Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(8)

Thurston was a small, dark-haired man with a sleepy look about his heavy-lidded eyes. Virgil said, “I hope this isn’t too much trouble,” as he sat down with his pie. “Being Sunday.”

“I’ll tell you what’s too much trouble,” Thurston said, folding the paper and pushing it aside. “Falling in love. Coming in for an hour on Sunday afternoon? No problem. Falling in love? Big problem. I was a perfectly content single guy, with a six handicap golf habit, and along came Buttercup.”

“That can’t be her name,” Virgil said.

“No, it can’t. Her name is Laurie, and she’s a crazy vegetarian, yoga practitioner, feminist bitch lawyer. Unfortunately, I fell in love with her.”

“When did all this come up?”

“Two or three months ago,” Thurston said. “It seems like it’s been forever. Like I’ve known her forever.”

“I’m familiar with the feeling,” Virgil said. “Been there myself a few times.”

“A few times? Did you love them or was it the sex?” Thurston asked.

“Oh, I loved them,” Virgil said. “I even married them.”

Thurston thought about that for a moment, then asked, “Then what?”

“After a while, we got divorced,” Virgil said. “The first divorce was bad, took some time to get over that one. The third only took about six weeks to get over.”

“Three divorces?” Thurston was impressed.

“Yeah, I was . . . unsettled,” Virgil said.

Made Thurston laugh. “All right. Finish your pie and let’s go look at Miz Hemming.”

—

Virgil had seen people shot, stabbed, burned, drowned, beaten to death, blown up, run over with cars, and eaten by a tiger. When Thurston rolled Hemming out of the cooler, she looked almost uninjured, if you could ignore the various dismemberments done during the autopsy. Thurston had put her roughly back together, leaving the rest for the funeral home.

Even with the autopsy work, when Virgil looked closely he could see that her head was no longer symmetrical. She wasn’t bloated, like most floaters: in fact, she seemed to have shrunken, and she was pale as a piece of printer paper, except that her lips, eyelids, and the tops of her ears were a distinct blue. She showed one wound, in her cheek, but that was small and bloodless. Her breasts were flattened, her nipples so pale that they merged with the skin around them. She had almost no pubic hair.

“Death was very quick—effectively, instantaneous,” Thurston said. “She was struck on the left side of her head, at her temple, and almost certainly from the front, so it’s better than fifty-fifty that the killer was right-handed. She was struck with something curved and heavy—I’d say there’s a good chance that it was a large, full bottle. A bowling ball or a bowling pin could have done the same kind of damage, but you usually don’t get people being smacked in the head with a bowling ball or pin. Whatever it was, it was larger in diameter than a baseball bat.”

“What’s the cut on her face?”

“Oh, yeah. The guy who saw the body floating in the river was a fisherman; he hooked her with a treble hook and pulled her in. The cops cut the lure off but left the hook. I took it off to see if there was any other, earlier defect beneath it. There wasn’t. All the damage was done by the hook.”

“Is there any way to tell how long she was dead before she was dumped?” Virgil asked.

“I can’t tell you exactly how long, but it was some time. The river water is cold, in the thirties . . . colder than a typical refrigerator. She showed substantial gravity-based internal bleeding toward her left side, which suggests that she was lying on that side for quite some time. Then the river water hit, and when she got cold enough, the bleeding would have stopped. I can’t say four hours, as opposed to two—that would depend on how the body was handled—but I can say it was some time.”

“Okay . . .”

He gestured toward Hemming’s chest and stomach, which had been opened with a Y-shaped incision. “The other thing is, she’d eaten quite a lot of cheese, which she may have liked but apparently didn’t agree with her. Prior to death, she’d already begun to develop intestinal gas, and that process continued after death, although it would have stopped when the body got cold enough. The cold also created some rigidity in her sphincter muscles, so she didn’t pass that gas until we opened her up.”

“Is there a point here?” Virgil asked.

“Yes. It was probably that gas that kept her afloat enough to wind up on top of the water at the sewage plant. If it weren’t for that, she would have been at the bottom of the river.”

“Okay.”

Not much help there. Another man came through the door, a heavyset guy wearing a ski hat, an open parka, and a fulsome neck beard. “Sorry I’m late,” he said.

Thurston said to Virgil, “Karl is our death investigator. He can give you some information on her clothing and the recovery of the body and so on . . .”

Virgil shook hands with Karl Lone, who asked Thurston, “You tell him about the bruises?”

“Getting there,” Thurston said. He took a yellow pencil from his jacket pocket and used it as a pointer. “If you look here, you can see that she had bruises at her wrists . . .” He pointed to them. “And at her ankles.” He pointed again. The bruises were faint but distinct, once you saw them, and circled her wrists and ankles like bracelets. “She also had light striped bruising on her buttocks. They happened some time before her death—days before, maybe a week before. Not hours. We can roll her, and you can look at the bruises if you want . . .”