Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(96)

“Yeah, I’m three to eleven. You got something?”

“I’ll tell you about it when I see you. I’ve got some stuff to think about, so let’s plan to get together about five o’clock. You know where Johnson Johnson’s cabin is?”

“Yeah.”

“Meet you there at five.”

—

The cherry on the cake arrived a few minutes later when Lucas Davenport called Virgil from the Twin Cities. Davenport was now a federal marshal, no longer working with the BCA, but he and Virgil still talked.

“Jenkins called me,” Davenport said. “He wanted me to tell you that Buster Gedney didn’t sell any silencers to any of the people on your list.”

“That’s not good,” Virgil asked. “Why didn’t he call me himself?”

“Because he remembered something, despite being hit in the head a lot. He remembered that when I was doing the Black Hole investigation, that one of the guys involved in the murders had been a pest control officer.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He had a silenced Ruger .22 semiauto pistol that was made especially for sale to pest control officers. I don’t know if Ruger still makes them, but they did for a long time.”

“One of my suspects—the leading suspect—runs a pest control company,” Virgil said.

“Jenkins mentioned that. Now that we’ve solved your case for you, for which we plan to take full credit, I’d recommend that you go over and pick the guy up.”

“I’ll do that,” Virgil said.

Cherry on the cake.





TWENTY-NINE When Virgil called that afternoon, David Birkmann was sitting in his van outside the Corsair Motel in Rochester. They spoke only a few minutes, but Birkmann thought Flowers was working on an idea and that that idea would take him to Birkmann as the killer.

Birkmann knew as much about guns as the average Minnesota small-town male, which was actually quite a bit: he’d owned two 12-gauge shotguns and a .22 rifle and had shot a dozen deer over fifteen seasons of hunting.

As far as pistols were concerned, he’d forgotten about his father’s old Ruger until he needed it. But if you’d handled other guns, its operation was simple enough, and an hour on the Internet gave him all the information he needed about cleaning and servicing the .22.

It’d worked faultlessly when he killed Margot Moore.

Still, one thing he knew for sure was that if he were going to kill himself, he wouldn’t do it with the .22. Three shots in the forehead might reliably kill, but his research on the Internet suggested that a suicide attempt with a .22 might leave him as a vegetable rather than painlessly dead.

One of the shotguns would work, of course, but they’d blow most of his head off. He wanted something tidier than that: he was thinking a .38. A cheap gun would be fine because he didn’t plan to target-shoot with it or even shoot it more than once.

He’d also considered going up to the I-90 bridge and throwing himself off. The fall onto the ice would kill him instantly. But . . . he was afraid of heights. The idea of looking down to the point of impact made him nauseated even thinking about it.

This is where he’d gotten to a week after he’d killed the only woman he’d ever really loved and killed another woman who really hadn’t deserved it. He’d killed Moore when he still had fantasies of getting away with it all . . .

The fantasies were going away, and he was going to kill himself. He couldn’t bear the thought of being led into the county court in an orange jumpsuit and chains, his friends and neighbors peering at him in disbelief.

—

Birkmann had been to gun shows several times—they were social events in Trippton—and the show in Rochester was like all the other ones, if larger. Private dealers worked out of individual motel rooms, usually showing ten or twenty weapons of a particular type. The “big room” had fifty dealers set up on a spiral of tables, selling everything from T-shirts and bumper stickers—“Honk If You’ve Never Seen a Gun Fired From a Vehicle,” “If Babies Had Guns, They Wouldn’t Be Aborted”—to tiny derringers for ninety dollars and massive .50 caliber Barretts for ten thousand.

He circled past the T-shirt, decal, bumper sticker, and knife sellers in the big room, looked in confusion at the array of AR-15 parts, watched a woman demonstrating a speedloader for a .44 Magnum pistol as long as her forearm, and eventually found what he wanted in one of the private dealer rooms: a table full of Ruger revolvers.

He knew he wanted a simple .38 but, being Minnesotan, wound up with a diminutive chrome Ruger revolver that would shoot both .38 specials and .357 Magnums.

“No tax on that, this is a private sale,” the dealer said. “Won’t have to fool around with the background check, so you can put it right in your pocket and take it home. Plus, of course, it chambers those .357s for home defense as well as .38s for practice.”

Birkmann made himself smile, a rare thing for the past week, when he went for the .357 because it would shoot both rounds. In other words, a deal: two-for-one. Not like he really needed the bargain, if he was only going to fire it once, but if you were Minnesotan you went for the deal.

Birkmann bought the gun and a box of .38s, which would be more than sufficient for a suicide, and, without exactly putting his finger on the reason why, a box of .357s. He’d almost gotten away with it, he thought. That didn’t make him much happier.