Deep Freeze

by John Sandford

  “Yes.”

  “What if Margot was killed by somebody who knew that Margot had killed Gina? Margot and Gina were friends, but it wasn’t always lovey-dovey. Ask around, you’ll find out.”

  “But why wouldn’t they come to me and tell me about it instead of killing Margot?”

  “This is Trippton, Virgil,” Carver said. “We’re so far away from everything that we’re used to handling our own problems. If somebody who loved Gina knew something about Margot . . . it could happen. You need to find out who doesn’t have an alibi for killing Margot.”

  —

  Virgil went out to his truck, deciding on his way that he didn’t believe that. He couldn’t believe it. If Margot had killed Gina, and Fred Fitzgerald came along and dumped the body, and somebody else killed Margot out of revenge, he was screwed. He’d never get to the bottom of this.

  TWENTY-FOUR The day was getting old, and Virgil felt like he’d been running in circles. What he needed more than anything, he thought, was a couple hours of absolute silence so he could sort out everything he knew about the two killings.

  Jenkins called and asked if they were still on for dinner. Virgil suggested the steak house at seven o’clock, and Jenkins said okay and added that Margaret Griffin had told them that she’d come up with a new idea for solving the Barbie doll problem but wouldn’t say what it was.

  Johnson Johnson said he and Clarice would meet them at the steak house and also said that the arrest of Fred Fitzgerald, and the reason for it, was all over town. “That boy’s gonna have to pack up and leave,” Johnson said.

  Virgil drove back to the cabin and, on the way, called Griffin and, when she answered, asked what she was up to. “What I should have done a week ago: find the sleaziest people who might know about the Barbie doll makers and do a reverse auction—five hundred dollars for information, payable upon delivery of results. No? Six hundred dollars? No? A thousand dollars? No? Two thousand? I’ll go to five grand, if I have to. Somewhere between five hundred and five thousand, I’ll find my Judas. There’s at least a few in every town.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Any goddamn way I can.”

  “Good luck with that,” Virgil said.

  The thought that she was right about finding a Judas—and she probably was—was moderately depressing, though Virgil himself had relied on more than one dirtball informant.

  —

  At the cabin, Virgil got out a legal pad, listed all the people at the reunion meeting, and a few more—Justin/Justine’s boyfriend, Marvin Hiners at the bank—and started writing down what he knew as facts about them. When he was done, he flipped through the pages, looking for connections. He didn’t find anything particularly convincing.

  At six o’clock he called Frankie, and they talked for half an hour. He learned that both Frankie and the dog Honus greatly missed him, and that a neighbor had gone in a ditch, rolled, and totaled his two-year-old Escalade. When he got off the phone, he stepped into the shower and got steamed up against the cold, dressed again, and drove across town to the steak house.

  —

  Jenkins and Shrake knew Johnson and Clarice and approved of both of them. Shrake said to the table, as the drinks came, “We oughta start a pool on when Virgil solves this thing. I’m thinking three more days.”

  Johnson said, “That’s what I’d take. If we’re really going to do a pool, we’d have to cut the days into half days or something. Because if it’s not soon, it’s not going to happen at all . . .”

  They were talking about that when Corbel Cain came in trailed by a woman who he introduced as Janey, his wife. She was a pretty, thin, and slightly fragile-looking woman. Virgil couldn’t see her as the violent housewife who sparked off brawls with her husband, but he’d often been surprised in the past. Cain said that he was out on bail but hadn’t given up on his search for Hemming’s killer.

  “Corbel . . .”

  “That’s the way things are,” Cain said. He slapped Johnson on the shoulder and asked, “How’re things going with the airplane?”

  “Me’n Virgil are flying it back in April,” Johnson said.

  “You oughta invite me to go along. I could be a valuable addition to the crew,” Cain said. “I used to fly myself. I could spell you at the controls.”

  “You still got a license?” Johnson asked.

  “No, but who’s gonna tell?” Corbel asked.

