Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(48)

“Who’s an asshole?” Cain shouted, and he punched Harney in the forehead. Harney went down in the entryway, and his wife stumbled over to the entryway closet and began throwing coats at Burke and Cain, who fought through them, undamaged, until she pulled the five-foot-long dowel rod out that the coats had been hanging on and swung it like a baseball bat. Cain managed to duck, but the rod hit Burke in the teeth, breaking off several of them and knocking him down.

“You bitch,” Cain shouted.

He moved on her, but Harney tripped him and he fell down. From the back of the house, a young boy was screaming, “Mom? Dad?” and Cain began to get the feeling that he might have screwed the pooch.

He tried to get up, but Karen Harney hit him, hard as she could, across the back, and he went down flat, and Ryan Harney sat on his head and told his wife, “Call the cops.”

“If we call the cops . . .”

Cain said, “If you don’t call the cops, we’ll go away.”

“Call the cops,” Harney said.

His wife said, “I’m talking to Taylor first thing in the morning.” Taylor Miller was their divorce attorney.

“Call the cops,” Harney said. Burke had struggled to a sitting position; blood was pouring out of his mouth and down his chest. Cain shouted, “Get the fuck off my head.”

“Call the fuckin’ cops,” Harney said. He felt really, really tired.

His wife went to call the cops.

—

The snow that night came through in ten-mile-wide pulses, accompanied by occasional thunder. Virgil didn’t sleep well in the strange bed, with the wind blowing through the eaves and thoughts of the murder investigation prodding him awake.

The first wave of snow had already gone through when he got back to the cabin, and he could see stars overhead. He got out his iPad and opened up Fred Fitzgerald’s criminal file, as downloaded to the BCA site by the duty officer. The details were unique to Fitzgerald, but the pattern was familiar enough—a small-town biker thug whose proclivities led to bar fights and minor crime.

He finished the file, made a couple of notes on the iPad, then spent some time reading Thomas Perry’s The Old Man, talked to Frankie for a while—it was snowing at the farm, and her third-oldest son would be getting up at five a.m., before school, to plow a dozen driveways—and finally went to bed at midnight.

He woke three times during the night to look out the bedroom window. Twice it was snowing, once it wasn’t, and when he got up in the morning, he found a sullen gray sky and six inches of new snow on the front porch and covering the truck.

He put on his camo suit, spent fifteen minutes shoveling off the porch and steps and brushing the snow off the 4Runner. His leg and hip still hurt, but the pain in his nose seemed to be going away. When he was done clearing snow, he went back inside and ate an oversized bowl of oatmeal, with cinnamon and raisins, and read the news and weather on his iPad. The National Weather Service said the day would be cold and windy, as would the rest of the next week, with a chance of snow every night.

As Virgil was shaving, Jon Duncan called from the BCA. Virgil put him on speaker, and Duncan said, “Bea Sawyer is on the way down to take a look at the house and she’s bringing Bill Jensen with her to look at the computer. Clay Danson—he’s a diver—is on the way down with a dive crew. Danson is costing us an arm and a leg. With the snow on the highway, they might take a while.”

“They got my number?”

“They do, and they’ll call as soon as they get into town.”

Beatrice Sawyer was the lead crime scene tech for the BCA; Virgil had never heard of Danson.

A few minutes later, Jeff Purdy called. “We got Corbel Cain and his friend Denwa Burke in jail. They went over to Ryan Harney’s house last night and attacked him. They were trying to force him to admit that he killed Gina Hemming.”

“Oh, boy. Anybody get hurt?”

“Denwa got some teeth broken off, Harney got hit on the forehead and has a bruise the size of a pancake, Cain’s been pissing and moaning about his back and neck. Karen Harney hit him with a dowel rod from a closet—you know, that thing they hang the coats off of—the same thing she used on Denwa. Denwa and Corbel got terminal hangovers. That’s about it.”

“Why did they think—”

“Seems Ryan had an affair with Gina Hemming, years ago. Corbel thinks he killed Gina to keep Gina from telling Karen, but it seems that Harney confessed all, years ago, and Karen knew about it. But now that it’s come up again, kinda publicly . . . Karen’s talking divorce.”

“Harney had an affair with Hemming? He told me he barely spoke to her.”

“I don’t know how much they talked, but they apparently spent some serious time screwing each other.”

“I’ll be down to the jail to talk to Corbel. Can you hold him until I get there?”

“Yeah, he’s got to wait for Sam Jones to order bail, and bail hearings don’t start until eleven o’clock, so he won’t get out until after noon. We’ve got him here in a holding cell; we haven’t transferred him to the jail.”

“I’ll be down right away,” Virgil said.

—

Corbel Cain looked fairly discouraged when he was retrieved from his holding cell and brought out to an interview room, where he dropped into the plastic chair. He nodded at Virgil, rubbed the back of his neck, and said, “That didn’t work out so good.”