Bad blood

6

The Floods were unusual, Virgil thought, as he drove away. Reticent. The daughters looked morose, as might be expected, but had never mentioned their father. Neither had Alma Flood or Emmett Einstadt, except in direct discussion. There was no hand-wringing or remembrance or tears: they spoke of him almost as though he were a distant acquaintance.

Einstadt looked like an Old Testament image of Abraham, as he was about to stick the knife in Isaac's neck. And the way they dressed, all brown, black, and blue-he didn't know if this was a religious thing, similar to the plain dress of the Amish, or personal preference.

Back at Homestead, Virgil took the exit, looked at his watch: coming up on seven o'clock, not enough time to eat before he had to be at the Tripps'. He stopped at a convenience store, got a bottle of orange juice, a pack of pink Hostess Sno Balls, and a couple of hunting magazines to take back to the motel.

One of the problems with working in a small town was that whenever you went somewhere, you were already there-it was only six or eight or ten minutes from one end to the other, so if you were running early, you stayed early, and if you were running late, there was no way to make it up by speeding or taking shortcuts.

He stopped a block from the Tripps', parked, ate the Sno Balls and drank the juice, and watched a man walking along the dark street with two Labrador retrievers. The dogs were looking for a comfortable snowbank in which to take a dump; the product of their efforts would sink into the snow, and freeze, and in March, when the snow went away, there it'd be. Sometimes, if your yard was on a popular corner, whole piles of newly thawed dog poop ushered in the spring.

Virgil thought about the unfairness of it, and checked his watch. Still early, but not too; he stuffed the juice bottle and Sno Ball packaging in a trash bag hung from the back of the passenger seat, and went on down the block. THE TRIPPS HAD GOTTEN dressed up for their visit to the funeral home. George Tripp was wearing a church suit, black wool with a white shirt and black-and-blue tie, and Irma was wearing a black dress with black boots with low heels. They looked simply, ineffably, sad.

George Tripp was standing in front of the picture window again, waiting for him, and opened the door when he came up the walk. "Come in, please," he said.

Irma Tripp came into the living room, carrying a long coat. She said, "We haven't gone into his room except once, to make his bed. It's just… too much."

"Did you figure anything out?" George Tripp asked.

"We did learn one thing-your son did know Kelly Baker," Virgil said. "We know that for sure. They hung around together the summer before last, but probably stopped seeing each other when the summer ended. We don't think they were intimate, but, of course, we really don't know, one way or the other."

"Crocker killed them both," George Tripp said. "Or Flood killed the Baker girl, maybe with Crocker. Is that what you think?"

"It's a possibility," Virgil said. "But I just talked to Flood's wife, and they turn it around from that-they think your son killed Baker, and Flood found out something, so Bobby killed him." They both objected, and Virgil held up his hands: "I'm just sayin'. I will tell you that I'm not buying any theories, yet. But we know that we have at least one killer running around loose, and that's the thread we've got to pull on."

"You don't have any idea who he is?" Irma Tripp asked.

"Well, we're pretty sure it's not a he. We think it's a woman," Virgil said. "Somebody who was intimate with Deputy Crocker. We're pushing that aspect of it."

"If you look hard enough, you'll find out that Bobby comes out okay," George Tripp said.

"That's why I want to look at his room," Virgil said. "Maybe there's something. Maybe he left a letter or a note or something that would explain this to us."

Bob Tripp's bedroom was at the far end of the house, in the front corner. The bed was neatly made-Irma went in and made it after he was killed, as though it were a final favor-but the rest of the room was about as messy as any teenage boy's might be. Books and papers were scattered over a desk, where a MacBook sat in front of an old-fashioned wooden office chair. A backpack lay at the foot of the bed, and a sports trophy, with a tennis player on top, stood on a chest of drawers. There were none of the expected jocko pennants on the wall, but there were posters for the Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans Saints, a couple of dozen postcards, mostly of nude women, stuck on the wall with pushpins. The place smelled faintly of sweat socks and male deodorant.