  —

  The Cains continued on to their own table, and Virgil, watching them from time to time, decided that they looked happy enough. They’d been there for an hour or so, whittling their steaks, when David Birkmann came in looking like a lost file clerk, in brown shoes, khaki Dockers, a blue shirt, parka, and a yellow ball cap. He said hello to Virgil, Johnson, and Clarice, then went off to a table by himself.

  Johnson leaned across the table to Virgil and said in a low voice, “Birkmann’s your killer. See that hat he’s wearing? The little dots all over it?”

  Virgil glanced at Birkmann’s hat. A pale yellow with black dots. “Yeah?”

  “He gives those hats out as promotions. I got one. If you look real close at those dots, they’re actually little tiny bugs crawling all over. That, my friend, is nuts. He thinks it’s funny.”

  “Well, he was the class clown,” Virgil said. “He’s supposed to have a good sense of humor.”

  “I say it again: goofy.”

  “You know that joke?” Shrake asked. “Mickey Mouse goes to his lawyer, says he wants a divorce from Minnie Mouse, and he explains why. The lawyer said, ‘I’m not sure you should go for a divorce just because she’s having a few psychological problems.’ Mickey says, ‘Psychological problems? I didn’t say she was having psychological problems. I said she was fuckin’ Goofy.’”

  Virgil happened to glance over at Cain while Shrake was telling his musty joke and saw that Cain was staring past his wife at Birkmann’s back. He thought, Oh-oh . . . but let it go.

  —

  Jenkins and Shrake had taken the last two available rooms at Ma and Pa Kettle’s, probably the first time they’d all been occupied at once since the Great Flood of ’27. Jenkins said that Margaret Griffin had asked that they be available the next morning for another raid. They would be.

  “You know what she’s doing?” Clarice asked. “She’s going around to people and offering a whole bunch of money for someone to rat out Jesse McGovern.”

  Virgil groaned and asked, “How’d you hear about it?”

  “Everybody’s heard about it,” Johnson said. “Sandy Martinez told me that she put up a wanted poster in the Laundromat. One of two things is going to happen: somebody’s going to rat out Jesse, or somebody’s going to shoot Margaret in the head. Then you’d have two separate murder cases . . . or three.”

  “Ah, shit,” Virgil said.

  —

  As they were all leaving the restaurant, Johnson Johnson said he and Clarice would not be available for dinner the following evening because they had couples league night at Brown’s Bowling Alley. Jenkins and Shrake asked about Brown’s, Johnson filled them in and they decided they’d go by and bowl a few frames before heading to bed. They invited Virgil, but Virgil was thinking about his yellow pad and his murder case.

  “I’m going to go back to the cabin, I’m going to lie on the bed and listen to Elmore James on my iPad, and I’m going to figure this out. If you guys get up a pool on when I’m going to crack this, you should take ‘Tomorrow.’”

  Jenkins looked at Shrake, Johnson, and Clarice and said, “Oooo. Wave.”

  The four of them did a football wave for Virgil, and he let them do it.

  —

  The trip back to the cabin was slowed by the occasional snowpack on the roads. As was usually the case, the lead car in the line of vehicles going down Main Street was driven by the slowest, most cautious driver, who rar
ely ventured above fifteen miles per hour.

  Virgil finally made it past the “Raccoon Crossing” sign and turned down the driveway and pulled up to the side of the porch. As he stopped the car, he saw a flash on the finger of land across the channel from the cabin and, a moment later, the truck jerked with a sound like SPAT!

  There was a second flash and a second SPAT! And another. And Virgil realized that the truck was being shot at—that he was being shot at—and he jammed himself over the seat back into the second row and climbed through to the back hatch, as the truck continued to jerk, continued to SPAT! SPAT! SPAT! The truck was being hit, but it sounded like the shots were going into the engine compartment. Virgil reached back, ran the combination on his gun safe, got out the Glock, pushed open the back hatch, and climbed out and got behind a tire.

