Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(53)

“We can put you there on Thursday night,” Virgil said, lying again. “I can’t get you yet for the murder, but I think I eventually will, unless it turns out somebody else was there. Is there any way you can prove that you left her there alive?”

“I don’t have to prove shit,” Fitzgerald said, his voice rising to a near whine. He fumbled the gel ball and it rolled across the floor to Virgil’s left foot. “I can’t prove shit because I wasn’t there Thursday night.”

Pweters turned to Virgil and said, “Looks like he’s going to stick to that weak-ass story. You want to bust him now? Or wait?”

Virgil thought it over and finally said, “I don’t know. I can’t believe that the guy . . . I can’t believe that the person who saw him got it wrong. Plus going out on the river on his sled.” He tossed the ball back to Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald suddenly looked more confident. He stood up and said, “Fuck this. I’m not talking to you no more. I know you’re gonna try to frame me and I ain’t sitting still for it.”

Virgil said, “Fred, if I were trying to frame you, you’d be framed and on your way to jail. What I’m trying to do is make sense of what we’ve got so far. You’re a big piece of that.”

Fitzgerald threw the gel ball at the wall, snagged it midair as it bounced back to him. He made pistols out of his forefingers and thumbs, poked them at Virgil, and said, “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill her.”

Virgil asked, “What did you do?”

“Fuck you,” Fitzgerald said. “I want a lawyer.”

—

Virgil and Pweters spent another five minutes issuing threats and listening to denials, then Virgil said to Pweters, “Let’s go.” To Fitzgerald he said, “Don’t run. We’ll find you in ten minutes, and running would be as good as pleading guilty.”

“I’m not going nowhere,” Fitzgerald said.

He followed them to the door and slammed it and locked it as soon as they were outside. Pweters looked back at the door and asked Virgil, “What did we get?”

Virgil said, “I don’t know, exactly. I wasn’t expecting a confession, but I picked up something in there. He knows something that he doesn’t want us to find out. But I messed up—we had him sweating and then he wasn’t.”

Pweters said, “I got that. I also got the feeling that he didn’t kill Gina.”

Virgil smoothed the squid over his nose and said, “Yeah, I got that feeling, too. The other thing is, he was throwing and catching the ball with his left hand, and Hemming most likely was killed by a right-hander . . .”

Virgil explained what the ME had told him about the blow that killed Hemming, and added, “I wonder if Fred might have an idea of who did kill her and he’s trying to cover that up? You know anybody he might associate with who’d fit the bill?”

“The town is small enough that all the douchenozzles know all the other douchenozzles, so it’s possible.”

“Give me a couple of names of people he talks to—I’ll go see them,” Virgil said.

“Sure. I’ll come along, if you want . . .”

Before they got in their separate vehicles, Virgil asked, “You’re a smart guy. When are you going to run against Jeff Purdy?”

“Five years. He runs again next year. He’ll get elected for four more and then he’ll retire, and then I’ll run,” Pweters said. “It’s a done deal.”

“What if he changes his mind and doesn’t retire?”

“I’ll run anyway and beat him. I know it, and he knows it,” Pweters said. “That’s why the deal is done.”

—

Inside the tattoo parlor, Fitzgerald watched from behind the window until Virgil and Pweters had driven away, then walked through the back room to an old-fashioned hardwired telephone and tapped in a number.

“Jimmy, you cocksucker, you sicced that fuckin’ Flowers on me, didn’t you?”

Jimmy Barker squealed, “Did not. Did not. He came in here yesterday and snuck in the back room, and he found one of those cat-o’-nine-tails and took it with him. Somebody told him about them, but I didn’t tell him jack shit.”

“If you didn’t tell him, who did?”

“Somebody else you whipped,” Barker said. “That’s what I’d think.”





SIXTEEN Before Virgil had a chance to talk to the other town lowlifes, Bea Sawyer called and said she was coming down the hill into town. Halfway to Trippton, she said, she’d stopped at a café to get coffee and had run into the dive team and their truck.

“Clay said they’d be here by noon; they’re moving slower than I was.”

“Do you have the address for Hemming’s house?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah, we do, and I’ve spotted it on my iPad.”

“I’ll see you there,” Virgil said.

—

Sawyer hadn’t yet gotten to Hemming’s house when Virgil arrived. He peeled the crime scene tape off the back door, went inside, and walked around, looking for anything he might have missed. There wasn’t anything in particular, except awkward traces of the dead woman. It wasn’t the first time he’d been struck by the unexpected interruption of murder: you leave the wine bottles by the sink, thinking you’ll put them in the recycling in the morning, and a week later here they still are because you’re dead. Here’s the silence of the house, with a couple of socks on the bathroom countertop, maybe to wear to bed, and there they still are.