Irma said, "Those postcards aren't anything-those dumb boys would find them and mail them to their friends with, you know, messages, on the back. Trying to embarrass each other. They were all doing it."

"We'll just leave you," George Tripp said. "We don't want to see any of this, to be honest. And we have our appointment, you know, we have to pick out…" He trailed off, and Virgil mentally filled it in: a coffin.

"Take off," Virgil said. "I'll wait until you get back."

They left him, but then Virgil stepped into the hallway and asked, "Did he have a cell phone?"

"Yes, it's on his desk."

"Okay. You don't know if he had a password on his computer, do you?"

Irma smiled for the first time, an almost shy smile, and she said, "Yes, he did, and he wouldn't tell us what it was. He said it was his private business. You know, I think with what boys look at on the Internet… We have wireless."

"Okay. I may want to take the computer with me," Virgil said. "We have some people in St. Paul who can work around the password."

George Tripp said, "I don't know how valuable it might be…"

"I'll get it back to you," Virgil said. "I'll give you a receipt. You go on-we'll work it out later." HE WENT to the computer first, and the first thing it did was ask for a password. He tried "Tripp" and "BJ" and "Bobby" and "RJ," "Irma," and "George," and, from a school poster taped to the wall, "Cardinals" and "Vikings," "wide receiver" and "receiver." Nothing worked.

He checked the phone and came up with a list of names and phone numbers. He recognized "Sullivan," the reporter, but the rest meant nothing to him. No Baker, Flood, or Crocker.

The phone would have to be run. He set it aside and turned to the room, starting with the chest of drawers. He pulled each drawer three-quarters of the way out, felt through the underwear and summer clothing, then pulled each drawer completely free to look under it.

Under the bottom drawer he found a plastic baggie containing a couple of joints and a package of rolling papers. He thought about it for a moment, then put the dope and the papers in his pocket.

Going to the closet, he shook down all the clothing, looking for paper, found a few gasoline receipts. Nothing in the shoes.

On impulse, he went back to the computer and typed in "gay" and "homosexual" and "homo" and the computer shook him off. He lifted the mattress off the box springs, found nothing. He went through the desk drawer, found it stuffed with receipts, ticket stubs, photographs. Nothing that set off a buzz.

He started sifting through papers and books, looking for anything that might be personal. Not much-no notes from anyone, just old schoolwork. The backpack contained workout clothes and two twenty-pound weights, probably to work his quads, and a printed-out calendar with a workout schedule on it, over the background image of a running horse, its tail flaring out behind it.

And a much-folded piece of copy paper, with a line drawing of the Statue of Liberty on it. No words, just the drawing. There was a long oval drawn from the base of the statue right up to its face, which might have been the number "eight" but, if so, heavily distorted, with the upper loop nearly round, the lower loop a very long oval. The distortion seemed to mean something, Virgil thought, but he couldn't think what-but it looked as though the paper had been something that Tripp had looked at over and over, and carried with him on his daily workouts.

Virgil looked at the statue drawing, then the calendar with the horse, went back to the computer, typed "Mustangs"-the Southwest Minnesota State Mustangs, where Tripp would have gone to college-and the computer bit: he was in.

"Excellent," he said to himself, as the Mac started to load.

He found 776 incoming e-mail messages and 538 outgoing. He clicked on the "From" queue to alphabetize the incoming messages, and found twenty-two from KBaker.

Nothing from a Crocker or a Flood.

With the sense that he was on to something, he began paging through the KBaker mail, noting the dates. The e-mail began in June of the summer before last, and rather than ending at the end of the summer, continued through the autumn, with the final KBaker note coming two days before Baker was killed.

As he went through the mail, his sense of anticipation dwindled: the exchanges were letters between teenagers, about when Baker would be in town, about who was dating whom, about summer jobs, about football. Baker was apparently religious: she mentioned a couple of times that she couldn't come to town because she had to go to church that night: the nights included Tuesday and Friday.

