At Hemming’s house, they left their vehicles in the street, and Griffin followed Virgil up the driveway and around to the back door. In the kitchen, he introduced Griffin to Sawyer, explained that she was a former cop, and they all stepped into the living room, where Baldwin had set up a camera tripod and was photographing what looked like a piece of vacant green carpet.
Bill Jensen was sitting in a corner, reading a Surface Pro.
“Okay,” Sawyer said. “You know about the blood on the carpet over there.” She pointed at four pieces of yellow tape that isolated a four-inch square of carpet. “Don’t get near it. Anyway, that’s the blood that the guy from the sheriff’s department found. What he didn’t find was a smaller bloodstain of the same type at the bottom of the stairs. That’s what Don’s taking pictures of. What we know from the ME is that Hemming sustained a skull fracture when she was struck, and that can result in bleeding from the ear canal.”
“You think she crawled?” Virgil asked. “I was told that death was instantaneous.”
“I’ve been told that. What I do know is, the first bloodstain is quite a bit more substantial than the second one, but their ‘character’ is the same. The first one looks like she bled from her earinto the carpet—from one point source, the ear canal, dripping blood onto a small area on the carpet, which, given the carpet fibers, wound up creating a bloodstain that’s about the diameter of a pencil, extending straight down into the carpet and pooling at the bottom of the fibers. The second stain is smaller in diameter but also extends straight down into the carpet and pools at the bottom. But, they both look like they could have come from the same drip of blood. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was possible that she fell down the stairs, cracked her head on the bannister on the way down, and landed here at the bottom, then crawled to the second spot, where she died.”
“And somebody threw her in the Mississippi why?” Griffin said. “To tidy up?”
Virgil looked up the stairs and shook his head. “I don’t think the ME would buy that idea—the bannister’s got those edges on it, and she was hit by something large in diameter and smooth, like a bottle.”
“So the guy kills her, doesn’t notice the bloodstain, drags her body over to the stairs to make it look like an accident,” Sawyer said.
“Then dusts off his hands, picks up the body, and throws it in the Mississippi,” Griffin said. “I like your murders. They give you something to think about. In L.A., it wasBANG! BANG! BANG!, two dead, one of them a gang member, the other a five-year-old girl on her way to buy a Popsicle. Simple, in-your-face nutcake homicide. Here, you’ve got to ‘detect.’”
Sawyer and Virgil and Baldwin were all looking at Griffin, and she said, “What?”
“Nothing,” Virgil said.
Sawyer said, “I like our way better.”
“You find anything else?” Virgil asked.
“Cracked Ping-Pong paddle; could be more B and D,” Sawyer said. “We can check it for DNA, if you want to put in for it. Bill’s got the email up on Hemming’s computer.”
“This way,” Jensen said, putting down the slate. He led the way back to Hemming’s office, tapped the Return key on her keyboard, and the mail came up. “It’s all yours.”
Virgil sat down, and Griffin asked, “How long is this going to take?”
“Probably a while,” Virgil said. “Give me an hour, and I’ll go out to CarryTown with you.”
She went away, and Virgil looked at the message count at the bottom of the screen. Hemming’s in-box showed 8,406 messages, with 3,502 in her out-box.
He started typing in names, beginning with Ryan Harney. There were two recent messages, one to Harney and one back: a notification of the meeting and a note saying he’d be there. There were seventy more messages between them, but they went back five years. Nothing sexual, nothing that would necessarily say “affair,” but they were meeting a couple of times a week, always at Hemming’s house in the late afternoons.
There were far fewer messages to the other people who’d been at the party, with one exception: over the years, she’d sent hundreds of messages to Margot Moore, most of them quick notes setting up more meeting times. There were references to Fred Fitzgerald, but always in a kind of coded language that an outsider might eventually recognize as referring to sexual events: “Had a good time Thursday night, F brought a new toy. Ask him about the ‘mouses.’”
Virgil scrolled through dozens of the notes from Moore to Hemming, both sent and received, and from Fred Fitzgerald toHemming. The most recent note from Fitzgerald confirmed a 9:30 therapy session. No date or day was mentioned, but the message had been sent the Sunday before Hemming was killed.
But the most interesting of all the notes was from Hemming to Lucy Cheever, sent on Wednesday afternoon, the day before Hemming was murdered.
Lucy,
I’m afraid that we might have to go another direction on the business loan. Frankly, a million’s too large a commitment for our bank, at the moment. I will talk to Marv on Monday, when he gets back from the Cities, and see if he has anything to say that may change our minds, but I don’t think this will happen. You told me that you’d explored the idea of a loan with Lew Andrews up at U.S. Bank in St. Paul, and I did make a quick call to Lew and they are still quite interested in talking with you. Best of luck with that.
Gina
—
Virgil found Marv Hiners’s phone number and got him on the line.
“Has the bank turned down a major loan for Lucy Cheever?”
Hiners said, “No... In fact, it’s on its way to approval. I was talking to Elroy Cheever this morning, who wanted to see what effect Gina’s death might have had on their application. I told him that as far as I was concerned, we were good to go. It has to be approved by the loan committee, but that shouldn’t be a big problem. How’d you hear about it?”
Virgil thought about telling Hiners about the email fromHemming to Cheever but held his tongue. Instead, he said, “The possibility came up in all the stuff I’ve been looking at. Thanks, Marv.”
