Deep Freeze

by John Sandford

  Jimmy Barker squealed, “Did not. Did not. He came in here yesterday and snuck in the back room, and he found one of those cat-o’-nine-tails and took it with him. Somebody told him about them, but I didn’t tell him jack shit.”

  “If you didn’t tell him, who did?”

  “Somebody else you whipped,” Barker said. “That’s what I’d think.”

  SIXTEEN Before Virgil had a chance to talk to the other town lowlifes, Bea Sawyer called and said she was coming down the hill into town. Halfway to Trippton, she said, she’d stopped at a café to get coffee and had run into the dive team and their truck.

  “Clay said they’d be here by noon; they’re moving slower than I was.”

  “Do you have the address for Hemming’s house?” Virgil asked.

  “Yeah, we do, and I’ve spotted it on my iPad.”

  “I’ll see you there,” Virgil said.

  —

  Sawyer hadn’t yet gotten to Hemming’s house when Virgil arrived. He peeled the crime scene tape off the back door, went inside, and walked around, looking for anything he might have missed. There wasn’t anything in particular, except awkward traces of the dead woman. It wasn’t the first time he’d been struck by the unexpected interruption of murder: you leave the wine bottles by the sink, thinking you’ll put them in the recycling in the morning, and a week later here they still are because you’re dead. Here’s the silence of the house, with a couple of socks on the bathroom countertop, maybe to wear to bed, and there they still are.

  But Hemming’s shade was going away: the most resonant aspect of a woman’s sudden death was often her perfume. Perfume was so personal, and so enduring, that it often lingered like a ghost at a murder scene. Then, after a while, it began to fade, like memories of the murdered person.

  Virgil was walking back downstairs when he heard Beatrice Sawyer’s truck pull into the driveway. He walked out the back door to meet the crime scene crew.

  —

  Sawyer was wrapped in a heavy blue North Face parka. A cheerful, middle-aged woman, she’d worked with Virgil on several cases, and didn’t miss much. Her regular partner, Don Baldwin, looked like the farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting, tall, thin, with watery blue eyes. His major non–Grant Wood aspect was his signature pair of black plastic fashion glasses, bought for the vibe they gave him in the punk revival band he led on his nights off.

  Virgil had seen Bill Jensen around the BCA technical area but didn’t know him well. A short, thin man with a goatee, he carried a leather portfolio with him, and he said that unless Hemming had done something unusual with her computer, he should be able to get by her password.

  “Main thing we want to look at is emails,” Virgil told him.

  “I’ll call you when I get them,” Jensen said.

  —

  How much have you messed up my crime scene?” Sawyer asked.

  “Not so much, but the sheriff’s office has a half-trained crime scene substitute who went through the place,” Virgil said. “Found some blood in the carpet, but that’s about it. I found some B and D paraphernalia in a dressing table up in the main bedroom, which took me to the guy who used it on her. He’s my number one guy, at this point.”

  “All right, we’ll handle it despite the mess you guys probably made. Whatever happened to Alewort?”

  Alewort was the sheriff’s office regular crime scene man, and Sawyer had met him during the investigation of the school board murders. “He’s up at St. Mary’s, drying out,” Virgil said.

  “He did like a drink—most any time of day,” Sawyer said. “Ask me how I knew that.”

  “I know how. You’re a highly trained crime scene technician.”

  “That’s correct,” Sawyer said.

  “Call me the instant—the instant!—that you find anything,” Virgil said. “Progress here has been sorta slow.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Sawyer said. “Take off, hoser.”

  —

  Virgil was sitting in his truck when the divers called and he directed them to the marina, where they could drive down the boat ramp to the river. They said they’d meet him there, and Virgil called Johnson and asked him if he could come along to the dive site. He could. “I wouldn’t miss this for all the canaries in the islands,” Johnson said.

  They met at the cabin, got the heavy-weather gear on, cranked up the sleds, ran out to the main river and turned south to the marina. When they got there, they found a Ford F-350 Super Duty sitting on the ramp, a large camper top on the back, fat snow tires at the corners, and three large men hanging around it. Virgil and Johnson pulled up and introduced themselves, and Clay Danson said, “Lead the way. Got about four hours. We don’t dive when it gets full dark.”

