Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(98)

“So we keep the recorders out of sight—I’ve got some lapel mikes that we can clip to the bottom of our coats—and we get him talking. Maybe scare him a little by reading his rights to him.”

“If he asks for an attorney?”

“He won’t,” Virgil said. “He’s shocked and freaked out by what he’s done. He’s gonna talk about it some. If he talks about it even a little, we’ll have him.”

—

Birkmann had a beer, and he had another, and he twisted the top off a third. He’d loaded the new pistol with the .357 shells, but he’d left it on the kitchen counter, glittering away, catching the eye, like a rattlesnake among the cups and plates. He wasn’t drinking as a way to work up to shooting himself; he was thinking it over.

He’d seen gun suicides in movies, and, a couple of times, the man about to die wrapped a towel around his head to minimize the mess. The movies made it look like the civilized thing to do, but really? He kept visualizing the two scenarios: one without the towel, his brains splattering all over the wall, and one with it, with his face wrapped like a mummy, the sudden blotch of blood on the outside of the towel . . . and the masked face, the mummy, found by the cops.

Should he leave a note? A confession? Should he say something about the way Hemming had treated him?

And he wondered what would happen when he pulled the trigger. He wouldn’t wake up in heaven, he thought, he wouldn’t give himself that. It would be, he thought, like somebody turned off the TV. He’d go wherever a TV picture went. Shouldn’t hurt . . . should it?

But what if he sorta missed? What if he blew out half his brain and spent the rest of his life as a vegetable, deep in pain and no way to tell anyone? That’s when he put in the .357s.

He sighed. No point in moving too soon, he thought. If he was going to kill himself, he had plenty of time. All the time in the world.

He was tap dancing, he knew, the same way he’d tried to tap-dance around the fact that he’d killed Hemming and later had murdered Margot Moore. Maybe something would happen that would help him out . . .

—

Virgil and Pweters walked out to their trucks. They’d drive up separately, they decided, and if Birkmann wasn’t home, they’d hit the downtown bars until they found him.

Virgil led the way up the bluffs and, from half a mile out, saw lights in Birkmann’s house. Pweters would see them, too. Virgil rolled up into the parking area, Pweters a hundred yards behind him. As Virgil got out of the truck, he saw a curtain moving in what he knew was Birkmann’s kitchen.

“Looks like he’s home,” Pweters said a minute later, stepping across the new half inch of snow.

“The curtains moved, I think he’s seen us,” Virgil said. “Let’s knock. Is your recorder turned on?”

“Yeah, I’m all set,” he said, and “Sweet Jesus sitting on the curb eating a peanut butter sandwich, I’ve never walked up to something like this.”

—

They knocked, and a moment later Birkmann swung the door open, looming in the doorway. He was in stocking feet, jeans, a plaid shirt, a heavy wool cardigan. He frowned and asked, “What’s up? Virgil? Luke?”

“We need to talk,” Virgil said. “We need to come in.”

“Well . . . okay. Have you figured it out?”

“I think we have,” Virgil said. “We need your help with it.”

—

Birkmann didn’t react. He said, “Come in, then. Snowing again, huh? Like the night Gina died.”

He led the way up the short flight of stairs to the kitchen and around the corner to the living room. He’d been drinking, Virgil thought: he could smell the beer. There were three chairs in the living room, two facing the television, more or less, the same two they’d sat in when Virgil first interviewed Birkmann. Birkmann pulled around a third chair, across from the other two so they could all face one another, and sank into it.

“Who did it?” he asked.

Virgil said, “Well, Dave . . . you did.”

—

Again, no immediate reaction. The silence stretched taut, and finally Birkmann asked, “How do you figure?”

“Before I tell you all that, I need to tell you exactly what your rights are here . . .” Virgil said.

Virgil recited the standard Miranda warning, hesitating long enough for Birkmann to reply but no longer than he had to, and continued with, “We have the evidence, Dave. What we haven’t been able to figure out is why you killed Gina. And, for God’s sakes, why did you kill Margot Moore? What’d she ever do to you?”

“Why do you think it’s me?” Birkmann asked.

“Because you have yellow hats.”

“What?”

“Because Bobbie Cole got off at the Harvest Store at nine o’clock exactly, stopped at Piggly Wiggly, and saw your van parked outside Gina Hemming’s house on her way home after she left the Piggly Wiggly—and that was way after nine o’clock. She said the man inside was a blond, but I cleared both of your blond guys. Then I saw somebody put a blond cap on his head . . . and I remembered sitting down in the steak house and you were wearing a yellow hat that night . . . a blond hat.”

“That’s it? A hat?”

“No, we’ve got a lot of other stuff now,” Virgil said. “Once we knew it was you, we began looking at your alibi more closely. We have a videotape of your first karaoke song, and you didn’t go on almost until ten o’clock that night. You’d told me it was more like nine o’clock. We found a guy who took a leak at the same time as you, back in the men’s can, and he didn’t leave work until nine o’clock, and he had time to walk down to the bar and have a beer before you arrived. And we know about the silenced .22. I suspect it was probably your father’s.”