Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(57)

Virgil sat down, and Griffin asked, “How long is this going to take?”

“Probably a while,” Virgil said. “Give me an hour, and I’ll go out to CarryTown with you.”

She went away, and Virgil looked at the message count at the bottom of the screen. Hemming’s in-box showed 8,406 messages, with 3,502 in her out-box.

He started typing in names, beginning with Ryan Harney. There were two recent messages, one to Harney and one back: a notification of the meeting and a note saying he’d be there. There were seventy more messages between them, but they went back five years. Nothing sexual, nothing that would necessarily say “affair,” but they were meeting a couple of times a week, always at Hemming’s house in the late afternoons.

There were far fewer messages to the other people who’d been at the party, with one exception: over the years, she’d sent hundreds of messages to Margot Moore, most of them quick notes setting up more meeting times. There were references to Fred Fitzgerald, but always in a kind of coded language that an outsider might eventually recognize as referring to sexual events: “Had a good time Thursday night, F brought a new toy. Ask him about the ‘mouses.’”

Virgil scrolled through dozens of the notes from Moore to Hemming, both sent and received, and from Fred Fitzgerald to Hemming. The most recent note from Fitzgerald confirmed a 9:30 therapy session. No date or day was mentioned, but the message had been sent the Sunday before Hemming was killed.

But the most interesting of all the notes was from Hemming to Lucy Cheever, sent on Wednesday afternoon, the day before Hemming was murdered.

Lucy,

I’m afraid that we might have to go another direction on the business loan. Frankly, a million’s too large a commitment for our bank, at the moment. I will talk to Marv on Monday, when he gets back from the Cities, and see if he has anything to say that may change our minds, but I don’t think this will happen. You told me that you’d explored the idea of a loan with Lew Andrews up at U.S. Bank in St. Paul, and I did make a quick call to Lew and they are still quite interested in talking with you. Best of luck with that.

Gina

—

Virgil found Marv Hiners’s phone number and got him on the line.

“Has the bank turned down a major loan for Lucy Cheever?”

Hiners said, “No . . . In fact, it’s on its way to approval. I was talking to Elroy Cheever this morning, who wanted to see what effect Gina’s death might have had on their application. I told him that as far as I was concerned, we were good to go. It has to be approved by the loan committee, but that shouldn’t be a big problem. How’d you hear about it?”

Virgil thought about telling Hiners about the email from Hemming to Cheever but held his tongue. Instead, he said, “The possibility came up in all the stuff I’ve been looking at. Thanks, Marv.”

Off the phone, Virgil thought about what Hiners had told him. Hemming was planning to turn down the Cheevers’ loan application, but Hiners hadn’t known that. The Cheevers hadn’t mentioned it, and Hemming’s successors at the bank were about to approve it. For the Cheevers, Hemming’s death had paid off—big-time.

When Virgil was working as a St. Paul homicide cop, he’d known of two separate killings done for single eight balls of cocaine. An eight ball, at the time, was worth maybe a hundred and fifty dollars. Kill somebody for a million? No problem. No fuckin’ problem at all.

—

Griffin stuck her head into the office and said impatiently, “It’s been an hour and a half. I’m waiting patiently.”

“I’ve got some things to think about,” Virgil said.

“Why don’t you think on your way to CarryTown?” Griffin suggested. “It’s a nice, relaxing drive out there.”

—

Virgil had once solved a case involving an Israeli spy, during which he’d been given the definition of “nudnik.” A nudnik, he was told, was like a woodpecker sitting on your ear, pecking at your skull. Like Margaret Griffin. When neither Bea Sawyer or Bill Jensen had any more to tell him, he went out, got in his truck, and drove out to CarryTown, with Griffin close behind him.

CarryTown wasn’t actually a town but rather a collection of mobile homes that had been put up around a country convenience store called the Cash ’n Carry, six miles south of Trippton.

The mobile homes didn’t look too bad under a pristine layer of snow, but when they got out of the vehicles Virgil could smell the unmistakable scent of a badly backed-up septic system. Griffin didn’t seem to notice. She pointed at one of the mobile homes and said, “His name is Joseph Anderson. I was told that he may have gotten some supply packages for the altered dolls.”

“Who told you that?”

“A little birdie . . . to whom I paid one thousand of Mattel’s hard-earned dollars.”

Virgil heard what she said but was focused on a red truck parked at a mobile home three down from Anderson’s: it was almost certainly, he thought, the truck driven by the women who beat him up, right down to the husband-wife-kids-dogs-cat sticker in the rear window.

Griffin picked up the fact that he wasn’t paying close attention to her and asked, “What? What’s going on?”

“That truck,” Virgil said. “When I got beat up, I think the women were driving that truck. No, wait: I’m sure they were driving it.”