Deep Freeze

by John Sandford

  —

  On the way down the hill, Virgil decided that if Moore had found something out, she would have called him almost immediately. She hadn’t—so it was something else. Maybe something she’d hidden, something involving Fred Fitzgerald. He’d stop at Moore’s place, he decided, but if there was nothing that he needed to do immediately, he was going to jack up Fitzgerald as fast as he could find him.

  Bea Sawyer . . . He fumbled out his cell phone and called her.

  “What?”

  “Bea, did you go back to St. Paul?”

  “No, I’m at Ma and Pa Kettle’s resort. So’s Don. In a separate room.”

  The implication there, that she and Don might be suspected of sharing a room, sidetracked Virgil’s whole line of thought for a few seconds, and she prompted him with, “So, what’s up?”

  “We’ve got another murder,” Virgil said. “Apparently, in the last half hour or so.”

  “Ah, poop. Give me the address . . . Is it still snowing?”

  “Yeah, about the same.” Virgil took the piece of notepaper out of his pocket, turned on the overhead light, and read it to her.

  “We’ll get there as quick as we can. If you get there first, keep people away from the body.”

  “I will. Thanks, Bea.”

  —

  Virgil got to Moore’s house four or five minutes later. There were six sheriff’s cars in the street, two at either end of the block with their flashers going. Virgil was waved through, parked, and hustled up to the house. A cop on the front porch told him that Margot Moore was lying in the doorway and directed him around to the back.

  Purdy and another deputy were in the kitchen with two stricken-looking women; both were crying off and on, seated over the beginnings of a Scrabble game. As though God had taken him by the hair and twisted his head to make him look, Virgil noticed that one of the words spelled out in the game was “MURDER,” seventeen points, the “M” and “E” on triple letter scores.

  Purdy said, “Good, you’re here. C’mon.”

  He led the way through a short hallway into the living room, where Moore’s body was flat on its back, three small bloody holes in the middle of the forehead, along with dime-sized powder burns. The crime scene crew would tell him better, but it appeared to Virgil that the gun had been only inches from Moore’s forehead when she was shot.

  He looked at the body for a moment, growing increasingly pissed off, then told Purdy, “Keep everybody away—our crime scene crew is on the way.”

  “Okay.”

  Virgil walked back to the kitchen, pulled out a chair, got the womens’ names, and said, “Tell me what happened.”

  They told him, with details—but no good details.

  Sandy Hart said, “She went to answer the doorbell. I was trying to figure out a word—”

  “So was I,” Belle Penney said.

  Hart continued, “—and we heard her open the door. There was this sound; it sounded like somebody clapping hands, like she’d gotten a FedEx or something. We both heard a kind of clunking sound—we told Jeff about it—we think it might have been her, falling down, but we didn’t know that . . .”

  “We heard the door close,” Penney chipped in. “We were sitting here, looking at the board, and after a minute or two, when Margot didn’t say anything and didn’t come back in, I called to her. I said, ‘Margot? You’re up.’ She still didn’t say anything, so I got up and walked in there, into the front room, and saw her on the floor, and saw her head . . . I started screaming . . .”

  “When Belle screamed, I ran in there and saw Margot, checked her pulse. I used to be a nurse and I knew she was dead. I ran back to my purse and got the phone and called nine-one-one,” Hart said.

  “Did you touch her?” Virgil asked.

  “Yes. I knelt down and I touched her shoulder and her neck, to see if she had a pulse, but that’s all. I touched her shoulder, kind of pushed her, and her neck, but there was no pulse, and I ran and called nine-one-one.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Penney said, “except scream.”

  “You didn’t hear her talking to anyone?”

  “No—we told Jeff—no, there wasn’t any talk. Three claps and the door closed. And then . . . nothing.”

  “Do you know what time it was?”

  “I . . .” Hart said, cocking her head, “I called nine-one-one. Probably one minute after she was shot.”

  “Longer than that,” Penney said. “Five minutes.”

