Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(77)

The list was short enough that Virgil ran through it in a hurry. The clinic had regular hours: seven to three, three to eleven, and eleven to seven. The restaurants ran two shifts, as did the liquor stores. No shift at any of the places started or ended at nine o’clock.

The convenience store . . .

Virgil found the pear-shaped assistant manager there, and a plumber working on a compressor for a cooler, and the assistant manager, whose name was Jay, said, “Yeah, Bobbie gets off at nine. She works Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.”

“What’s Bobbie’s last name?”

“Cole. What’d she do?”

“Nothing,” Virgil said. “Where can I find her?”

“She’s standing behind the counter, wearing a red sweater.”

—

Virgil introduced himself to Bobbie Cole, a short, stocky woman with chromed hair who was rearranging the candy stacks in front of her cash register. A half-eaten PayDay bar sat on the counter. She said, “Didn’t take long to find me. How’d you do that?”

Virgil ignored the question and asked, “How sure are you that you saw a GetOut! truck outside Gina Hemming’s house? After nine o’clock?”

“Positive.” She crossed her arms defensively. “I get off here exactly at nine on Thursdays. I drive past her house every night after I get off. I saw the truck.”

“There was for sure a GetOut! truck there earlier . . .”

“But I wasn’t,” she said.

“How sure are you that the guy inside was blond?”

“Positive. I was coming up behind him when he must’ve put his foot on the brake pedal, because the brake lights came on. And that made me sort of jerk, because I was afraid he was going to pull out. I went past and looked over and could see a man in the front seat. And he was looking at something over in the passenger seat, because his back was turned to me, and his hair was bright yellow. I seen it. And that’s that.”

“No idea about his age or anything? Or anything about the truck . . .”

Jay, the guy who’d been working on the cooler, had come up behind Virgil, stopping back in the Hostess pastries section. Virgil didn’t see him until Cole looked past him and said, “Jay, you still have the time clock cards from Thursday, right?”

“Sure.”

“Virgil here doesn’t believe me when I say I got off at nine.” She looked at Virgil. “The time card will show you the exact minute. My guess is nine-oh-one.”

Virgil: “It’s not that I don’t believe you . . .”

Jay said, “Let’s go look.” There were people out at the gas pumps, and he added, “Bobbie, better stay up here with the register.”

—

Jay didn’t have an office so much as a closet, with a time clock and a couple of file cabinets and a chest-high bench. He pulled the time cards for the previous week, ducked his head back out the door to check on Bobbie. In a low voice he said, “Officer . . . uh . . . You gotta be a little careful with Bobbie.”

Virgil’s heart sank. “In what way?”

“Everybody who comes in talks about Gina getting killed, and now Margot what’s-her-name . . .”

“Moore . . .”

“Yeah, Moore. Bobbie made herself into the local expert on it, she’s heard every rumor there is. I didn’t know about her spotting the GetOut! truck until yesterday—I mean, a week after she saw it. She never mentioned it before. So . . . anyway, there’s this medical truck that goes around from town to town, they’ve got a machine that checks your neck artery to see if it’s getting clogged up or anything. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Yeah, the ultrasound truck.”

“That’s it. Anyway, it’s a drop-in thing. And my doc keeps telling me I ought to get one ’cause, you know, I kinda let myself get out of shape.”

“Okay.”

“Last month, I came in, and Bobbie was behind the counter and says, ‘Jay, the ultrasound truck is down in the Hardware Hank parking lot. Weren’t you supposed to do that?’”

“And I say, ‘Absolutely.’ I leave her in the store and go down to the Hardware Hank, no truck. I went inside and asked at customer service, and the truck was there the day before . . . She’d seen it the day before.”

“Oh, boy,” Virgil said.

“I’m not saying she’s wrong, I’m just sayin’.”

“Got it,” Virgil said.

Jay had been going through the time cards for the previous week and held one up. “Here’s her time card. Out of here at nine-oh-one.”

“So she’s accurate about that,” Virgil said.

“Sure, but . . . she was out of here at nine-oh-one on Wednesday and nine-oh-three on Friday,” Jay said, peering at the card. “People don’t stick around after work, and if their replacement comes in late, the counter people can get nasty about it. Feet hurt, knees hurt. I hate to say it, but it’s sort of a shit job. Nobody gets here late—and everybody gets out of here on time. Every time.”

—

Virgil ran into unreliable witnesses all the time, and Cole seemed like a classic. People could be a close-up eyewitness to a robbery and not be able to tell you whether the robber was black or white, whether he had a gun or a knife. When they were more distant from the event but had been prepped to talk to the cops through rumors and media reports, their information was often useless or, worse, completely misleading.