Deep Freeze

by John Sandford

  —

  Club Gold was closed when Virgil got there, but a couple of people were working inside. He banged on the glass door until an impatient man came trotting over—Jerry Clark, the manager. He opened the door and asked, “Virgil?”

  “Yes. I need to talk to you about last Thursday.”

  “Ooo-kay. Uh . . .”

  Virgil followed Clark back to the bar’s office, closed the door, and said, “I don’t want you talking about what I’m going to tell you. ’Cause you could get killed.”

  Clark was a thin man with a weathered face and knife-edge nose. His Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times, and he said, “I won’t talk to nobody.”

  “I’m trying to nail down a time line and I need to know what time David Birkmann got here. Is there any way we can do that?”

  “Depends on how close you need the time.”

  “How close can you get me?” Virgil asked.

  “We do videos of the karaoke. We start at about eight o’clock—maybe not exactly, but close—and we run the camera continuously until we quit at eleven or so. Sometimes we run a little late, or quit a little early, depending on how many people we get singing,” Clark said. “We could run the video forward and see exactly how long it runs before Dave came on . . . but I don’t know if we started exactly at eight, so we could be a few minutes off.”

  “Where’s the video now?”

  Clark pointed to a shelf hanging on a side wall. “Right there. We keep them on a hard drive. For ten bucks, we’ll email you a copy of your performance. You’d be surprised how many people ask.”

  “Let’s take a look.”

  —

  Clark hooked the hard drive to a laptop, found the video from Thursday, and ran it fast-forward until they found Birkmann, who was climbing up on the stage, smiling and sweating. The video took in that part of the crowd, sitting at round metal tables in front of the stage. Other patrons walked back and forth in front of the camera from time to time. The audience gave Birkmann a brief round of applause and then he did a reasonably creditable version of “Pretty Woman.”

  “Well . . . he was up there singing at nine-forty, give or take,” Clark said, looking at the time line running at the bottom of the video. “Probably not five minutes one way or the other.”

  “Could he just walk up and get on the stage?”

  “No, he would have had to sign up . . . but sometimes there isn’t much of a wait. It’s sorta like a party. We don’t have one person right after another; some guys sing three or four times . . . We don’t always stick right to the list, either, depending on who’s ready to go. He wouldn’t have to wait long.”

  If Birkmann went back to Hemming’s house after he was sure that everybody else was out of sight—say, five minutes after nine o’clock—he would have had to kill her, let the body bleed into the carpet for a couple of minutes at least, move the body and arrange it, and get out of there and down to the bar and start singing, all in half an hour. A decent defense attorney would chop that time line to pieces, looking for every excuse to add a few minutes—like with the falling snow. Birkmann would have been driving carefully . . . A good attorney would stick an extra five minutes in there.

  While Virgil was thinking about that, Clark muttered, “Let me see if I can . . .”

  He ran the video backward, then forwards again, until he found a heavyset blond woman climbing up on the stage. “Okay,” Clark said. “Let’s see if Carroll’s in the crowd. He usually is.”

  “What are we doing?” Virgil asked, looking back at the video.

  “Looking for Carroll Wilson. That’s his wife, Jeanette, up there singing. Carroll’s usually . . . Yeah, there he is.” He stopped the video and tapped the head of a man who was sitting at a table below the stage but near its center.

  When Jeanette started singing, Carroll stood up and took a photo with his cell phone.

  “Thank you,” Virgil said. “Where can I find Carroll?”

  “He’s got the Stihl chain saw dealership. We can call him.”

  —

  Carroll Wilson had the photos of his wife on his phone. The first one was taken, he said, right after his wife started singing. The time stamp at the top of the photo said 8:44.

  “Don’t mess with that photo, we’ll want to save it as evidence,” Virgil said. “I’ll come by later to talk to you about it.”

  “I’ll be here,” Wilson said.

  Virgil didn’t say so, but when he said he’d come by to talk to him about it, he meant that he’d give Wilson a subpoena and take his phone away from him.

  He and Clark went back to the video, marked the photo at 8:44, and ran the video forward to Birkmann’s appearance onstage. “We must’ve started a little late,” Clark said after they figured out the time line. “If Carroll took that picture at eight forty-four, Dave started singing at nine fifty-one.”

  “I’ll need to take the hard drive with me,” Virgil said. “I’ll give you a receipt.”

  “Okay, but I’m kinda into this now,” Clark said. “Let me roll back . . . Let’s see if we can spot Dave with his parka on . . .”

  They couldn’t. The first time they saw him was when he moved into the video and climbed up on the stage, and he wasn’t wearing the parka.

  “So he’d already hung it up,” Clark said.

  “Do you have the sign-up sheets?”

