Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(95)

They couldn’t think of any more ways of spotting Birkmann’s entrance to the club—no security cameras covering the parking lot—so Virgil was left with the video showing him getting onstage.

—

In his initial interview with Virgil, and the quick phone interview earlier that afternoon, Birkmann had suggested that he left Hemming’s house at around 8:45 and had driven directly to Club Gold and, shortly after, had begun singing. He hadn’t. In fact, if he’d been telling the truth about when he left Hemming’s house, he’d have been at the club for an hour before he went onstage.

Again, a good defense attorney could make a hash out of that. A guy goes to a bar, talks to people, has a couple of beers, signs up for karaoke . . . Who would know exactly how long you’d been there. An hour might seem like fifteen minutes.

Virgil sat in his truck outside Hemming’s house, eyes closed, and tried to imagine the string of events if the killer was David Birkmann, as he now thought likely.

—

Birkmann goes back to the house for some reason. He and Hemming have a quick and ultimately violent argument—money or sex, Virgil thought. Give them ten minutes for that. She slashes him with her nails, he hits her with something round or cylindrical, takes it with him when he leaves.

Give him an additional ten minutes to react to her death, move the body, run out of the house. According to that time line, he’s probably out of the house by 9:30, down at the bar by 9:37. Fred Fitzgerald arrives at 9:40 . . .

Tight, but workable . . . But he’d need more to get a conviction.

A confession would be good.

—

Virgil opened his eyes, sighed.

He’d been badly fooled by Birkmann’s very vulnerability. His obvious and genuine depression, the fact that the Hemming’s murder had left him distraught. When Virgil asked him about the GetOut! truck seen by Bobbie Cole outside Hemming’s house, he hadn’t tried to deny it—he’d actually insisted that it was probably his and let Virgil decide that Cole was an unreliable witness who’d gotten the time wrong.

He couldn’t have untangled that before Moore was killed—he still hadn’t untangled what that killing was about. Was it possible that it really was a separate problem?

But, no. It wasn’t.

—

He still had a few more people to check: Birkmann’s employees—the non-blonds. He had their names in his notebooks and he spent two hours that afternoon tracking them down. Because Hemming’s murder had been a sensation, all three men knew where they’d been the night of the murder.

Two of them had been at home with their families. The third had been with his girlfriend at the movies in La Crosse. Virgil checked on the La Crosse alibi with a phone call to the girlfriend, while he was still sitting with Birkmann’s employee, and the girlfriend confirmed it. That wasn’t airtight, but Virgil believed it anyway: all three said that they had little previous contact with either Hemming or Moore and had never done business with either of them.

—

Virgil was back in his truck when Jerry Clark, Club Gold manager, called. “I, uh, told my wife about talking to you. I figured when you said don’t tell anybody, you didn’t mean her . . .”

“Well . . . she can’t talk, Jerry. Honest to God, there’ve already been two murders, one in absolutely cold blood.”

“Yeah, okay. Anyway, she said that she’s sure she saw Dave come in from the parking lot with Cary Lowe. She said he still had his parka on. I don’t have Cary’s number, but he works at Home Electric and Appliance here on Main. You might check with him.”

“Great. But don’t tell anyone else.”

“I won’t. Promise.”

—

Virgil had seen the Home Electric store, did a U-turn, and went back to it. The store did both sales and small engine and electric repairs, and Lowe, the store’s assistant manager, was alone in the store’s workshop when Virgil arrived. Virgil asked about Birkmann.

“I do remember that,” Lowe said. “I didn’t see him come in from the parking lot, but I ran into him in the men’s can.”

“Was he still wearing his parka?”

“Yup. I remember that because there’s not a lot of room between the urinal and the sink, and your coats can kinda overlap. Dave was washing his hands, and I had to pee a little sideways to make sure I didn’t spray his coat.”

“Did you make a phone call around then? Something we could use to tell the time?”

“No, but it was probably . . . nine-thirty? Something like that?”

“Nine-thirty. Definitely after nine?”

“Oh, yeah,” Lowe said. “Thursday is store night in Trippton, and I was working until nine. There was no one in the store, so I locked up right at nine. The club’s only two blocks down, so I walked over, had a beer, was watching the karaoke, went back to pee, and ran into Dave in the men’s room. So that was probably . . . nine-thirty, give or take.”

“And he’d just come in from the parking lot?”

“I don’t know that; I didn’t see him come in. He had his parka on, though, and the club’s always warm.”

“Thank you,” Virgil said.

—

Virgil called Pweters, the sheriff’s deputy. “You working tonight?”