  There was a last SPAT! and Virgil emptied the Glock, all seventeen rounds, at the last spot where he’d seen a flash, holding his gun at what he thought might be six feet above the flash. He had no real hope of hitting anything, but he might scare the shooter. He was slapping another magazine in the Glock when he smelled the gas . . .

  He couldn’t tell where it was coming from, then saw the reflection of fire on the snow under the engine compartment.

  The gunfire from across the water had stopped, but the gunman might still be there waiting for Virgil to reveal himself. He took a chance, dashed around the back of the cabin, went through the little-used back door, having to kick a snowdrift out of the way before the screen door would open out. He ran through the cabin to the front door, went to his hands and knees, pushed the door open, reached out around the jamb until he got hold of the snow shovel he’d left there, pulled it inside.

  He ran back through the cabin with the shovel, back to the truck. Fire was now dripping from the bottom of the engine compartment into the snow—a stream of burning gasoline. He didn’t know exactly where the gas was coming from, but he began frantically throwing snow on the fire he could see, but it didn’t stop. Still afraid of showing himself at the front of the truck, he dropped the shovel and, with freezing hands, called 911. When the operator answered, he told her that he had a bad truck fire and about the shooting. The operator knew where Johnson Johnson’s cabin was and said that deputies and a fire truck would be on the way.

  Virgil used the shovel to bank snow along the driver’s side, popped the driver’s-side doors, front and back, and began pulling gear out. The fire was close and hot, still confined to the engine compartment.

  The truck was only ten feet from the cabin. Virgil thought about trying to shift the truck into neutral and rolling it down toward the river, but the front seat was now too hot, and fire broke through the dashboard above the gas pedal . . .

  When the fire truck finally got there, six or seven minutes after his call, the entire front interior of his truck was burning. The firemen put the fire out in two minutes, hosing it with foam.

  Virgil had hauled all his gear around behind the cabin, and he sat on his duffel bag and watched them do it. When it was all done, one of the firemen came over and said, “Not looking so good.”

  Virgil said, “No, it really isn’t.”

  —

  The cops arrived a minute later, and when Virgil told them what had happened, they looked across the stretch of frozen river to where the shots had come from, and said, “Probably came in on the other side of the finger there, on the river, on a sled. Walk across that finger, probably fifty yards, wait until you show up. Long gone now.”

  “Are you sure that he’s gone, so that we could run across and check it out?” Virgil asked.

  The cop looked across the ice for a moment, shook his head. “Not by ourselves. We’d be sitting ducks for a guy with a deer rifle. Let’s get some help out here.”

  He went to call for more cops, and, while he did, Virgil finally looked at the front of his 4Runner. He found four bullet holes but was sure that the truck had been hit more often than that. He got a flashlight and checked the mesh grille and found another hole. It was possible, he thought, that one had gone through one of the holes in the mesh without hitting the mesh itself.

  The holes, he thought, looked to be .30 caliber. Virgil had gotten the impression that the shooter had been squeezing off shots one at a time—most probably working a bolt-action rifle.

  A deer rifle, and not a .223, was the most popular firearm with gun enthusiasts. David Birkmann had said he had been a deer hunter, so he might have one. But in the entire southern part of the state—good deer country—such guns were limited to shotguns firing only slugs. Unless Birkmann traveled to hunt, he’d probably be shooting a shotgun. A 12-gauge shotgun—about the only kind used for hunting deer—would have a slug more than twice as large as those that had hit the truck . . .

  He would ask Birkmann about his gun, and who could confirm it, but Virgil also had to consider the possibility that he’d been shot at by Jesse McGovern’s people.

  As for the fire, one lucky shot probably hit the gas line or fuel pump, spattering gas around the inside of the hot engine compartment, or maybe one of the incoming bullets had sparked off the iron engine itself. Whatever had happened, the truck was done.

  —

  Twenty minutes later, six heavily armored deputies, along with Jeff Purdy, had assembled at Johnson’s cabin, all of them armed with semiauto .223 black rifles. Johnson’s cabin faced out on a backwater of the main river, a cul-de-sac. The opposite shore was a finger of land, a narrow peninsula, that extended upstream to the north. Virgil hadn’t been out on it because it was low and marshy and probably covered with poison ivy, but he thought it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred yards across.

