Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(94)

“Yes. I need to talk to you about last Thursday.”

“Ooo-kay. Uh . . .”

Virgil followed Clark back to the bar’s office, closed the door, and said, “I don’t want you talking about what I’m going to tell you. ’Cause you could get killed.”

Clark was a thin man with a weathered face and knife-edge nose. His Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times, and he said, “I won’t talk to nobody.”

“I’m trying to nail down a time line and I need to know what time David Birkmann got here. Is there any way we can do that?”

“Depends on how close you need the time.”

“How close can you get me?” Virgil asked.

“We do videos of the karaoke. We start at about eight o’clock—maybe not exactly, but close—and we run the camera continuously until we quit at eleven or so. Sometimes we run a little late, or quit a little early, depending on how many people we get singing,” Clark said. “We could run the video forward and see exactly how long it runs before Dave came on . . . but I don’t know if we started exactly at eight, so we could be a few minutes off.”

“Where’s the video now?”

Clark pointed to a shelf hanging on a side wall. “Right there. We keep them on a hard drive. For ten bucks, we’ll email you a copy of your performance. You’d be surprised how many people ask.”

“Let’s take a look.”

—

Clark hooked the hard drive to a laptop, found the video from Thursday, and ran it fast-forward until they found Birkmann, who was climbing up on the stage, smiling and sweating. The video took in that part of the crowd, sitting at round metal tables in front of the stage. Other patrons walked back and forth in front of the camera from time to time. The audience gave Birkmann a brief round of applause and then he did a reasonably creditable version of “Pretty Woman.”

“Well . . . he was up there singing at nine-forty, give or take,” Clark said, looking at the time line running at the bottom of the video. “Probably not five minutes one way or the other.”

“Could he just walk up and get on the stage?”

“No, he would have had to sign up . . . but sometimes there isn’t much of a wait. It’s sorta like a party. We don’t have one person right after another; some guys sing three or four times . . . We don’t always stick right to the list, either, depending on who’s ready to go. He wouldn’t have to wait long.”

If Birkmann went back to Hemming’s house after he was sure that everybody else was out of sight—say, five minutes after nine o’clock—he would have had to kill her, let the body bleed into the carpet for a couple of minutes at least, move the body and arrange it, and get out of there and down to the bar and start singing, all in half an hour. A decent defense attorney would chop that time line to pieces, looking for every excuse to add a few minutes—like with the falling snow. Birkmann would have been driving carefully . . . A good attorney would stick an extra five minutes in there.

While Virgil was thinking about that, Clark muttered, “Let me see if I can . . .”

He ran the video backward, then forwards again, until he found a heavyset blond woman climbing up on the stage. “Okay,” Clark said. “Let’s see if Carroll’s in the crowd. He usually is.”

“What are we doing?” Virgil asked, looking back at the video.

“Looking for Carroll Wilson. That’s his wife, Jeanette, up there singing. Carroll’s usually . . . Yeah, there he is.” He stopped the video and tapped the head of a man who was sitting at a table below the stage but near its center.

When Jeanette started singing, Carroll stood up and took a photo with his cell phone.

“Thank you,” Virgil said. “Where can I find Carroll?”

“He’s got the Stihl chain saw dealership. We can call him.”

—

Carroll Wilson had the photos of his wife on his phone. The first one was taken, he said, right after his wife started singing. The time stamp at the top of the photo said 8:44.

“Don’t mess with that photo, we’ll want to save it as evidence,” Virgil said. “I’ll come by later to talk to you about it.”

“I’ll be here,” Wilson said.

Virgil didn’t say so, but when he said he’d come by to talk to him about it, he meant that he’d give Wilson a subpoena and take his phone away from him.

He and Clark went back to the video, marked the photo at 8:44, and ran the video forward to Birkmann’s appearance onstage. “We must’ve started a little late,” Clark said after they figured out the time line. “If Carroll took that picture at eight forty-four, Dave started singing at nine fifty-one.”

“I’ll need to take the hard drive with me,” Virgil said. “I’ll give you a receipt.”

“Okay, but I’m kinda into this now,” Clark said. “Let me roll back . . . Let’s see if we can spot Dave with his parka on . . .”

They couldn’t. The first time they saw him was when he moved into the video and climbed up on the stage, and he wasn’t wearing the parka.

“So he’d already hung it up,” Clark said.

“Do you have the sign-up sheets?”

Clark shook his head. “Threw them away as soon as we were done. They’re down at the landfill by now.”