Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(9)

“No, no,” Virgil said hastily. “I believe you. Are they relevant?”

“It’s possible that they’re from B and D,” Lone said. “Bondage and discipline. She was possibly tied up and spanked.”

Virgil looked at Thurston: “Really?”

“It’s the best explanation,” Thurston said. “You can decide if it’s relevant. Some sex play may have gone too far . . .”

“Not sex play if you whack somebody hard enough to break her skull,” Virgil said.

“But sex, alcohol, a taste for violence, a quarrel . . . somebody brings a bottle over expecting to get laid, she tells him to take a hike, they argue, and WHACK!”

“Okay,” Virgil said. “It’s a possibility.”

Lone stepped up: “The doc won’t tell you this, because he’s a conservative medical doctor who’s careful about what he says, but I’ll tell you what—I’ve seen a couple people killed by B and D during my career, and I don’t know if her . . . sex partner . . . killed her, but I know B and D bruises when I see them. That’s what we’re looking at.”

Virgil turned back to Thurston again, who said, “Umm.”

Thurston said, “Possibly more relevant to your investigation . . . look closely at the fingernails of her right hand. The nails on her ring and middle fingers are cracked and slightly ripped, and that happened at the time of death or slightly before.”

“How can you tell?”

“I don’t want to sound too definite about that, to tell the truth, but it’s what I think,” Thurston said. “There was some instantaneous bleeding behind the nails at the time of the trauma, but the bleeding quickly stopped.”

“Why wasn’t this washed away when she was in the water?” Virgil asked.

“The blood we see is down behind the nails, which sealed up the broken blood vessels.”

“And that’s relevant . . . how?” Virgil asked.

“It looks to me—possibly—that she struck her killer with her hand and raked him with her nails. She has well-cared-for nails, and they’re quite long. There was no tissue of any kind beneath the tips, but that easily could have been washed away in the water because it wasn’t sealed beneath the nails.”

“You’re saying that the killer could have scratches,” Virgil said.

“Scratches, or even nasty cuts, because she hit him hard. Now, it’s also possible that she damaged her nails some other way before she was killed, but in my experience a woman like this isn’t going to walk around with two ragged hangnails. They’ll clip them, or use an emery board to clean them up—and right away. I think the damage happened in a fight at the time of her death.”

Overall, Virgil spent an hour in Rochester, talking to Thurston and Lone, but didn’t get much more that would help with his investigation. Hemming’s body showed no signs of a pre-death struggle, other than the nails: no fresh cuts or bruises on the body, except the scalp; no large amounts of missing hair, although there may be some small bits missing around the point of impact.

Lone said that her clothing was undamaged by anything resembling violence, although it had been discolored by immersion in the river. She’d been barefoot when taken out of the water.

Back in his 4Runner, Virgil spent another hour driving on to Trippton, moving slow through the rough rolling terrain of the Driftless Area, thinking about the ME’s findings. He was thirty miles out when his phone rang: Duncan again, calling from St. Paul.

“Wanted to make sure everything’s okay, that you made it to Trippton,” Duncan said.

“Not quite there yet,” Virgil said. “I spent more time with the medical examiner than I expected. I’ll be there in half an hour or so.”

“Good, good. Listen, something else has come up,” Duncan said. “Our new governor, God bless him, has been looking around for somebody to help out on a minor crime problem. As it happens, the center of the problem is in the Trippton area. He was trying to deal with it when he was the attorney general, but nothing got done, and you know he likes your ass . . .”

“The new governor is dumb as a box of rocks,” Virgil said. “And that’s an insult to rocks and boxes.”

“Yeah, yeah, but he’s governor now. And because he’s dumb, he’s got lots of people whispering in his ear, telling him about things he needs to do. Somebody wants him to look into this . . .”

“Well?” Virgil said. “What is it, Jon?”

“It’s too complicated to talk about while you’re driving,” Duncan said. “There’s a private investigator, named Margaret Griffin, in Trippton right now. She’s from Los Angeles. She’ll meet you wherever you’re staying and lay the whole thing out.”

Virgil had picked up traces of nervous stress in Duncan’s voice and he said, “Jon, you lying lump of horseshit. You’ve done something to me . . .”

“Not me. The governor,” Duncan said. “The governor did it. I don’t even entirely understand it. Anyway, this Margaret Griffin will meet you wherever . . .”

—

Duncan never did tell the truth, Virgil thought, as he drove down the hill into the Mississippi River Valley and Trippton. Virgil told Duncan that he was staying at Johnson Johnson’s riverfront cabin as a way to save the state some money and that he could meet Griffin that night.