He looked back down at the list. “None of the women could have moved a body. Margot Moore would be the strongest, but she’s too small. So... you know what I think?” He slid the list back toward Virgil. “I don’t think it was any of them. Or me or Rob. For sure, not me or Rob.”
Virgil: “Then...”
Rhodes held his hands up, a dismissive gesture. “You’re looking at the wrong people. The economy around here has never recovered from the crash in ’08. We used to have seven Realtors working out of this office, now we have three. A lot of businesses are still in trouble, a lot of places closing down because of Internet sales. Gina had a lot of loans out.A lot.She’s the main source of loan funds around here and she’s had to make serious decisions about people who can’t make payments.”
“I’d thought about that, but it opens up a whole universe of suspects, which is a problem,” Virgil said. “Is there anybody in particular who you think couldn’t pay and might be dangerous?”
“Nooo... The people at the bank could help you with that,” Rhodes said. “Now that I think of it, most people would suppose that their problem is with the bank, not with Gina. Kill her and the bank would still collect. Of course, as a decision maker, maybe the anger was aimed directly at her. Lots of people are plain stupid.”
—
Virgil talked with Rhodes for a few more minutes—Rhodes told him that Hemming was a “fussy dresser” and that she would never have gotten up in the morning and put on the same outfit she’d worn the night before—and despite Rhodes’s lack of alibi, Virgil was nearly ready to cross him off the list of suspects.
The fact that he’d been crying didn’t mean much—lots of killers cried after they’d offed their wives—but Rhodes seemed so nakedly open that Virgil believed him. Faking both openness and innocence at the same time wasn’t easy; most hardened sociopaths couldn’t pull it off.
That was not true of Rob Knox, who sat in his chair and smoldered, watching Virgil from the corners of his eyes.
Before he left, Virgil had Knox give him a list of names, the people he’d been with in Prairie du Chien.
—
As Virgil walked back to his truck, he was thinking about a grilled cheese sandwich. He’d gotten a good one at Shanker’s Bar and Grill the last time he was in town, so he went that way. At Shanker’s, he pulled into the parking lot, stopped in the second row of spaces, and climbed out of the truck.
As he did, a red pickup was pulling past him into the first row of spaces right outside the back door. He waited until it was stopped, noticed one of the stickers in the back window that showed a cartoon family: husband, wife, five kids—two boys and three girls, in a variety of sizes—two dogs and a cat.
Frankie had a sticker like that in the back of her truck, with asingle woman and five boys, and, lately, a slightly askew sticker of a dog that actually resembled Honus, as much as any cartoon could.
As Virgil walked toward the bar’s back door, a woman got out of the passenger side, wrapped up in an old-style parka with a heavy snorkel hood that left nothing visible but her eyes.
As Virgil passed the truck, another woman got out of the backseat on the passenger side, and as he walked up to the door, he found that the truck had held four women, all bundled heavily against the cold. He didn’t think about the fact that the truck would be heated, and they certainly wouldn’t have needed the hoods inside it...
He got to the back door of the bar and politely held the door open, and the first woman coming through, half turned away from him, whipped back toward him, leading with her fist, and knocked him on his ass.
He was still sitting up, surprised as much as stunned, when the other three piled on, what he later estimated to be roughly six hundred pounds of woman flesh, and he tried to roll over but could barely move, felt the breath being squeezed out of his lungs.
Then they beat the hell out of him.
He couldn’t hear much, except a soprano voice squeaking—“You fucker, you fucker, you fucker”—keeping time with the blows.
They didn’t exactly know what they were doing, and his ribs did have some padding from his parka, or they would have hurt him much worse, but, as it was, they hurt him badly enough.
He kept trying to roll so he could get to his knees, but they kept hitting him in the face and knocking him flat on his back. Hegot in a couple of short punches, but the heavy parkas on the women soaked up the impact.
The woman in a blue parka did most of the hitting, with her big, hamlike fists, while the other three kept him pinned, one of them struggling to her feet and starting to kick him in the hip and legs. The woman in the blue parka broke his nose, and blood went everywhere all over his face, and one woman actually squealed at the sight.
Nearly blind now, he got his hand inside one of the hoods and grabbed some hair and yanked it out of the woman’s scalp, and the woman screamed and rolled away from him, but Ham Fist hit him in the forehead, and someone kicked him some more, and finally a woman with a nice soprano voice said, “Stay away from Jesse, you prick.”
The weight suddenly lifted, leaving him lying on a dirty crush of snow and ice, trying to catch his breath. The women ran back to the truck, one of them saying, “He yanked my hair out, I’m bleeding,” and then the four doors slammed shut. The truck started crunching across the gravel lot, but he couldn’t see it because of the blood in his eyes, and he was afraid they were going to run him over, so he blindly rolled toward the building until his back was against the concrete-block wall. He was low enough that the bumper couldn’t get him, close enough the wheels couldn’t get him... he hoped.
If he’d had a gun, he might have tried to shoot at the truck, but he didn’t have a gun. A few seconds later, the truck was gone.
Virgil wiped the blood from one eye, ran his tongue along his teeth. None seemed broken or loose, though he could taste blood. He found with some probing that his lower lip was cut, apparently on his own teeth.
He managed to get to his knees and crawl to the back door of the bar but couldn’t reach high enough to get hold of the handle. He scratched at the edge of the door until he got his fingers around an edge and pulled it open—smeared blood on the glass, found both hands were bleeding from the gravel in the parking lot. He crawled into the back hallway, where he fell flat again.
A man came out of the men’s room and stepped over him and said, “Hey, buddy, you had a little too much there... Oh, holy cats.” And the man started shouting, “Shanker! Shanker!”
A minute later, the bar owner was there, and he looked at Virgil and said to somebody Virgil couldn’t see, “This is Virgil Flowers. Get an ambulance. Get an ambulance...”