  Hart shook her head. “No, it wasn’t, Belle. Think about it. We were sitting here—we thought she’d be right back—we didn’t hear her walk or say anything, and we didn’t wait too long before you went to look. Maybe not a minute, but not two minutes, either. Quicker than two minutes.”

  Purdy came in from the living room and said, “I heard that. We got the call at nine-one-one at seven-fourteen. So, probably, in the couple of minutes after seven-ten.”

  “Good enough,” Virgil said.

  Bea Sawyer stepped into the kitchen and said, “Don’s getting our stuff. What do we got?”

  “You’re running the scene,” Virgil said. “It might be the freshest murder you’ve ever been to. I’ve got to take off, talk to a guy.”

  “You need help?” Purdy asked.

  “Is that Pweters guy working?”

  “He can be,” Purdy said.

  “He knows Fred Fitzgerald, the tattoo guy, pretty well. I’d like him to meet me at Fitzgerald’s shop.”

  “I’ll call him,” Purdy said. “He’ll meet you there.”

  —

  Pweters called Virgil as Virgil was driving south on Main. “I was in class. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Virgil parked across the street from Fitzgerald’s shop. There was light coming through a white curtain on the second floor, but the shop itself was dark. Virgil sat and watched as the light played off the curtain: somebody was either watching television or had left a television on. If Fitzgerald was the killer, he was cool and already home.

  He’d been waiting for five or six minutes when Pweters pulled in behind him. Virgil got out of his 4Runner and said, “Let me guess: computer programming.”

  “What?”

  “Your class,” Virgil said.

  “Oh. No. It’s a class in how to carve and paint decoy ducks,” Pweters said.

  “Huh. Cool. I write outdoors articles, you know? For magazines . . .”

  “I’ve googled a couple,” Pweters said. “They weren’t terrible.”

  “Thanks. Maybe I could get something out of a duck-carving class . . . if the ducks are decent.”

  “They’re actually very good; the instructor is in that folk art museum in New York City,” Pweters said. He looked up at Fitzgerald’s window. “Jeff told me what happened . . . Damnit, Margot was a nice lady.”

  “You know her well?” Virgil asked.

  “Not well, but I knew her from the coffee shop. She always seemed nice, always had a good word for cops.”

  They walked across the street toward the shop, and Virgil said, “Stay loose.”

  “I’ve actually got my hand on my gun; it’s in my parka pocket,” Pweters said.

  Virgil stopped and said, “Shoot. Hang on here a second.”

  He went back to the 4Runner, popped the back door, got his Glock out of the gun safe, and stuck it in his parka pocket.

  When he got back to Pweters, the deputy said, “Remind me not to call you for backup.”

  Virgil stepped up to the shop door, pressed a doorbell, then pounded on the door for a few seconds.

  Pweters asked, “Honest to God, did you forget to take your gun?”

  Virgil took his gloves off, shoved them in the other pocket, and said, “Maybe.”

  —

  A window popped open overhead, and Fitzgerald shouted, �
��We’re closed. We’re closed!”

  “It’s Pweters,” Pweters shouted back. “Come on down and open up. Me’n Virgil need to talk to you again.”

  “About what?”

  “Open up, and we’ll tell you.”

  The window slammed shut, a light came on in the shop area, and a moment later they heard Fitzgerald stomping down the interior stairs. He turned on another light, and they could see he was wearing a sweatshirt and cargo shorts and leather slippers.

  “Hand on the gun?” Pweters asked out of the side of his mouth.

  “Won’t need it,” Virgil said, as he watched Fitzgerald approach the door. “This feels wrong. He’s too . . .”

  “Disheveled,” Pweters suggested. “Psychologically unfocused.”

  “That’s it,” Virgil said. “He might have killed Hemming, but he didn’t do Moore.”

  “So what are we doing here?” Pweters asked, as Fitzgerald fiddled with the door lock.

  “Wrong question,” Virgil said. “The right question is, ‘What did he do?’ I know he did something.”

  —

  Fitzgerald was physically, if not psychologically, disheveled, and sleepy. He opened the door, heavy-eyed, scowling, and asked, “What do you want now?”

