Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(68)

—

Once Fitzgerald started talking, he sank back and closed his eyes, and the words rolled out like a repellent dream, riveting Virgil, Pweters, McComber, and Carlson in their chairs, viewers at a horror movie.

Fitzgerald dressed carefully for his assignations, he said: tight jeans, black T-shirt that would show his muscle, black leather jacket, heavy black boots by Daytona. Black thong underpants. He enjoyed looking like a movie biker, but the movie bikers he emulated tended to ride in Southern California or Arizona. If he stood outside in Trippton in the winter in his Southern California assignation gear, he’d freeze his nuts off.

He thought about that as he drove to Gina Hemming’s house. He liked messing with Hemming, and he liked the two hundred and fifty dollars she paid him for each therapy session, but he didn’t want to freeze his nuts off. Would she still be hot for him if he showed up in a North Face parka and hood, in trapdoor long johns and fleece-lined rubber boots? Maybe not.

He took his Jeep up the incline to Hemming’s back drive, parked, got a plastic baggie with a couple of joints from under the front seat, hustled up the back steps of the house, and knocked. He was shivering from the cold when he finally tried the doorknob, which, to his surprise, was unlocked. He pushed inside, into the warmth of the kitchen. “Gina?”

No answer. She was upstairs in the bathroom, he guessed, and he went that way. “Gina?”

And found her body at the bottom of the stairs.

He froze, called to her across the twenty feet that separated them. “Gina? Gina?”

Trembling in the sudden presence of death, he stepped across to her, squatted next to her body, touched her neck with a knuckle: still warm but obviously dead, one side of her head crushed flat.

She’d only been dead for a few minutes, he thought. He stood, took his phone from his pocket to call the cops. And then thought twice about that.

Nobody had seen him arrive; it was snowing hard enough that he could probably get away clean. If the cops found him here, they were likely to think that her death had been something more than an accident. His reputation in town was not the best, and that prick Jeff Purdy would be happy to get rid of him for whatever reason.

Then he noticed the blood. A spot of blood marred the carpet, five feet from Hemming’s head. He wasn’t a doctor, and he thought for a moment that it was possible that she’d fallen, hit her head on the stairway bannister, and had landed where the blood was . . . had staggered somehow out into the room. What—and pushed herself backward to where she now lay? Not likely, not with the damage to the side of her head.

And, finally, he noticed the shoe.

One high-heeled pump lay on the stairs, as if it had come off when she’d fallen. The other was still on her foot. But the shoe on her foot was on the wrong foot—like it had been put there by mistake, by somebody hastily faking the fall.

By the killer.

Fitzgerald looked around, suddenly frightened. She had been dead only a few minutes. Was the killer still in the house? Maybe upstairs, looting the bedroom?

He carried a switchblade, which were legal in Minnesota. He clicked it open, listened, and heard nothing but the wind. After a few minutes, he crept up the stairs and into the bedrooms, a chill between his shoulder blades as he waited for the killer to jump out of one of the many closets, nooks, and crannies of the old Victorian.

He’d never stabbed anyone . . .

But the house was empty.

—

As he worked through the house, he realized that his trouble was deeper than he’d first supposed: his fingerprints were on the outside doorknobs. Had he touched Hemming with his fingers? He knew from watching television shows that fingerprints could sometimes be taken from bodies, along with DNA. And he’d definitely touched Hemming’s neck . . .

Downstairs, he thought about it some more and finally decided he had no choice: he had to get rid of her body. It’d be a mystery, what happened to her. The cops might eventually find out about their relationship, but if a motive couldn’t be found, he should be safe . . . except for those prints.

He had to get rid of the body.

He first made very sure that Hemming was really dead. He checked her breathing and then saw the blood marks on her face, the blood slowly being dragged down by gravity, no longer pumped by her heart.

When he was sure, he went back up the stairs, into a guest bedroom, and took a plaid blanket off a cedar chest, carried it back down, and wrapped her in it. He was trembling again. He carried her in his arms out to the truck, put her in the truck bed. He returned to the house and wiped everything he might have touched with his hands. At the last pass through the house, he spotted her purse and decided to take it—maybe somebody would think she’d gone off by herself. Same with her shoes.

That done, he drove carefully back to his shop, got his auger and his ice chipper, and drove out on the Mississippi. The snow was thick, but he could still see the lights of the lowest level of Trippton when he stopped. Cutting through the ice went quickly enough, and, ten minutes later, he slipped the body into the water and pushed it down. As he did, the blanket floated off. He pushed that under, too, and threw the shoes and the purse after it. When everything was gone, he used his boots to push loose snow into the hole.

Still wearing the leather jacket and T-shirt, and on the edge of frostbite, he drove back to the lights of Trippton. Gripped with fear. A fear that had never gone away.

The cops would be coming, he knew, and he had to work through Hemming’s death, change his fear to puzzlement.