Three interesting notes from Baker.

The first: "Definite stud muffin."

The second: "I wish I could go with you. If I was in high school, it'd almost be like I was normal. You're about the only outside person that I know, who knows how lonely this can be."

The third: "Can't: Got Liberty."

The third note was the last e-mail from Baker, the one just before she was killed. He looked for antecedents to the two notes, either from Baker or Tripp, and found nothing. They were like remnants of oral conversations.

The e-mail, as a whole, had a curious flatness to it: no flirtation, nothing in the least controversial. Something, he thought, was missing-and he suspected that Tripp had cleaned it up. The "definite stud muffin" message struck Virgil as a reply to something-and possibly a hint that Baker knew that Tripp was gay, and was commenting on some previous e-mail about somebody Tripp was attracted to.

"Can't: Got Liberty." There was that paper in the backpack with the Statue of Liberty drawing on it. A connection? But to what? Or who? Was the capitalized word "Liberty" a proper noun, a specific person or place?

Could the computer guys recover the deleted mail? Have to try.

He looked through all the rest of the mail, scanning quickly, and most of it was the same as the mail to and from Kelly: meet me there, let's do this or that, going up to the MOA with my folks. MOA was Mall of America, in the Twin Cities.

Huh.

He went to Safari, the browser, and clicked on "History," and came up empty-not a single entry. He checked the settings and found that Tripp had set the browser to erase his website visits on a daily basis.

He went to the "Security" icon, clicked on it, and found that the computer was set to accept cookies from the sites Tripp visited. He clicked on "Show Cookies" and came up with a list that ran into the hundreds of items. Scanning down the list, he found a lot of what appeared to be sports sites and, from the names, what appeared to be gay porno sites.

All right, he knew that.

A thought popped into his head. What if Flood had somehow discovered that Tripp was gay, had ridiculed him, or challenged him-or even solicited him-and Tripp had lashed out purely in anger, with no other connection to anything?

No: Tripp had taken the T-ball bat from home. He'd gone to work prepared to kill Flood.

Besides, there were too many dead people for something that simple.

And where in the hell did a woman fit in, a killer?

Virgil continued working the room, no longer expecting to find much: Tripp had been covering himself.

The Tripps were back in a little under an hour, and Virgil was done with the room, sitting on the bed, looking around, wondering what he'd missed. He heard them come in, sighed, stood up, picked up the cell phone and the computer, and walked down the hall to meet them.

"Find anything?" George Tripp asked.

"I don't know-I will have to take the computer. Your son was e-mailing back and forth with Kelly Baker, right up until the time she was killed. They were pretty friendly…"

"You figured out the password?"

"Mustangs," Virgil said, and George Tripp showed the tiniest of smiles.

"How friendly were they?" Irma asked. She asked in a way, Virgil thought, that solicited a response that Bobby Tripp and Kelly Baker were in bed together. Because, Virgil realized, Irma knew or suspected that her son was gay.

"Friendly. I can't say more than that, but there's no feel of… violence in it," Virgil said. "Of potential violence. At this point, I really don't believe your son was involved in hurting her."

"Of course he wasn't," George Tripp said. "It was that goddamn Flood, or Crocker, or both of them."

"I'm going to look into that," Virgil said.

He asked them to go through the contact list on Tripp's phone; standing together, they did that, and identified each of the people on the list, including Sullivan, who, they said, had interviewed their son a half-dozen times.

"Everybody knew Bobby was going to be a college star. He could've gone to the Gophers, but they wanted to make a corner-back out of him and he didn't want that," George said. Wistful, now, with a glint of tears in his eyes: "He was going to be something."

On his way to the motel, Virgil threw the joints out the window-they were biodegradable-and crumbled the Ziploc bag into the trash. No need for Tripp's parents to know about that.

He called Coakley from the motel, told her about the search, about the relationship with Baker, and about the "Liberty" note.