  Virgil asked, “Where were you an hour ago?”

  “Here,” he said, “watching TV. I was asleep, with the TV on, when you started banging on my door.”

  “Anybody with you?”

  “No . . .”

  “What was on?” Virgil asked. “What was on TV? What were you watching?”

  “CNN . . . the talking heads,” he said.

  Virgil asked, “What was the first news story you saw?”

  “Donald Trump, some new tweet . . . Obama . . . Let me see . . .”

  He rolled out an explanation, and Virgil interrupted to ask, “You got Sirius Radio in your car?”

  “My car is a 1992 Jeep pickup truck. The fuckin’ steering wheel barely works. You’re askin’ if I got Sirius Radio?”

  “Just askin’,” Virgil said. He turned to Pweters and said, “Dunno.”

  “What the fuck is going on?” Fitzgerald asked. “Did something happen?”

  Pweters looked at Virgil, who stared at Fitzgerald, shrugged, and said, “Somebody shot Margot Moore and killed her. From what you’re telling me, once again, you don’t have an alibi. You were watching TV by yourself.”

  Fitzgerald gaped at him, sputtered, “Margot? Somebody shot Margot?”

  Virgil rubbed his forehead with his left hand, said, “Oh, boy,” and then, “Fred, I know goddamn well you had something to do with killing Gina Hemming. Sooner or later, I’ll prove it, and you’re looking at thirty years. Since you had something to do with killing Gina, I believe you had something to do with killing Margot. That’s how it is. What I don’t know is exactly what you had to do with it, but I’ll figure it out.”

  “Fuck you!” Fitzgerald stepped back and slammed the door. A couple of seconds later, he opened it again and said, “I didn’t have a fuckin’ thing to do with killing either one of them.”

  “What did you do?” Pweters asked. “I’ve known you for a while, and Virgil thinks you killed them or got one of your buds to do it. I personally am willing to believe you didn’t kill them. But you did something . . . I can hear it in your voice.”

  “I’m calling my lawyer,” Fitzgerald said. He stepped back and slammed the door again. Two seconds later, he opened it back up again and said, “My lawyer’ll call you in the morning.”

  “Who is it?” Pweters asked.

  “Don’t know yet,” Fitzgerald said.

  Virgil and Pweters glanced at each other, and Virgil said, “Lawyers cost money, Fred. If you don’t have it, I can fix it so that a public defender takes it for free. He’ll be your lawyer, and probably be as good as anyone else you can get. Margot’s murder’s only an hour old, and we’ve got to get on it. Every minute we lose is a problem. If you think you might have something to say to us, I’ll crank up the public defender and get him over here right now.”

  Fitzgerald looked between the two cops for a minute, then asked Pweters, “Who’s the public defender?”

  “Ann McComber. She’s good.”

  “If you can get her to come over, I’ll talk to her,” Fitzgerald said. He edged the door closed. “Tell her to call first . . .”

  He closed the door one last time.

  —

  Ann McComber wasn’t interested in leaving a date to talk to a tattoo artist until Virgil explained that Margot Moore had been murdered and her prospective client might have something to tell the cops about it.

  “All I wanted was a third glass of wine and a little romance,” McComber complained. “But . . . Fred’s down at his shop?”

  “Yeah. He wants you to call. I’ll get your county attorney involved, so if there’s a deal to be made, he can sit in on it,” Virgil said.

  “Well, phooey. Okay. I’ll call Fred. I’m not sure I want to go down there by myself, though.”

  “If you want, me and Pweters can sit where we can hear you scream. If you scream.”

  “Let me call Fred.”

  —

  Virgil got the county attorney on the phone, a guy named Bret Carlson, who agreed to meet with McComber that night if a deal was necessary. “But not after eleven o’clock.”

  Virgil rang off and said to Pweters, “If we can get McComber off her date and Fitzgerald off his dead ass and Carlson before he goes to sleep, we might work something out.”

  “McComber’s on a date?”

  Virgil heard the interest. “You got something going with McComber?”