  Clark shook his head. “Threw them away as soon as we were done. They’re down at the landfill by now.”

  They couldn’t think of any more ways of spotting Birkmann’s entrance to the club—no security cameras covering the parking lot—so Virgil was left with the video showing him getting onstage.

  —

  In his initial interview with Virgil, and the quick phone interview earlier that afternoon, Birkmann had suggested that he left Hemming’s house at around 8:45 and had driven directly to Club Gold and, shortly after, had begun singing. He hadn’t. In fact, if he’d been telling the truth about when he left Hemming’s house, he’d have been at the club for an hour before he went onstage.

  Again, a good defense attorney could make a hash out of that. A guy goes to a bar, talks to people, has a couple of beers, signs up for karaoke . . . Who would know exactly how long you’d been there. An hour might seem like fifteen minutes.

  Virgil sat in his truck outside Hemming’s house, eyes closed, and tried to imagine the string of events if the killer was David Birkmann, as he now thought likely.

  —

  Birkmann goes back to the house for some reason. He and Hemming have a quick and ultimately violent argument—money or sex, Virgil thought. Give them ten minutes for that. She slashes him with her nails, he hits her with something round or cylindrical, takes it with him when he leaves.

  Give him an additional ten minutes to react to her death, move the body, run out of the house. According to that time line, he’s probably out of the house by 9:30, down at the bar by 9:37. Fred Fitzgerald arrives at 9:40 . . .

  Tight, but workable . . . But he’d need more to get a conviction.

  A confession would be good.

  —

  Virgil opened his eyes, sighed.

  He’d been badly fooled by Birkmann’s very vulnerability. His obvious and genuine depression, the fact that the Hemming’s murder had left him distraught. When Virgil asked him about the GetOut! truck seen by Bobbie Cole outside Hemming’s house, he hadn’t tried to deny it—he’d actually insisted that it was probably his and let Virgil decide that Cole was an unreliable witness who’d gotten the time wrong.

  He couldn’t have untangled that before Moore was killed—he still hadn’t untangled what that killing was about. Was it possible that it really was a separate problem?

  But, no. It wasn’t.

  —

  He still had a few more people to check: Birkmann’s employees—the no
n-blonds. He had their names in his notebooks and he spent two hours that afternoon tracking them down. Because Hemming’s murder had been a sensation, all three men knew where they’d been the night of the murder.

  Two of them had been at home with their families. The third had been with his girlfriend at the movies in La Crosse. Virgil checked on the La Crosse alibi with a phone call to the girlfriend, while he was still sitting with Birkmann’s employee, and the girlfriend confirmed it. That wasn’t airtight, but Virgil believed it anyway: all three said that they had little previous contact with either Hemming or Moore and had never done business with either of them.

  —

  Virgil was back in his truck when Jerry Clark, Club Gold manager, called. “I, uh, told my wife about talking to you. I figured when you said don’t tell anybody, you didn’t mean her . . .”

  “Well . . . she can’t talk, Jerry. Honest to God, there’ve already been two murders, one in absolutely cold blood.”

  “Yeah, okay. Anyway, she said that she’s sure she saw Dave come in from the parking lot with Cary Lowe. She said he still had his parka on. I don’t have Cary’s number, but he works at Home Electric and Appliance here on Main. You might check with him.”

  “Great. But don’t tell anyone else.”

  “I won’t. Promise.”

  —

  Virgil had seen the Home Electric store, did a U-turn, and went back to it. The store did both sales and small engine and electric repairs, and Lowe, the store’s assistant manager, was alone in the store’s workshop when Virgil arrived. Virgil asked about Birkmann.

  “I do remember that,” Lowe said. “I didn’t see him come in from the parking lot, but I ran into him in the men’s can.”

  “Was he still wearing his parka?”

  “Yup. I remember that because there’s not a lot of room between the urinal and the sink, and your coats can kinda overlap. Dave was washing his hands, and I had to pee a little sideways to make sure I didn’t spray his coat.”

  “Did you make a phone call around then? Something we could use to tell the time?”

  “No, but it was probably . . . nine-thirty? Something like that?”

  “Nine-thirty. Definitely after nine?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lowe said. “Thursday is store night in Trippton, and I was working until nine. There was no one in the store, so I locked up right at nine. The club’s only two blocks down, so I walked over, had a beer, was watching the karaoke, went back to pee, and ran into Dave in the men’s room. So that was probably . . . nine-thirty, give or take.”

  “And he’d just come in from the parking lot?”

  “I don’t know that; I didn’t see him come in. He had his parka on, though, and the club’s always warm.”

  “Thank you,” Virgil said.

  —

  Virgil called Pweters, the sheriff’s deputy. “You working tonight?”

  “Yeah, I’m three to eleven. You got something?”

