“You, too, Virgil.”
—
He worried a little about Cain, but Virgil had heard that kind of revenge talk before from friends of victims. Nothing had ever come of it, not in Virgil’s experience.
He went to his truck and sat a moment. A video of the body being thrown into the Mississippi was too much to hope for. Virgil knew that, even as he started the truck and drove south through town to the sewage plant.
And he was right. He talked to the plant superintendent, who told him that the cameras were pointed at the chain-link front gate, which was locked shut at night. The effluent channel was several hundred yards farther south.
The superintendent, a burly man in striped coveralls, said, “She wasn’t thrown in there anyway. I knew who she was and she probably weighed one-forty, one-fifty. You would have had to walk a half mile on a bad slick-icy path in the middle of the night with a hundred-and-fifty-pound body on your back. In a blizzard? No way.”
“You have to walk it?”
“Yup. You park in our parking lot here, and there’s a path that runs along the river. Not a government path, not a sidewalk—a path that’s been walked in.”
“How do you know it was in the middle of the night?” Virgil asked.
The guy cocked his head. “You think somebody walked a half mile down a slick-icy path in the middle of thedaywith a hundred-and-fifty-pound woman’s body on his back?”
“Well... no.”
“There you go,” he said.
“The guy who found her... he fish down there much?” Virgil asked.
“Ben Potter? Yeah, once or twice a week, year-round. He’s probably eighty. Saw her jacket, snagged her with a lure, pulled her in, called the cops.”
“He doesn’t have any problems with the idea of fishing, you know, in the effluent stream?”
“Hey. When it goes out of here, that stuff is as clean as springwater,” the superintendent said. “You could drink it.”
“You ever do that?” Virgil asked.
“I’m confident about our water quality, but I’m not crazy.”
“You know Jesse McGovern?”
The guy’s eyes went flat. “Who?”
—
On his way back through town, Virgil stopped at the public library, where a chubby blond librarian said, “Virgil Flowers! Welcome back. Are you here on the Gina Hemming thing?”
She’d helped him out on a previous case, and he appreciated it. Virgil said, “Yeah, I am. You know her?”
“Sure. I mean, I’ve talked to her a time or two. She mostly knew my folks; they had a mortgage from the bank. We had a little ceremony when the folks paid it off, and Gina gave us the paper in person.”
“Huh. All right. Let me ask this: do you have yearbooks from the high school?”
“Sure. I’ve heard rumors about the reunion meeting. You’d want Class of ’92,” she said. “Let me show you.”
She took him back in the stacks and showed him two shelves that, between them, contained fifty or sixty high school yearbooks. Virgil said, “Thanks, I can take it from here.”
“Class of ’92 right here,” she said, touching one of the books. “If you need more help, ask me.”
When she’d gone, he pulled off a book a foot farther down the shelf than the ’92, cracked it open, and looked at the index. Janice Anderson had been right: Jesse McGovern was in the same class as Virgil. He found her senior picture, spent some time looking at it—the photo was in color, and McGovern had a thin, foxy face, freckles, and auburn hair—until he was sure he’d recognize her, then put the book back.
He hoped Janice Anderson never figured out what she’d given away. She was a nice old lady, and he liked her. She’d be upset if she knew he’d played her.