  “Not yet, but the thought has crossed my mind more than once. If I got that girl in bed, I’d turn her every way but loose.”

  Virgil said, “Oh-oh,” and “How old are you?”

  Pweters said, “Thirty-one. Why?”

  “If you want to jump McComber . . . that suggests to me that she’s about five minutes out of law school. Is she gonna know enough to work a deal? Or is she gonna blow us off?”

  “Ah, she’s been out of law school for three or four years, and she’s smart. She knows how it works.”

  Virgil said, “Okay. I’ll have to trust you on that.”

  As they were walking back to their cars, Pweters asked, “Why did you ask Fred if he had Sirius Radio?”

  “Because on TV cop shows, people get questioned about what shows they were watching when the crime occurred,” Virgil said. “People think that might be an alibi because of the shows. But if you’re halfway smart, you know that some TV shows are also on the radio—and the show that he was ‘watching’ is on Sirius. He could have been listening to it, could have driven over to Margot’s, killed her, and driven back here without missing a thing.”

  “But not if he has a 1992 Jeep.”

  “No, but he could have been driving something borrowed. Something he borrowed from some other dipshit. But I don’t really think that. I think he knows something, but he didn’t kill Moore. Hemming maybe, but not Moore.”

  “Why do you think that? Hemming maybe?”

  “Because he’s all I got.”

  NINETEEN Ann McComber turned out to be a moderately attractive frosted blonde with a haircut like some Olympic ice-skater that Virgil once saw in an Ice Capades show that his second wife made him go to. She was curt with Virgil, slightly less curt with Pweters, and told them that they were not permitted to wait inside Fred Fitzgerald’s shop even though they had to keep Virgil’s truck running to keep their asses from freezing off, a clear waste of gasoline and an environmental hazard, and even though they promised not to eavesdrop on the attorney/client discussion.

  “Get a sleeping bag and huddle up together,” she said. “The shared body heat should keep you alive.”

  “I’m not sure
she’s all that impressed with you,” Virgil grumbled an hour or so later, as he watched the 4Runner’s exhaust fumes drift down the street. The insides of the windows were frosting up from their breath.

  Pweters was reading a tattered copy of Gun & Garden, which Virgil had stolen from his dentist, in the light from the overhead lamp. “Bullshit. She could hardly hold back from throwing me on the floor and having her way with me right there in the foyer.”

  “I didn’t notice that,” Virgil said. He checked his cell phone for the time. “Man, they’ve been in there for a long time.”

  “That’s good, right? They must have something serious to talk about.”

  “Could be,” Virgil allowed.

  A few minutes later, an SUV, with its high beams on, pulled up behind them. Virgil asked, “Who’s this?”

  “Don’t know, but the asshole has his brights on.”

  “Why don’t you get out and look?” Virgil suggested.

  “I’ll do that. With my hand on my gun,” Pweters said.

  He did, and a moment later stuck his head back inside the truck and said, “It’s Bret Carlson. McComber called him to come down.”

  “And didn’t call us? Left us out here?”

  “Okay, she’s the bitch from hell. I’d still turn her upside down,” Pweters said.

  Virgil tended to agree. “Bitch from hell” and “Turn her upside down” were two distinctly different categories.

  Carlson was out of his truck, and Virgil got out, and Carlson, whose face appeared no larger than a saucer in his parka hood, said, “Agent Flowers. Causing more trouble, I see.”

  “It’s the town, actually,” Virgil said. “It’s absolutely murderous. I’m only here to help out.”

  “I’m sure our previous school board would disagree,” Carlson said. He was wearing leather gloves, and he clapped them a couple of times and said, “Let’s get out of the cold, shall we?”

  The school board members had been convicted of murder in the county court by a special prosecutor appointed by the state attorney general. Carlson had been asked to step aside because of his close relationships with all the board members. He’d done that but hadn’t been happy about it.

  Carlson led the way to the shop door, where they knocked once and went inside. McComber and Fitzgerald were on the second floor, and McComber called, “Bret, come on up.”