“I was there,” Virgil said, putting a little gravel in his voice.Maybe she was checking his voice to see if he was the man who tipped her. “We know goddamn well that you were building dolls down there. Give it up, Jesse.”
“You tracked me on my phone, didn’t you?”
“I can’t reveal law enforcement techniques, you gotta know that,” Virgil said. “If you’d stop making those dolls, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Tell that woman that we’re almost done.”
“I told her last night,” Virgil said. “She used to be a cop, and she’s getting paid for being here. I don’t think she’s gonna quit until she hands you the paper. You know, you could stop doing the dolls now, knock on her door down at Ma and Pa’s, take the paper, and she’ll be out of here. She doesn’t like the winter. If you can show that you’ve ceased and desisted—take a vacation down to Florida—you’d be in the clear.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
“I got a question for you about that van your guy saw,” Virgil said. “Is it possible that whoever saw it saw it a little earlier than you say?”
“No.”
“That sounds pretty definite.”
“She gets off work at nine o’clock, I won’t tell you where,” McGovern said. “She stopped at Piggly Wiggly to get a rotisserie chicken and some potato salad, which probably took ten minutes, and then saw the van when she was driving home. Probably between twenty after and nine-thirty.”
“She got off at nine o’clock for sure?”
“Where she works, they don’t go a minute past nine. Her replacement doesn’t start a minutebeforenine. That kind of place.She walked out no later than nine-oh-one, or however long it took her to put her coat on.”
“I need to talk to her.”
“I’ll tell her,” McGovern said and hung up.
—
Virgil drove into town, thinking it over. The woman had a job and got off at nine. She had a replacement, a swing-shift worker. That probably meant that the job was either a two-shift or a full twenty-four hours a day. The clinic? A possibility. What else was open those hours in Trippton?
He called Johnson Johnson and got a list. The clinic, one convenience store, three restaurants, two liquor stores, the bowling alley. Bernie’s Books was open until eleven, but nobody would be working a two-hour shift. And Jimmy worked until it closed, Johnson thought... The sheriff’s office... The boot factory had once had two shifts but now was down to one, seven to three, and even that shift was light.... Other than that, nothing.
The list was short enough that Virgil ran through it in a hurry. The clinic had regular hours: seven to three, three to eleven, and eleven to seven. The restaurants ran two shifts, as did the liquor stores. No shift at any of the places started or ended at nine o’clock.
The convenience store...
Virgil found the pear-shaped assistant manager there, and a plumber working on a compressor for a cooler, and the assistant manager, whose name was Jay, said, “Yeah, Bobbie gets off at nine. She works Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.”
“What’s Bobbie’s last name?”
“Cole. What’d she do?”
“Nothing,” Virgil said. “Where can I find her?”
“She’s standing behind the counter, wearing a red sweater.”
—
Virgil introduced himself to Bobbie Cole, a short, stocky woman with chromed hair who was rearranging the candy stacks in front of her cash register. A half-eaten PayDay bar sat on the counter. She said, “Didn’t take long to find me. How’d you do that?”
Virgil ignored the question and asked, “How sure are you that you saw a GetOut! truck outside Gina Hemming’s house? After nine o’clock?”
“Positive.” She crossed her arms defensively. “I get off here exactly at nine on Thursdays. I drive past her house every night after I get off. I saw the truck.”
“There was for sure a GetOut! truck there earlier...”
“But I wasn’t,” she said.