  Virgil and Johnson got back on the sleds and led the way out onto the river. Johnson had worried that a snowstorm would cover the hole, but with Virgil’s triangulation from the first trip out, they found it in ten minutes, in a patch of wind-scrubbed ice.

  Danson, a bulky man with a gold mustache, brought a depth finder from the truck, scraped off a piece of ice and put the transducer on it, and turned it on. A moment later, he said, “Nine meters. Thirty feet, more or less.” He turned to the other two men and said, “All right. Let’s get it going.”

  Danson and a man named Blue got in the camper and shut the back door, while the third man, Ralph, brought out an ice auger, a chain saw, and a pair of ice tongs. Virgil and Johnson stood around, being useless, as Ralph drilled a hole through the ice and used the chain saw to cut out a square five feet on a side, with cuts spaced roughly a foot apart. He used the ice tongs to pull the blocks of ice out. It was heavy work, and Johnson volunteered to help, but Ralph said, “Naw.”

  He stacked the blocks of ice to one side, and Johnson said, “You could build a pretty good igloo with those.”

  Ralph said, “Go ahead.”

  That ended the conversation until Danson and Blue climbed out of the back of the camper wearing dry suits, which covered them from head to toe in heavy black neoprene, with the exception of a small oval around the face.

  Ralph got a thick yellow nylon rope out of the truck, lashed one end of it to the truck’s bumper, as Danson and Blue pulled on single-tank scuba outfits and rounded up lights and swim fins. Before Virgil felt quite ready for it, they were dangling their feet through the ice into the freezing river water and sealing up their face masks.

  Danson grunted, “Ready?” and Blue said, “Yup,” and Danson dropped the end of the rope, which was tied to a rusty, fifteen-pound dumbbell, into the river and followed it down. Blue was ten seconds behind him and immediately out of sight. Ralph got a heavy-duty, sealed plastic bubble out of the truck, with its own lead weight. It turned out to be a battery-powered LED light, and he clipped it to the rope and dropped it in the water and it slid down the rope and out of sight.

  “Muddy water,” Ralph said.

  They all stood around and looked at the hole for a while, Ralph as quiet as the Sphinx, until Johnson said, “I bet you guys have some really great conversations in the truck, huh?”

  Ralph scratched his nose and shrugged and said, “Oh . . . no.”

  Two minutes after that, one of the divers—impossible to tell which—surfaced and threw a dark object onto the ice, and went back down. Virgil squatted over it: a woman’s purse with a metal clasp. He opened it and found it full of the usual female junk, including a wallet. He opened the wallet and found himself looking at Gina Hemming’s driver’s license.

  “Son of a bitch,” Johnson said. “This really is the place. I sorta didn’t believe it.”

  A diver surfaced again two minutes later and threw a high-heeled shoe out on the ice, and went back down.

  “Well, she wasn’t kidnapped when she went out for a walk,” Virgil said, as he looked it over. “She wouldn’t have been walking in that, not on that night.”


  Twenty minutes passed, and Ralph went to the truck and brought back a ladder like those that are hung off the back of sailboats except this one had spikes at the curled top end. He stuck it into the water and jammed the spikes into the ice. Another five minutes, and one of the divers surfaced and climbed the first two rungs of the ladder, and Ralph grabbed him by the shoulders and helped him up the rest of the way.

  Danson took off his face mask and said, “I think that’s gonna be about it. We did a grid ten to fifteen yards upriver, twenty yards down, ten yards on either side, and that’s what we got. Don’t think there’ll be any more.”

  “You got what we needed,” Virgil said. “This is where she was dumped.”

  “Yeah, I figured that when I spotted the purse,” Danson said. Blue surfaced, and Ralph and Danson helped him up the last steps.

  Johnson said, “How cold are you?”

  Danson shrugged. “Not cold at all.”

  “This is cool,” Johnson said. “I’m gonna try it.”

