor attached by wires to a brown plastic disk about the size of three quarters stacked on top of one another. Virgil picked it up, turned it over in his hand. The silver coin was a battery inside a thin holder; the brown disk showed a hole the size of a pencil eraser and, at its bottom, a shiny copper strip.

“What do you think?” he asked Johnson.

Johnson peered at it for a second, fished in a pocket, produced a mechanical pencil, and used it to push on the copper strip.

The brown box spoke to them. “Oh, yes, oh, yes, give it to me harder, big boy. Oh, yes, you’re so big . . .”

“Goddamn. Must have been out building them Barbie-Os,” Johnson said. “That’d keep you busy while you’re waiting for a bite.”

“That was a woman who went sneaking off. She knew who I was. If we’d come here first, I would have had my hands on one of the women who put the squid on my face,” Virgil said.

“Quit whining. What are you going to do?”

“Nothing. Not yet. Call up Margaret Griffin, suggest she talk to Duane what’s-his-name . . .”

“Hawkins . . .”

“And, in the meantime, we ought to check around with the people out here and see if anybody saw anything Thursday night. Or a truck go by. I’d like to find the hole the killer stuffed the body through.”

—

Over the next hour, they talked to a dozen fishermen, got a lot of shaking heads; went farther south, checked a couple of isolated shacks but found nobody home; hit a second, smaller fishing village, talked to a few more fishermen. One of them said, “Let me call Rusty Tremblay. He might know something. He saw a weird hole Friday night.”

A minute later, they had Tremblay on speaker, and he said, with a mild Quebecois accent, “Yah, I seen a hole, too big even for pike guys. Let’s see . . . Friday night, I might have had a couple three or four drinks, so I was not one hundred percent. I was going over to Rattlesnake, but I aimed too far north . . . You know how that works, pissed as a newt and snowing an’ all . . . There’s a light on a pole outside the Lutheran church. I was aiming at that, thinking it was Rattlesnake, and I almost run over the hole . . . Yeah, you could have shoved a body through it . . . Thinking about it now, had to been done either Thursday night or Friday, ’cause somebody had scraped snow in it and it wasn’t completely froze up yet.”

“Good information, Rusty,” Johnson shouted into the phone. “We’ll go over there. How’s Booger?”

“She’s fine. Getting trained now. I got her bringing my shoes.”

“Great. Good for you,” Johnson shouted. “We’re gonna go look for this hole. And my assistant here, Virgil, might want to come talk to you later. That okay?”

“That’s okay, Johnson. I’ll be at Wyatt’s after eight o’clock.”

On the way back to their sleds, Virgil asked, “What kind of fuckin’ idiot would name his dog Booger? You can see him, out in the neighborhood, calling her in: ‘Here, Booger’ . . .”

“Not his dog,” Johnson said, as he straddled his sled. “She’s his granddaughter. Gotta be two years old now.”

He fired up the sled and took off, Virgil trailing behind.

—

They took an hour to find the hole. They started by lining up the Lutheran church, which was on a road along the river, north of the Rattlesnake Country Club, and the boat ramp at Trippton, which was where almost everybody got onto the river.

They made the mistake of looking too close to the Wisconsin side, tracking back and forth, and finally stumbled on it less than halfway across and south of their original line. The newly refrozen hole wasn’t much to look at, maybe two and a half feet long and twenty inches wide, made with six auger holes, and connected by chipping out the area between the holes with an ice chipper.

“That’s got to be it,” Johnson said, scuffing at it with his boots. “No reason in hell that somebody would cut a hole that size out here by itself. You might catch a mud cat down there, but there’s no walleyes or anything good.”

“Okay.” Virgil looked around and picked out a reference point on the Wisconsin side that lined up with the hole and the Trippton boat ramp. “You know what? Suppose you killed a woman and wanted people to think she might have gone off someplace with her purse and shoes and all that shit . . . what would you do with that stuff? You wouldn’t want to get caught with it.”