Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(61)

“Do you think Corbel could be right?” Penney asked after Hart laid it out. “Ryan Harney . . . that seems too unlikely.”

“Corbel supposedly told Flowers that Ryan had an affair with Gina,” Hart said. Hart and Penney both looked at Moore. “You think that’s true?”

Moore said, “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

Hart said, “Margot . . . it’s us.”

Moore said, “You can’t tell anyone.”

“Of course not,” Penney said.

“They had a relationship, but it was years ago,” Moore said. “Completely over with. Gina says that Ryan told Karen about it and she forgave him.”

“I don’t see that happening,” Hart said.

—

Penney said, “From what I’ve heard, Flowers thinks that one of the people at your meeting must have done it. Who do you think?”

Moore was shaking her head. “No one. It must have been an outsider. I mean, maybe somebody here in town, but nobody from that meeting. Something else is going on that we don’t know about.”

“That makes it even more scary. A killer on the loose, with no known motive,” Penney said. “What if he’s a nut? He could come after anybody.”

Hart said, “Single women, living alone.”

Moore: “I’ve got a gun under my bed.”

Penney said, “Mine’s in the side table. A nine-millimeter. Kelly Brenner showed me how to shoot it and load it and all. It kinda scares me, knowing it’s there. It’s like looking from a high bridge and thinking you might jump.”

Hart said, “Maybe I should get one. I’ve never shot one. Is it easy to learn?”

“Point and shoot,” Moore said. “An idiot can use one. Look at the news . . . anytime.”

—

Birkmann had parked his truck on a side street two blocks away and had walked through the snowstorm with his head down, an anonymous nylon-wrapped blob trudging up the sidewalk in the dark.

Birkmann had been in Moore’s house a few times on extermination missions—she’d once had a major plague of Asian ladybugs—so he knew the layout. Moore was in her kitchen, the only brightly lit room in the house. As he approached, he thought, Is this really necessary? It was only possible, perhaps not even probable, that Moore would tell Flowers what she knew.

Then a new thought: thrown in the river? How had Hemming gotten in the river? Had he been thrown into some weird mental state by the killing? Had the trauma wiped his memory? Such things were possible.

That whole line of thought took another two or three minutes, but he finally shook it off and refocused on the house.

Still no light, except from the kitchen windows. No real sign of life, either. Maybe she wasn’t home, maybe she’d had left the light on as a security measure or because she didn’t like to get home in the dark?

A shadow moved across the kitchen curtains . . .

A sigh, the gun in hand, a fumbling check of the mechanism. A round in the chamber, a bright spot of golden brass in the steel mechanism of the gun. Birkmann walked up the front steps, reached toward the doorbell . . . paused, fled down the steps, stepped behind an evergreen, obscured in the night and the falling snow.

He stood there for a full three minutes, not really thinking, simply frozen. Another sigh, and he climbed back up the steps.

This time, he rang the doorbell.

A moment later, Moore walked through the front room to the door. Gun up, face down, until the last minute. Moore opened the door, a question on her face—her last question—then recognition, and the gun right there, three quick shots.

Moore toppled backward, landed on the front room rug with a muffled thud.

Was she dead? She had to be.

Penney and Hart didn’t immediately react to the gunshots. Penney had gotten up to pour more hot toddy for the three of them, and Moore’s body dropping to the floor sounded like somebody had dropped a package or a sack.

Only after a minute or two, when they didn’t hear Moore speaking, did Penney call out, “Margot? Margot? Everything okay?”

Hart walked over to the door that led down a short hall to the front living room and felt the draft of cold air from the open front door. “Margot?”

She didn’t see the body immediately because it was in the dark space below the storm door and a streetlight was shining in through the glass in the door. She stepped farther into the hallway and saw the lump on the floor, like a rolled-up rug . . .

“Margot? Margot?”

—

After the shooting, Birkmann ran for a half block, seeing nobody in the storm. He slowed, found himself panting. She had to be dead, because she recognized him, he thought, in the split second before he pulled the trigger, and if she wasn’t dead, then he was. So she had to be dead. He hurried down the second block, got in his truck, and, as he was about to pull the door shut, heard the first of the sirens.

What? Had he missed her? No, he hadn’t; he’d actually seen the bullets impact her forehead and her legs failing as she slumped toward the floor. Another witness? My God, they might be right behind him.

Birkmann, near panic, rolled up the hill and around the corner and headed for home.

—

The cops didn’t come for him, so Moore must have been dead. Although, he supposed, she could simply be so injured that she couldn’t speak . . . at least, not yet. The Dunkin’ Donuts opened at seven o’clock, to catch the going-to-work crowd, and he’d be there right at seven, to see what the latest news was.