Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(6)
Virgil, under his breath: “Go, go, go . . .”
The bird made a small downward movement, as though cocking itself, and dropped back toward the water, and BANG! This time, it came up with a flapping fish, probably a small white sucker. Virgil shot thirty frames, starting from the owl’s launching point, to the water, and back. He burned up a few more frames of the bird tearing the fish apart, sat back, and chimped the results.
Not bad, he thought, as he flipped through the images on the camera’s LCD screen. In fact, excellent. One thousand American dollars, unless the good folks at Wing & Talon had been shining him on.
—
Back at his truck, he put the folded blind away and the lens back in its case, pulled his iPad out of the backseat and transferred the photos. He also kept them on the memory card as a backup and, when he got home, would move them to the Cloud as even further insurance.
He started the truck and was backing out to the road when the phone burped. Frankie wouldn’t be calling, because he’d asked her not to call between three o’clock and sundown when a call could disturb the owl. He picked up the phone and looked at the screen: Jon Duncan, his nominal boss at the BCA. He was on vacation, so the call could be social. Maybe. Okay, maybe not.
“What’s up?” Virgil asked.
“Man, I know you’re on vacation—”
“No, no, no! Get somebody else.”
“It’s down in Trippton, your old stomping grounds. I’ve got to ask you to take a look. Do this for me, take the rest of your vacation when it’s done,” Duncan said. “The big boss says nobody will check if you take a bunch of undertime on top of your vacation.”
“Undertime” was a concept widely used in state government: it was like overtime, but instead of working more, you worked less, while still getting paid. The real artists took undertime while on the clock for overtime, thus getting time-and-a-half for not working.
“How much undertime?” Virgil asked.
“However much you want . . . that isn’t outright theft.”
“I gotta talk to Frankie. We were going out tonight.”
“Go out,” Duncan said. “There’s no point of getting down there before tomorrow morning anyway. Since tomorrow’s a Sunday, you probably don’t even have to get there early.”
“Gimme the short version,” Virgil said.
“Short version: forty-two-year-old almost-divorced female bank president disappears Thursday night and is dumped in the Mississippi, only to emerge as a block of ice this afternoon.”
“How’d she emerge?” Virgil asked. “The river’s frozen solid all the way down to Iowa.”
“A sewage plant effluent stream creates open water a couple miles south of Trippton. Some guy was out there fishing when she floated by.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Yeah, I’m told it wasn’t exactly pleasant.”
“I meant fishing in the effluent stream,” Virgil said. “Do they know what killed her? Shot, or drowned, or what?”
“The ME has her in Rochester; he says she died of a fractured skull. He finished the autopsy about ten minutes ago. Wasn’t an accident, wasn’t a fall or anything. She was wearing a burgundy-colored dress and was barefoot. The sheriff said that when she was last seen in that dress, Thursday night, she was wearing high heels. She wasn’t walking around on river ice in four-inch heels and a Donna Karan jacket.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “If Frankie gets pissed, I’m gonna blame it on you.”
“That’s one of the fardels I must bear,” Duncan said.
“What?”
“You must not be familiar with Hamlet,” Duncan said. “You know, by Shakespeare.”
“Oh, that one,” Virgil said.
“Yeah. One of my ancestors is in Macbeth.”
“I’ll buy a copy, maybe you can autograph it for me,” Virgil said. “I’ll call you back tomorrow night about the banker lady.”
“Virgil, I owe you.”
“You keep saying that, but you never pay off.”
“That’s one of your fardels,” Duncan said.
—
Virgil was two hours from home. He called and spent some time talking to Frankie about nothing in particular but including a ten-minute rumination about her sister’s sexual misadventures at the University of Minnesota, which seemed designed to gain her a tenured teaching position. “Absolutely disgusting,” Frankie said. “I sometimes can’t believe that Sparkle and I are even related . . .”
“It’s absolutely awful,” Virgil said. When he got off the phone, he brought up a country music station and fantasized about a Frankie-Sparkle-Virgil sandwich, which should have made him ashamed of himself but didn’t.
Virgil and Frankie spent Saturday evening at the Cine Grand Mankato watching Hacksaw Ridge, then went over to the Rooster Coop for a couple of beers and to chat with people they knew. Between the two of them, that included half the patrons in the place, including three out-and-out barflies and an out-of-tune Eagles cover band.
Frankie was a short, good-looking woman with pale blue eyes and blond hair, which she wore in a fat, Swedish-style single braid. She was once a smart redneck but was now the smart owner of an architectural salvage business, which meant she bought and tore down old houses that had good wood or salable fixtures in them. She also operated a small farm outside Mankato, mostly growing alfalfa.