"Good: sounds like you're getting somewhere," she said. "I set up meetings with both of the female deputies for tomorrow morning. You're not invited. I've been thinking about them since I left the office, and I already know they're not involved. I'll push them anyway, which means my popularity is going to take a hit, but I'll do it."

"You've got four years-I think pushing them now will be pretty small potatoes when you break these murders," Virgil said.

"When I get done, to show that I trust them, I'm sending all of them out to the countryside around Battenberg, to talk to folks," Coakley said. "The community out there is so sparse that somebody must know who Crocker was sleeping with-people know each other's cars, and even if it was just seeing a car parked in his driveway, somebody knows."

"Okay. I want to talk to Kelly Baker's parents. There's something going on there."

"See you tomorrow," she said. HE MADE a late check with Bea Sawyer: "We got the pants," she said. "We can see a snag and what could be blood, and from what you said, I believe it is. So does Don. There's enough blood for a DNA check, so we'll be able to nail that down for you."

"Excellent. When will you be done?" Virgil asked.

"We've already shipped the body up to Ike in Mankato," Sawyer said. "We're going through the house now, but we're about to quit. We'll be back tomorrow."

"You at the Holiday?"

"Nah, we're staying at a little ma-and-pa place in Battenberg. Pretty handy," she said.

"All right. I'll see you out there tomorrow. Try not to destroy any evidence."

He called Coakley back: "Got a piece of information for you: the crime-scene guys have a pair of uniform pants at Crocker's, with a snag and a smear of blood. Probably Tripp's, I expect."

"Good. That really does take my other people out of it," she said.

"Pretty much," Virgil agreed.

Two inches of snow fell overnight, kicked out of an Alberta Clipper that swung down through the state and just as quickly departed. Virgil could hear the winds coming up as he went to bed, and then the muffling effect of the snow.

He thought about God for a while, and the early and traumatic end of expectations: Bobby Tripp "would have been something," his father said, and those expectations were now gone and might never have existed.

And he thought about the commonality of comfort, stretching back over the centuries and millennia, a guy lying alone in a warm space, listening to a clipper just outside the cave, igloo, hut, teepee, motel, whatever, a long thread reaching all the way back to the apes.

Then he went to sleep.

In the morning, he'd just gotten out of the shower when his cell phone rang, and Coakley said, "Why don't we hook up at the Yellow Dog? Get some pancakes."

"Half an hour," Virgil said.

He got dressed, checked e-mail, packed up his computer, and put on his parka. The clipper had slipped away, and the day would be sunny but cold: he brushed the light, fluffy snow off the truck and, by the time he was done, could feel the sharp near-zero temps on his cheekbones.

He pulled into the cafe just as Coakley did, and she asked, as she got out of her truck, "Any more ideas?"

"I think you had the best one-go out to Battenberg and stir around, see what happens."

They went inside, got a booth, peeled off their parkas. Coakley was wearing a plaid wool shirt over a black turtleneck, with just a hint of lipstick. They discovered a common interest in blueberry pancakes and link sausages, and after they ordered, she said, "Kelly Baker-it has to be local. I mean, local-local. Here, not Estherville, not Iowa."

"Close to here," Virgil agreed. "The killers weren't travelers."

The pancakes arrived with the cafe owner, who introduced himself as Bill Jacoby, and asked if there was anything new in the case. "Maybe," Virgil said. "We think whoever killed Deputy Crocker was a woman, and we're looking around for whoever may have had an ongoing sexual relationship with him."

"He was killed by somebody he was sleeping with?"

"We think so," Virgil said. There were a couple of dozen people in the cafe, and the nearby tables had gone quiet. "We're kind of looking around for someone who knows who that might be."

"Well, I don't," Jacoby said. "Be an interesting thing to know, though."

"And something else," Virgil said. "You know that Kelly Baker girl who was killed down by Estherville a year ago? We think that murder is tied into the new ones."

