Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(69)

He could handle the cops, he thought, but he wasn’t entirely sure he could handle Hemming’s murder. She’d been the most beautiful woman he’d ever slept with, the most high-toned . . . the prize of his life.

—

I figured she wouldn’t pop up until spring, if she ever came up, and then nobody would remember who was doing what when she died,” Fitzgerald told his audience. “I wouldn’t have to pull some goofy alibi out of my ass. I could say I was out of town, or whatever, if anybody asked.”

Virgil said, “I’m still not clear on why you didn’t call the sheriff’s office. Or walk away from it.”

“Because Jeff Purdy would slap me in jail and call it a day. I’d be good enough for him—another fifty votes for solving the murder so quick. Purdy wouldn’t give a shit about who really did it. All he’d care about would be getting somebody in jail. Anybody. I’d be perfect. If I’d walked away and left her, same deal—he’d find out that we were involved . . . sexually . . . from somebody like Margot, and I’d be in jail.”

“I don’t think you’re being entirely fair to Jeff,” Carlson said. The prosecutor’s forehead was beetled in a frown. “There’s no evidence that we don’t treat all murders with utmost . . .”

“Oh, shut up, Bret,” McComber said.

Virgil: “So you’re saying that when you showed up, about nine-thirty . . .”

“A little later than that, but not much. It wasn’t even nine forty-five. I’d guess . . . maybe nine-forty.”

“At nine-forty, she already had those little blood things under her skin,” Virgil said.

“Yeah.”

“What’s that mean?” McComber asked.

“It’s something that happens after somebody dies, blood stripes under the skin, the beginning of the lividity process. That doesn’t take long, but it takes a little while,” Virgil said. “Unless Fred is lying, she must have been killed right after the meeting ended . . . unless the people at the meeting were lying and she was killed while they were still there.”

Carlson shook his head. “You don’t get to do that again—take down a bunch of good citizens.”

Virgil, annoyed: “Bret, the school board killed several people and stole millions of dollars from the schools. From the kids. Even if they were your good friends, they weren’t good citizens. They’re doing thirty-year sentences for their rotten citizenship.”

“Well, except for that, they were okay,” Carlson muttered.

McComber leaned across to him and whispered, “Bret, this is being recorded,” and Carlson shut up.

—

Virgil, Pweters, Carlson, and McComber continued to push Fitzgerald on the details of his discovery of the body, but after half an hour, there wasn’t much more to learn. Virgil was interested in Fitzgerald’s observation about the shoe, which struck him as very real reportage and not something a killer would extemporaneously think up as part of a cover.

When they were done, Pweters arrested Fitzgerald for interfering with a dead body, a gross misdemeanor. He would be booked at the county jail, Carlson explained, where he would be held overnight, but, at Carlson’s directive, would be released on his own recognizance the following day—after Virgil had gotten a search warrant from a county judge.

Virgil and Pweters took Fitzgerald down to Pweters’s patrol car, and when Fitzgerald was locked in the backseat, Virgil said, “He doesn’t know anything else?”

“I don’t think so,” Pweters said.

“You remember the last time we talked to him and I screwed something up? All of a sudden he wasn’t sweating anymore? That’s because I said somebody saw him on a sled—and he’d driven out in his pickup. He knew I was bullshitting him.”

“Ah. I didn’t pick that up.”

Virgil pulled his gloves out of his pocket and put them on. “You want to get the warrant and help search the place tomorrow?”

“Sure. After breakfast? Meet you at Ma and Pa’s for pancakes?”

“I guess. Damnit, you know what this means?”

“Could mean a lot of things,” Pweters said, “but tell me.”

“I’d eliminated a lot of the possible suspects, like Lucy Cheever and Margot Moore and Sheila Carver, because they were too small to carry a body as heavy as Hemming’s. Turns out, they wouldn’t have had to. All they would have had to do is hit Hemming with a bottle and, probably, be mean or crazy enough to shoot Moore with a handgun. I’m starting again at zero.”

Virgil went back to Moore’s house, where Sawyer and her partner were still at work. “I’ve got nothing much, except we picked up two .22 long-rifle shells from outside the door, in the snow. Haven’t found the third one. But, the shooter was using an autoloader. We’ll look at the firing pin marks, et cetera, maybe get you a make on the pistol. We’ll run the shells for prints, but I don’t see any. That’s about it. You’ll get my report in the morning, but there won’t be much in it other than that. We should get the body off to Rochester, let the ME look at her, and dig out the slugs—no exit wounds. That might get you a little more on the make of the gun.”

“Okay.” Virgil hung around for a while to see if anything amazing came up, but nothing did.