  “Lots of people tell me that, but then they don’t,” Danson said.

  —

  Danson and Blue went back to the camper and climbed inside to change back to street clothes, as Ralph piled up the gear at the back of the truck. Ralph also got them a black plastic bag for the purse and shoes, began slotting the blocks of ice back into the hole he’d cut.

  “Always do that?” Johnson asked.

  “Yup.”

  “How come?” Johnson asked.

  “Liability.”

  “What . . .”

  Ralph gushed, “Guy comes zooming across the lake on a snowmobile going ninety miles an hour, hits a big pile of ice blocks, wrecks his snowmobile and kills himself, and his old lady sues our butts for everything we got. Liability.”

  “Got it,” Johnson said.

  —

  Virgil and Johnson hung around until Danson and Blue were back out of the camper, and Danson said, “We’ll bill you.”

  “Do that,” Virgil said. “And thanks.”

  “Easier and better than our usual calls,” he said.

  Johnson bit. “What are your usual calls?”

  “We’re usually looking for bodies.”

  —

  When all the equipment was stowed, the three men got back in the truck and took off for St. Paul, and Virgil and Johnson rocketed back to the cabin on the sleds. When they got there, they found Griffin sitting in her car, the engine running, reading the Republican-River.

  As they pulled in and killed the engines of the sleds, she got out of her car, walked over, and said, “Well, I’ve now read the worst newspaper in the country, from top to bottom and end to end. The most important thing I found was that if you act now and buy one turkey at full price, you can get a second turkey of the same size or smaller at half price.”

  Johnson said, “For real? At Piggly Wiggly?”

  “I thought the name was a joke, but that’s what the paper said.” She turned to Virgil. “You’ve got to help me out. The guy who owns the ice-fishing house, or tent or whatever it is, this Duane Hawkins, where you found the voice recording, has gone on vacation to Florida. So his neighbor says. I don’t believe it.”

  Virgil said, “You know, Margaret, I’ve got a murder case . . .”

  “You’ve also got a governor who told my boss at Mattel that you’d make it a priority to help out, and you’ve got a case of assault on an officer of the law that needs to get solved. That would be your case. You could probably solve it all at once by driving out to CarryTown and talking to the guy in trailer 400. Besides, tell me what you’d do on the murder case if you didn’t spend a half hour round-trip-driving out to CarryTown?”

  Johnson said, “She’s got you there, Virgil. You ain’t got shit on the murder.”

  Griffin said, “See? Even this lunk thinks you ought to help out.”

  Johnson: “‘Lunk’? I represent that comment.”

  Virgil: “Jesus, Johnson. The line is either ‘I resent that comment’ or ‘I resemble that comment,’ but it’s not ‘I represent that comment.’ Could you try to keep that straight?”

  “Okay,” Johnson said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You only say you’re sorry to make me feel bad.”

  Griffin said, “You sound like teenage girls.”

  —

  They all went in the cabin, Johnson and Virgil stripped out of their snowmobile gear, and Johnson said, “I like that diving shit. I did a few tanks down in the Virgin Islands one winter. I’d be more interested in looking for sunken boats, though. Not so much bodies.”

  “I believe if you’d asked him, he’d tell you that you can see about four feet down there. It’s not the Virgin Islands,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah, well. You might be right. Did it help you at all?”

  “Might,” Virgil said. “It’s another place and time that I know the killer was at.”

  “As an experienced big-city police officer, I can tell you that what you found doesn’t mean anything unless you have a specific sighting of the guy driving out there with a body on the back of his snowmobile,” Griffin said. “Since you wasted that time, why don’t you take a few minutes to drive out to CarryTown? I’ll not only be out of your hair, I could be out of Trippton entirely.”

  “Okay, okay. Let me call my crime scene crew and see if they need me for anything. If not, I’ll drive out there and see what’s what,” Virgil said.

  “I’ll follow you,” Griffin said. “And please—please!—put a gun in your pocket.”