"Really," Jacoby said. "Man, that's freaky. That's a lot of dead people."

"Sure is. We're looking for all the connections we can find," Virgil said.

A grizzled, rancher-looking guy in the booth behind Coakley said, "You know, you should talk to Son Wood. He used to hang around with Crocker, some, and they go back a ways. He might know who Crocker was going with."

Virgil leaned sideways so he could see the guy past Coakley: "Son Wood. S-O-N? Where's he at?"

"He's got Son Wood's Surface Sealers out on 15 South," the rancher-guy said.

Coakley said, with a little razor in her voice, "Virgil, eat your pancakes. They're getting cold."

Virgil said, "Hey. I'm just trying to be a friendly guy."

"Come in anytime for a cup of coffee," Jacoby said. "We don't have doughnuts, but we got twelve kinds of pie."

"I'll do that," Virgil said.

When Jacoby had gone, Coakley leaned into the table and said, "What? You're a talk-show host?"

He said, "What good does it do to keep the information private? The killers know everything we do. Why shouldn't the taxpayers know it?"

She said, "Well." Thought about it, then said, "It doesn't seem law enforcement-like."

"That's a problem for law enforcement," Virgil said. "You can get a lot more done if you ask around, and spread the joy."

"I'm still a little annoyed," she said. "Sitting here in a cafe, blabbing to every Tom, Dick, and Harry."

"Your eyes sparkle when you're annoyed," he said, giving her his second-best cowboy grin. His first-best grin was so powerful that he reserved it for places where the woman had her back against something, for support; like a mattress.

"For God's sakes, Virgil, try to keep your mind on what you're doing…"

"Slender, yet firm body," Virgil said, wiggling his eyebrows at her.

She showed some teeth. "I'm gonna stick this pancake up your nose, in about one minute."

"All right. All right," he said, holding up his hands, palms out. "I'll suppress my feelings, if you say so. You're the sheriff."

"I'm going to talk to the girls, then send them out to Battenberg. I'll go with them. I've got John Kraus talking to that list of kids on Bobby's phone. What are you doing?"

"Well, I developed one solid lead since last night," Virgil said.

"Really?" Her eyebrows popped up.

"Yes. There's a guy named Son Wood on Highway 15 South who hung out with Crocker, and who might know what women he was hanging with. I'm gonna talk to him."

"Virgil…"

"Then, I'm going to go talk to Kelly Baker's parents."

"Good. That's a plan. Maybe I'll meet you there-I've never talked to them, myself."

They finished their pancakes under the eyes of the cafe patrons, Virgil telling her about the strangeness of the Floods, and about this and that. Coakley looked at her watch and took a last hit of her coffee and said, "Call me."

She left, and Virgil watched her go. Slender, yet firm body. And she gave him a hard time, but she sort of liked it. It was, Virgil thought, drifting toward the philosophical, a truism that no woman was really upset when somebody suggested she was attractive.

Jacoby came over with a carafe: "More coffee?"

"Thanks, Bill-maybe a half cup."

"Anything more that Lee didn't want us to know?" Jacoby asked as he poured.

"Well, not really, not much that wasn't in the paper this morning. We know the Tripp boy killed Flood, and now we know that Deputy Crocker killed Tripp. We've got that nailed down with DNA, and I expect we'll get some DNA off Crocker's body, from the woman, so if we can find her, we'll nail that down, too."

"DNA from the woman-what, like a hair? Blood?"

"Saliva traces," Virgil said.

Jacoby leaned forward and dropped his voice. "Saliva? How'd you know where to look?"

"Crocker was… his dick was sticking out," Virgil said, pitching his voice down below Jacoby's.

"You mean…?"

"I do."

"Oh, jeez. Maybe I ought to try to find her before you do," Jacoby said.

"Think about it, Bill. What happened to Crocker."

Jacoby scratched once, in the general area of his groin, and muttered, "Might be worth it. I'm so goddamn horny the crack of dawn ain't safe."