  “I’ll tell you about it when I see you. I’ve got some stuff to think about, so let’s plan to get together about five o’clock. You know where Johnson Johnson’s cabin is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Meet you there at five.”

  —

  The cherry on the cake arrived a few minutes later when Lucas Davenport called Virgil from the Twin Cities. Davenport was now a federal marshal, no longer working with the BCA, but he and Virgil still talked.

  “Jenkins called me,” Davenport said. “He wanted me to tell you that Buster Gedney didn’t sell any silencers to any of the people on your list.”

  “That’s not good,” Virgil asked. “Why didn’t he call me himself?”

  “Because he remembered something, despite being hit in the head a lot. He remembered that when I was doing the Black Hole investigation, that one of the guys involved in the murders had been a pest control officer.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. He had a silenced Ruger .22 semiauto pistol that was made especially for sale to pest control officers. I don’t know if Ruger still makes them, but they did for a long time.”

  “One of my suspects—the leading suspect—runs a pest control company,” Virgil said.

  “Jenkins mentioned that. Now that we’ve solved your case for you, for which we plan to take full credit, I’d recommend that you go over and pick the guy up.”

  “I’ll do that,” Virgil said.

  Cherry on the cake.

  TWENTY-NINE When Virgil called that afternoon, David Birkmann was sitting in his van outside the Corsair Motel in Rochester. They spoke only a few minutes, but Birkmann thought Flowers was working on an idea and that that idea would take him to Birkmann as the killer.

  Birkmann knew as much about guns as the average Minnesota small-town male, which was actually quite a bit: he’d owned two 12-gauge shotguns and a .22 rifle and had shot a dozen deer over fifteen seasons of hunting.

  As far as pistols were concerned, he’d forgotten about his father’s old Ruger until he needed it. But if you’d handled other guns, its operation was simple enough, and an hour on the Internet gave him all the information he needed about cleaning and servicing the .22.

  It’d worked faultlessly when he killed Margot Moore.

  Still, one thing he knew for sure was that if he were going to kill himself, he wouldn’t do it with the .22. Three shots in the forehead might reliably kill, but his research on the Internet suggested that a suicide attempt with a .22 might leave him as a vegetable rather than painlessly dead.

  One of the shotguns would work, of course, but they’d blow most of his head off. He wanted something tidier than that: he was thinking a .38. A cheap gun would be fine because he didn’t plan to target-shoot with it or even shoot it more than once.

  He’d also considered going up to the I-90 bridge and throwing himself off. The fall onto the ice would kill him instantly. But . . . he was afraid of heights. The idea of looking down to the point of impact made him nauseated even thinking about it.

  This is where he’d gotten to a week after he’d killed the only woman he’d ever really loved and killed another woman who really hadn’t deserved it. He’d killed Moore when he still had fantasies of getting away with it all . . .

  The fantasies were going away, and he was going to kill himself. He couldn’t bear the thought of being led into the county court in an orange jumpsuit and chains, his friends and neighbors peering at him in disbelief.

  —

  Birkmann had been to gun shows several times—they were social events in Trippton—and the show in Rochester was like all the other ones, if larger. Private dealers worked out of individual motel rooms, usually showing ten or twenty weapons of a particular type. The “big room” had fifty dealers set up on a spiral of tables, selling everything from T-shirts and bumper stickers—“Honk If You’ve Never Seen a Gun Fired From a Vehicle,” “If Babies Had Guns, They Wouldn’t Be Aborted”—to tiny derringers for ninety dollars and massive .50 caliber Barretts for ten thousand.

  He circled past the T-shirt, decal, bumper sticker, and knife sellers in the big room, looked in confusion at the array of AR-15 parts, watched a woman demonstrating a speedloader for a .44 Magnum pistol as long as her forearm, and eventually found what he wanted in one of the private dealer rooms: a table full of Ruger revolvers.

  He knew he wanted a simple .38 but, being Minnesotan, wound up with a diminutive chrome Ruger revolver that would shoot both .38 specials and .357 Magnums.

  “No tax on that, this is a private sale,” the dealer said. “Won’t have to fool around with the background check, so you can put it right in your pocket and take it home. Plus, of course, it chambers those .357s for home defense as well as .38s for practice.”

  Birkmann made himself smile, a rare thing for the past week, when he went for the .357 because it would shoot both rounds. In other words, a deal
: two-for-one. Not like he really needed the bargain, if he was only going to fire it once, but if you were Minnesotan you went for the deal.

  Birkmann bought the gun and a box of .38s, which would be more than sufficient for a suicide, and, without exactly putting his finger on the reason why, a box of .357s. He’d almost gotten away with it, he thought. That didn’t make him much happier.

  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.”