“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?