  —

  Virgil called Bea Sawyer and found that she had been trying to call him, but he hadn’t heard the phone ring or felt it vibrating through the thick snowmobile gear. When she answered, she said, “Virgil. Bill has the computer open. And we have an anomaly.”

  “You know how I like those, Bea,” Virgil said.

  “Then you’ll like this one. You want to come by? It’s easier to see than it is to explain.”

  “Ten minutes,” Virgil said. He hung up and turned to Griffin and said, “Clue.”

  “Ah, shit. Well, I’m still coming with you. After you look at this so-called clue, we can still go out to CarryTown.”

  —

  At Hemming’s house, they left their vehicles in the street, and Griffin followed Virgil up the driveway and around to the back door. In the kitchen, he introduced Griffin to Sawyer, explained that she was a former cop, and they all stepped into the living room, where Baldwin had set up a camera tripod and was photographing what looked like a piece of vacant green carpet.

  Bill Jensen was sitting in a corner, reading a Surface Pro.

  “Okay,” Sawyer said. “You know about the blood on the carpet over there.” She pointed at four pieces of yellow tape that isolated a four-inch square of carpet. “Don’t get near it. Anyway, that’s the blood that the guy from the sheriff’s department found. What he didn’t find was a smaller bloodstain of the same type at the bottom of the stairs. That’s what Don’s taking pictures of. What we know from the ME is that Hemming sustained a skull fracture when she was struck, and that can result in bleeding from the ear canal.”

  “You think she crawled?” Virgil asked. “I was told that death was instantaneous.”

  “I’ve been told that. What I do know is, the first bloodstain is quite a bit more substantial than the second one, but their ‘character’ is the same. The first one looks like she bled from her ear into the carpet—from one point source, the ear canal, dripping blood onto a small area on the carpet, which, given the carpet fibers, wound up creating a bloodstain that’s about the diameter of a pencil, extending straight down into the carpet and pooling at the bottom of the fibers. The second stain is smaller in diameter but also extends straight down into the carpet and pools at the bottom. But, they both look like they could have come from the same drip of blood. If I didn
’t know better, I would have thought it was possible that she fell down the stairs, cracked her head on the bannister on the way down, and landed here at the bottom, then crawled to the second spot, where she died.”

  “And somebody threw her in the Mississippi why?” Griffin said. “To tidy up?”

  Virgil looked up the stairs and shook his head. “I don’t think the ME would buy that idea—the bannister’s got those edges on it, and she was hit by something large in diameter and smooth, like a bottle.”

  “So the guy kills her, doesn’t notice the bloodstain, drags her body over to the stairs to make it look like an accident,” Sawyer said.

  “Then dusts off his hands, picks up the body, and throws it in the Mississippi,” Griffin said. “I like your murders. They give you something to think about. In L.A., it was BANG! BANG! BANG!, two dead, one of them a gang member, the other a five-year-old girl on her way to buy a Popsicle. Simple, in-your-face nutcake homicide. Here, you’ve got to ‘detect.’”

  Sawyer and Virgil and Baldwin were all looking at Griffin, and she said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” Virgil said.

  Sawyer said, “I like our way better.”

  “You find anything else?” Virgil asked.

  “Cracked Ping-Pong paddle; could be more B and D,” Sawyer said. “We can check it for DNA, if you want to put in for it. Bill’s got the email up on Hemming’s computer.”

  “This way,” Jensen said, putting down the slate. He led the way back to Hemming’s office, tapped the Return key on her keyboard, and the mail came up. “It’s all yours.”

  Virgil sat down, and Griffin asked, “How long is this going to take?”

  “Probably a while,” Virgil said. “Give me an hour, and I’ll go out to CarryTown with you.”

  She went away, and Virgil looked at the message count at the bottom of the screen. Hemming’s in-box showed 8,406 messages, with 3,502 in her out-box.

  He started typing in names, beginning with Ryan Harney. There were two recent messages, one to Harney and one back: a notification of the meeting and a note saying he’d be there. There were seventy more messages between them, but they went back five years. Nothing sexual, nothing that would necessarily say “affair,” but they were meeting a couple of times a week, always at Hemming’s house in the late afternoons.