Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(56)
“You only say you’re sorry to make me feel bad.”
Griffin said, “You sound like teenage girls.”
—
They all went in the cabin, Johnson and Virgil stripped out of their snowmobile gear, and Johnson said, “I like that diving shit. I did a few tanks down in the Virgin Islands one winter. I’d be more interested in looking for sunken boats, though. Not so much bodies.”
“I believe if you’d asked him, he’d tell you that you can see about four feet down there. It’s not the Virgin Islands,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, well. You might be right. Did it help you at all?”
“Might,” Virgil said. “It’s another place and time that I know the killer was at.”
“As an experienced big-city police officer, I can tell you that what you found doesn’t mean anything unless you have a specific sighting of the guy driving out there with a body on the back of his snowmobile,” Griffin said. “Since you wasted that time, why don’t you take a few minutes to drive out to CarryTown? I’ll not only be out of your hair, I could be out of Trippton entirely.”
“Okay, okay. Let me call my crime scene crew and see if they need me for anything. If not, I’ll drive out there and see what’s what,” Virgil said.
“I’ll follow you,” Griffin said. “And please—please!—put a gun in your pocket.”
—
Virgil called Bea Sawyer and found that she had been trying to call him, but he hadn’t heard the phone ring or felt it vibrating through the thick snowmobile gear. When she answered, she said, “Virgil. Bill has the computer open. And we have an anomaly.”
“You know how I like those, Bea,” Virgil said.
“Then you’ll like this one. You want to come by? It’s easier to see than it is to explain.”
“Ten minutes,” Virgil said. He hung up and turned to Griffin and said, “Clue.”
“Ah, shit. Well, I’m still coming with you. After you look at this so-called clue, we can still go out to CarryTown.”
—
At Hemming’s house, they left their vehicles in the street, and Griffin followed Virgil up the driveway and around to the back door. In the kitchen, he introduced Griffin to Sawyer, explained that she was a former cop, and they all stepped into the living room, where Baldwin had set up a camera tripod and was photographing what looked like a piece of vacant green carpet.
Bill Jensen was sitting in a corner, reading a Surface Pro.
“Okay,” Sawyer said. “You know about the blood on the carpet over there.” She pointed at four pieces of yellow tape that isolated a four-inch square of carpet. “Don’t get near it. Anyway, that’s the blood that the guy from the sheriff’s department found. What he didn’t find was a smaller bloodstain of the same type at the bottom of the stairs. That’s what Don’s taking pictures of. What we know from the ME is that Hemming sustained a skull fracture when she was struck, and that can result in bleeding from the ear canal.”
“You think she crawled?” Virgil asked. “I was told that death was instantaneous.”
“I’ve been told that. What I do know is, the first bloodstain is quite a bit more substantial than the second one, but their ‘character’ is the same. The first one looks like she bled from her ear into the carpet—from one point source, the ear canal, dripping blood onto a small area on the carpet, which, given the carpet fibers, wound up creating a bloodstain that’s about the diameter of a pencil, extending straight down into the carpet and pooling at the bottom of the fibers. The second stain is smaller in diameter but also extends straight down into the carpet and pools at the bottom. But, they both look like they could have come from the same drip of blood. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was possible that she fell down the stairs, cracked her head on the bannister on the way down, and landed here at the bottom, then crawled to the second spot, where she died.”
“And somebody threw her in the Mississippi why?” Griffin said. “To tidy up?”
Virgil looked up the stairs and shook his head. “I don’t think the ME would buy that idea—the bannister’s got those edges on it, and she was hit by something large in diameter and smooth, like a bottle.”
“So the guy kills her, doesn’t notice the bloodstain, drags her body over to the stairs to make it look like an accident,” Sawyer said.
“Then dusts off his hands, picks up the body, and throws it in the Mississippi,” Griffin said. “I like your murders. They give you something to think about. In L.A., it was BANG! BANG! BANG!, two dead, one of them a gang member, the other a five-year-old girl on her way to buy a Popsicle. Simple, in-your-face nutcake homicide. Here, you’ve got to ‘detect.’”
Sawyer and Virgil and Baldwin were all looking at Griffin, and she said, “What?”
“Nothing,” Virgil said.
Sawyer said, “I like our way better.”
“You find anything else?” Virgil asked.
“Cracked Ping-Pong paddle; could be more B and D,” Sawyer said. “We can check it for DNA, if you want to put in for it. Bill’s got the email up on Hemming’s computer.”
“This way,” Jensen said, putting down the slate. He led the way back to Hemming’s office, tapped the Return key on her keyboard, and the mail came up. “It’s all yours.”