Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(60)

So Birkmann sat in the coffee shop, running through a list of fantasies about how it all could be explained. Came up empty. As the sun disappeared behind the bluffs and the night came down like an Army blanket pulled over the head, the question occurred to him, What if Margot died?

Moore was some kind of health nut and obviously wasn’t going to drop dead on her own, so there was no point in pretending. If she was going to die, she’d have to be murdered.

An ugly word.

Murdered.

More fantasies, in which she died all on her own . . . And finally a dark, tickling thought, persistent, unavoidable: a perfect murder weapon was at hand. Something nobody else in town had access to . . .

Birkmann’s father had dealt almost entirely with bugs. Insects. On a rare occasion, one of his clients might ask him to take care of an errant raccoon or skunk. Or an obstreperous possum, a too-visible rat. For those occasions, he carried a .22 caliber Ruger pistol in his van. The notable thing about the pistol was that it was made specifically for exterminators. And was silenced, so as not to disturb the peace when used in urban settings.

The pistol was in a wooden box at the back of a storage closet. The weapon had been purchased before all the current paperwork was required, probably forty years before. There was no sentimental value to it. But who threw away a gun? They were serious chunks of metal that, with even minimal care, would last forever. A ’70s gun in a common caliber was as good as a gun bought yesterday.

Birkmann dug it out, carried it up to the living room, and sat and stared at it. Worked the action . . .

—

Margot Moore’s second guest, Sandy Hart, came through the front door at seven o’clock, brushed a few snowflakes off her shoulders and out of her hair, pulled off her coat, and said, “My golly, when will this cold go away? It’s been a week, and I don’t see an end to it.”

Moore took her coat to put on the bed and said, “Don’t worry, we’ve got something to warm you up.”

“Margot’s hot toddy?”

“Exactly. Gonna send you home drunk on your butt. Belle’s in the kitchen, setting up the board.”

“She’s probably hiding some tiles under her chair,” Hart said.

Belle Penney called from the back of the house: “I heard that.”

Moore took the coat into the bedroom, and when she walked back into the kitchen, Hart and Penney were seated at the kitchen table, turning the Scrabble tiles facedown in the game’s box top.

Moore went to the stove, where the toddy had been steeping for five minutes. She poured the fiery liquid into tall mugs, sniffing the pleasant steam from the cloves, cinnamon, and the three ample shots of Jack Daniel’s.

She put the cups next to the other two women and settled into a third chair. “Mix those babies up good. Remember last time, Belle kept getting those ‘Q’s.”

“Hey . . .”

Old friends, playing Scrabble, on a cold, snowy night in Trippton.

—

The impulse to kill almost seemed to have its own horsepower, like a runaway truck. The elimination of one person would cut through an immediate, otherwise unsolvable threat. Birkmann drove into town, the gun in his coat pocket, snow coming down like a favor from God, muffling sounds, obscuring trucks, with cars moving slowly in the night, all eyes on the slippery roads.

—

An odd coincidence, which Virgil would notice later.

Belle Penney came through with the word “murder,” five letters hooked through the letter “u,” which Sandy Hart had left in the open with her down word, “chateau.” They’d had a brief argument about whether “chateau” would qualify because, basically, it was a foreign word, but an online check said that, yes, it was acceptable for English-language Scrabble.

That settled, Penney tapped her finger on the word, hushed her voice by a few decibels, and asked Moore, “Have you heard any more about Gina?”

Moore shook her head. “God, it’s been a nightmare. I’ve been questioned twice by Virgil Flowers, but he knows I didn’t have anything to do with it. He doesn’t have anything to go on, so he’s questioning everybody who went to the reunion meeting, and all of Gina’s friends, people at the bank—everybody. Really putting on the pressure.”

“He’s supposed to be tricky,” Penney said. “You think he can be trusted?”

“He’s about a hundred miles better than Jeff Purdy,” Moore said. “If Jeff was investigating, we’d have a mystery for the ages. Nobody would ever know who killed Gina.”

“Might not be a bad thing,” Penney said, “depending on who did it and why.”

“Had to be a sex thing,” Hart said.

“Or a money thing,” Penney said.

“Or a random attack,” Moore said. “That’s the problem—Flowers can’t even figure out the motive.”

“Believe me, it was sex,” Hart said.

Penney: “I think people get more angry and violent about money, especially here in Trippton. Hard times.” She turned to Moore. “Who’d he talk to about money stuff? Other than you?”

Moore filled them in on Virgil’s investigation, without mentioning whips or handcuffs. Or Fred Fitzgerald.

—

Moore had been buried in a client’s investment wish list all afternoon and hadn’t heard the rumors about Corbel Cain, Denwa Burke, and the fight at the Harneys’ house, but Hart worked at the courthouse and had pieces of the story.