Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(97)

David—he thought of himself as David rather than Big Dave, Daveareeno, Daveissimo, D-Man, Chips, or Bug Boy—didn’t consider himself a killer.

Not a real killer. Even when it came to suicide.

—

Birkmann drove back to Trippton, whimpering from time to time, with the gun on the passenger seat, tricking up the truck with dark energy. And he thought about the past week.

Gina Hemming, the rich, arrogant, divorced bank chairwoman of the board and president of the Second National Bank and Class of ’92’s Most Likely to Succeed, and David Birkmann, financially okay divorced owner of GetOut! and a Main Street donut shop, ’92’s class clown—one of them carrying a spectacularly unrequited love . . .

Then Margot Moore . . . He’d been at the Dunkin’ Donuts store when Moore jogged across the street from Moore Financial wrapped in a business jacket, good enough for a quick two minutes in the cold. They’d talked for a while about Hemming’s murder, because everybody was talking about it, and they talked about Virgil Flowers’s investigation.

“He’s pushing everybody. He’s heard about stuff that nobody else ever knew about, about who’s been sleeping with who,” Birkmann confided to Moore. “He even asked me about that spanking thing, the D and B . . .”

“B and D,” Moore said, correcting him. “I think what he’s basically doing is working out a time line to see who was the last to leave Gina’s place, who might have gone back, who might have seen somebody else driving around . . .”

Birkmann shook his head. “Don’t know about that. By nine o’clock, I was already down at Club Gold, doing the karaoke.”

Moore frowned. “I thought you left after me. I thought your van was still there when I pulled out.”

Birkmann shook his head. “Naw, I was out of there early. I’m not a meeting guy. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Make me run around in circles with a committee and I get this need to escape.”

Moore nodded, and they talked about the possibility that Hemming’s death was an accident. There’d been rumors she’d fallen down the stairs.

Even as they talked, Birkmann’s heart felt as though somebody had gripped it in his fist and squeezed. Moore remembered that he hadn’t been gone at nine o’clock, that he’d been the last to leave. Sooner or later, Flowers would hear about that.

He hadn’t wanted to kill Moore—he liked her—but it was a matter of survival. He hadn’t deserved what had happened to him with Gina Hemming, it had been an accident, but there was no possibility of walking away from it. At least with the .22, it had been quick.

Three shots and he was off . . . panicked, hiding out at home, the .22 wrapped in rags and stuffed behind some rafters in the basement. He heard the next day, at the donut shop, that there had been two women in the kitchen when he killed Moore at the front door. That was a shock, but . . . nothing happened.

Nothing. Had. Happened.

Then Flowers had come asking about a blond man sitting in a GetOut! truck after nine o’clock at Hemming’s house. Birkmann wasn’t blond, and he had no idea why Flowers was looking for a blond, but, sooner or later, he’d be back to Birkmann.

But Birkmann would be gone . . .

Wouldn’t he?





THIRTY Pweters showed up exactly at five o’clock and found Virgil fitting new batteries into his twin voice recorders. Fred Fitzgerald’s statement about moving Hemming’s body had been transferred to the prosecutor’s files, and had also been transcribed to paper.

“What’re we up to?” Pweters asked. His face was red with the cold. He brushed snow off his shoulders and added, “Starting to snow again. Wish it would quit for a while.”

“We live in Minnesota,” Virgil said. “We’re gonna go see David Birkmann and see if we can bullshit him into a confession.”

“Birkmann?”

“Yeah. He lies well, but I worked my way through it,” Virgil said. “I’m ninety-seven percent that he killed Hemming and Margot Moore. I don’t know exactly why he killed Moore, but I suspect it was to cover up something.”

“Well, shoot. Didn’t actually see this coming,” Pweters said. “You want to tell me about it?”

Virgil told him and Pweters said, “A hat? I mean . . .”

“Not only the hat. It’s the silenced .22. It’s the fact that he was in love with Hemming forever—according to George Brown anyway—and she . . . disdained him . . . and that can lead to violence. When Corbel Cain accused him of killing Hemming, what’d Birkmann do? He grabbed a microphone stand and broke Corbel’s arm with it. If he’d hit him on the head, Corbel would be dead. So we know Birkmann’s capable of violence . . . And, like I said, he’s been lying about the whole time line.”

Pweters walked in a slow circle around the cabin’s living room, then said, “If we just go up there and bust him, what are the chances he’d be convicted? On what you know now?”

“That’s the weird thing—if he’s put on trial here, I wouldn’t be surprised if he walked. If we put him on trial up in the Cities, where nobody knows him, I think we’d probably get him.”

Pweters nodded at that. “You’re right. Everybody here knows him, and they’d go in thinking that good ol’ Dave Birkmann would never kill anyone . . . He’d walk.”