Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(70)

TWENTY At the cabin, Virgil hooked a pair of earphones into his iPad and called up a shuffle of country blues. He’d just closed his eyes to think when the phone rang. Johnson Johnson was on the other end and said, “You’re gonna get a phone call.”

“What?”

“You’re gonna get a phone call. You won’t recognize the number. Answer it anyway.”

“Johnson . . .”

“Answer the phone, dummy. Probably next five minutes . . .”

He clicked off, and Virgil didn’t bother to call him back. Johnson moved in mysterious ways sometimes—or in ways that seemed mysterious to outsiders, especially when he crashed one of his boats, trucks, cars, motorcycles, airplanes, four-wheelers, or snowmobiles and yet survived to run a thriving business. Virgil had learned that lesson through the years and so was content to wait for the phone call.

It came in three or four minutes later, in the middle of J.J. Cale’s “Call Me the Breeze”: a sulky woman’s voice, a little whiskey in it. “Is this Virgil?”

“Yes, it is. Who is this?”

“This is Jesse McGovern.”

“Jesse.” Johnson did indeed move in mysterious ways, sometimes. “I’ve been trying to look you up.”

“Yeah, I know. For that Griffin woman who’s trying to shut us down. What’s it to you, what we’re doing?”

“Nothing, except I guess it’s illegal,” Virgil said. “Even then, I wouldn’t much care, but . . . I’m supposed to stop illegal stuff.”

“Because somebody got to the governor, is what I heard,” McGovern said. Johnson also ran his mouth, sometimes.

“Look, all Margaret Griffin wants to do is serve you some papers,” Virgil said. “We’re not trying to arrest you . . . Yet . . . Unless you beat somebody up . . . Like me.”

“I didn’t know that was going to happen. Carolyn Weaver and some of her CarryTown pals got a wild hair, is all. Anyway, I talked to Johnson about you,” McGovern said. “He said that you’re open to . . . arrangements.”

“If you’re talking about a bribe . . .”

“No, no, no. I asked Johnson about that, and he said you don’t take bribes,” McGovern said. “Unlike certain other law enforcement officers I could mention.”

Virgil didn’t want to go there and instead asked, “So, what do you mean ‘arrangements’?”

“My people could help you with the Gina Hemming case, if you lay off us.”

Virgil sat up and said, “If you have any information about Gina Hemming, I need it. If you have it and don’t cough it up, I’ll put your ass in jail.”

“Yeah? You can’t even find me, how are you going to find me and prove I knew something about Gina? It’s all in my head; it’s not like I wrote it down on a piece of paper and put it in my purse.”

Virgil didn’t have an answer for that except a limp, “I’ll find you. And to tell you the truth, I don’t need a bunch of amateur Sherlocks running around town, trying to turn up clues.”

“It’s not that. It’s something specific.”

Virgil decided to make an emotional appeal for justice; he had a few pre-canned: “Jesse, if you have something specific, it’s your obligation to tell me. We’re not talking about some button on the back of a Barbie doll. We’re talking about Margot Moore getting shot three times in the forehead while she was playing Scrabble with a couple of friends. A woman who went to the same high school that you did. You probably knew her, right? I looked into her open, dead eyes, and it seemed to me like she was pleading with me to find the killer. You gotta think about that. You gotta help me.”

“I heard about Margot.” More silence. Then, “Johnson said you might try to pull some ethics shit on me.”

“He was right.”

“You did that really good. Made me feel guilty. The dead eyes thing,” she said.

“Thank you.”

—

Even more silence; the woman apparently didn’t feel the need to fill every crack in the conversation with the spoken word. Finally, “There’s all kinds of rumors going around, about who was at that party at Gina’s on Thursday night and what time that broke up. Some people say it broke up at nine o’clock.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t know if this will mean anything, but a friend of mine—honestly, a friend, not me, and not somebody involved with the Barbie-Os—said a GetOut! truck was parked outside Gina’s house at nine-thirty.”

“A GetOut! truck? David Birkmann?”

“Definitely not David. My friend said it was a blond-headed man. The man may have seen my friend looking out the window at him and turned his face away, but he was a blond for sure.”

“That’s it?”

“Isn’t that a lot?”

“It could be,” Virgil said. “If it pans out, I’m going to need your friend’s name . . . I’m sure you know that.”

“If it pans out, this person will talk to you,” McGovern said.

“Jesse, I appreciate this . . .”

“You gonna lay off us?”

“I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to catch you. But if somebody sticks some Barbie doll stuff in my face, I’ll probably have to do something. And Carolyn Weaver is going to jail for a while, for beating me up. If I can find out who her helpers were, they’ll go with her.”