  The deputies spread out along the near shore, always three deputies with guns up, focusing on the far shore, while two more, on the far ends of the line, hurriedly crossed the open ice.

  Those two moved along the far shore, closing on the spot where the gunfire had come from. When they were close, they stopped and set up, and the other deputies crossed two at a time. Virgil went with this last group.

  When everyone was safely across, they moved slowly through the barren vegetation, powerful lights cutting through the brush, until they found the track of the shooter. As they’d expected, the shooter had walked, or run, to the other side of the finger of land to the river.

  Then, as they hadn’t expected, he had walked, or run, back down the finger to the point where it connected to the mainland. The tracks led up the riverbank, across the railroad tracks.

  The buildings along the tracks and the river were either industrial warehouses or abandoned, with mostly empty parking lots, and all of them vacant at night. The shooter could have left his vehicle almost anywhere and it wouldn’t have been thought of as out of place. He could have come and gone without being seen.

  One of the deputies said to Virgil, “Don’t quote me, but we’re fucked.”

  TWENTY-FIVE Virgil called Jon Duncan and told him that his truck had been burned to the ground, which was not an exaggeration. Duncan said, “Whoa! What are you going to do?”

  “Go up to Winona and rent a Hertz, before anybody finds out what happened to my truck,” Virgil said. “Talk to my insurance guy—I’ve got a law enforcement rider on it, so maybe I’ll come out okay. Davenport’s car got all shot up last fall, and he got some good money back.”

  “Well, do what you have to,” Duncan said. “Is this gonna take much longer? I mean, either a solution or a dry hole?”

  “A few more days, is my guess. I’ve got a lot of people stirred up, something will crack. Or not. Anyway, I gotta do something about wheels.”

  —

  Virgil called Johnson, told him what happened, told him that the cabin was fine, and Johnson offered to loan Virgil a pickup. “Four-wheel drive, good heater, but the radio’s shot, and it’s got a big ‘Johnson Johnson Timber Products’ sign on the side.”

&n
bsp; “I’ll rent,” Virgil said, “if you can give me a ride up to Winona tomorrow morning.”

  “See you then.”

  —

  There was no chance at all that anything could be recovered from the car by a crime scene crew—the bullets would have disintegrated as they ricocheted off the engine block. Virgil called Gene’s Wrecker and Salvage and arranged for a wrecker to come pull out the 4Runner and hold it at the salvage yard until an insurance adjuster could look at it.

  The wrecker showed up half an hour after he called, and Virgil went out and watched as the driver maneuvered the hulk up on top of the flatbed. The driver said, “State Farm? You’ll get ten grand. Maybe twelve, if you put a gun to the guy’s head. But I don’t think twelve. Might try to stick you with eight.”

  Virgil went in the cabin to think about it. Had he been shot at by somebody involved in the Hemming and Moore murders or by somebody pissed off about the hunt for Jesse McGovern?

  From the impressions in the snow where the shooter had been, it looked as though he’d been shooting while sitting, which was a good position, one that an experienced rifleman would use if he couldn’t go prone. Yet, the shooter had hit nothing but the engine compartment: it was like he wasn’t trying to actually hit Virgil.

  On the other hand, he was willing to throw a lot of high-powered lead into the front of a truck with a man inside, so even if he didn’t really want to kill Virgil, he was willing to risk it.

  On the third hand, Virgil was higher up than the shooter, so the shooter, who was sitting at the waterline, was effectively shooting uphill and might not have been able to see much of the windshield, and, with the high beams on, might not have been able to even see the truck that well at all. He might simply have been shooting between the headlights.

  No way to know, really.

  And was it really a he? Virgil thought about that for a while and decided it probably was. The boot tracks in the snow weren’t all that telling because the snow was so loose, but it appeared to Virgil that the boots were larger than anything a woman might wear. So probably a man.