“He says he didn’t witness the actual accident—”
“Lee, I’m telling you. It’s not right. I believe Flood was murdered, with maybe a one percent chance of an accident of some weird kind.”
“All right. I hear you, Ike,” Coakley said. “I’ll get my guys together, we’ll work it over. Damnit, he really is a good kid.”
2
Virgil Flowers was winterizing on his boat: time to get it done, since there was almost a foot of snow in the yard. Despite the cold, he worked with the garage door open, for the light. He added stabilizer to the remaining gas, checked the grease levels in the Bearing Buddys, yanked all three batteries, hauled them into the house, into the mudroom, and stuck them on the auto-conditioners.
He was back in the garage, removing the bow and stern lines—best to buy disposables in the fall, when the sales were on, than in the spring—when a white SUV pulled into the driveway. A tall blond woman got out of the driver’s side; she was thin, with a bony face and nose, and the nose looked like it had been broken sometime in the past. She wore her hair pulled back in a short ponytail, and plain gold-rimmed glasses, a hip-length canvas car coat, black gloves, and cowboy boots that pushed her total height to six feet.
She had a wintry look: a few unhidden strands of gray showed in her hair. Her face was a bit weathered around her pale eyes. She walked up the driveway and took off her gloves and asked, “Are you Virgil Flowers?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She said, “You don’t look much like a law enforcement officer.”
“Just because you’re a cop, doesn’t mean you can’t be good-looking,” Virgil said.
She cracked a thin smile, then stuck out her hand and said, “I’m Lee Coakley, from Warren County.”
“Oh, hey, Sheriff, pleased to meet you,” Virgil said. He wiped his right hand on his pants and shook. “I’ve been meaning to get down there to talk to you, but I’ve been busier’n heck.”
“I’ve come over to ask for your help. Or to find out who I talk to, to get your help,” she said. She had a dry, crisp voice, something you’d expect from a green apple, if green apples could talk.
“I’m the guy you talk to,” Virgil said. “Come on in. I’ll get you a cup of coffee or a Diet Coke. I’m about done here.”
“Pushing the season a little,” Coakley said, looking at the boat.
“I was,” Virgil agreed. “I’d be back out there tomorrow, if it wasn’t fifteen degrees out.”
“Tomorrow’s a workday,” Coakley said.
“Well, except for that,” Virgil said. He thought she might have been joking, but her tone was flat, and he wasn’t sure. “Come on in.”
SHE TOOK COFFEE, and instant microwave was fine, she said, but she could use an extra shot of coffee crystals: “I’m so tired I can’t see straight.”
Virgil got her the coffee and dug a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator. He was a tall man himself, tall enough that he could still look a bit down at her eyes, cowboy boots and all. He had unruly blond hair that hung down over his ears, and was slender enough that, except for her red hair, people might mistake them for brother and sister.
“So what’s up?” he asked.
She’d been sleepily checking out the house—bachelor neat, not fussy, furnished for comfort. She sighed, brushed a vagrant lobe of hair from her eyes, turned back to him and said, “I’ve been in office for less than a month and I have the biggest problem our office has ever run into,” she said. “At least, if Ike Patras is right. Ike’s the one who told me how to get to your house.”
“Ike doesn’t make many mistakes,” Virgil said. He knew Patras well. “You had a kid hang himself in the jail. I heard about that.”
“That’s part of it,” she said. “But there’s more.”
THE TROUBLE STARTED, she said, with an apparent accident at a grain elevator in Battenberg the previous Thursday. A kid named Robert Tripp, called Bob or B.J. by his friends, had phoned 911 to say that a farmer named Flood had apparently fallen on a grate and knocked himself out, and then drowned in the beans that poured on him.
“We shipped the victim’s body up to Ike, and Ike decided it was no accident. He said it was about ninety-nine percent that it was a murder, that Flood was dead before he ever hit the grate. Probably killed by a blow to the head with something like a pipe, or a baseball bat. The Tripp boy already said there’d been no one else there but he and the farmer, so . . .”
“He had to be the one,” Virgil said.
She nodded. “You could think of other scenarios, but it was pretty thin. So Ike called it a murder, and another deputy and I went over to interview the boy. Read him his rights, pushed on him, he started crying. He didn’t actually confess, but it was close. This is a kid I’ve known since he was born. Know his parents. Really nice people, really nice kid,” she said.
“Anyway, he said enough that we thought we had to hold him. Took him down to the jail, processed him in, went back to his house with a search warrant, looked in his room, looked around the house. Out in the garage, among a bunch of really dusty, unused stuff, we found a clean aluminum T-ball bat. Cleaner than it should have been—you could smell the gasoline on it. Looked in the trash, found some paper towels that smelled of gas, had a few hairs on them . . .”
“So you had him,” Virgil said.
“Oh, yeah. He did it. Wouldn’t say why,” Coakley said. “He said he would talk, but only to one guy—a newspaper reporter. A gay newspaper reporter. I’m not sure if the gay part is important, but Bobby was a big jock, got a full ride over at Marshall starting next fall, could have slept with half the girls in town, but you didn’t hear about that. Maybe he was discreet, maybe he was shy.”
“Maybe he was gay.”
“Don’t know,” Coakley said. “But it was an odd request. His father said Bobby didn’t have any particular relationship with the reporter, except that he’d been interviewed for newspaper stories a few times. But he must have had some kind of relationship—Bobby told me, when I talked to him, that the reporter was the only person in town he would trust, outside of his family, and he wouldn’t talk to his folks about it.”
“Odd. Interesting,” Virgil said.
“So, I was going to set it up,” Coakley said. “But early the next morning, I got a call from the jail. He’d hanged himself. He was dead.”
“Nobody checking during the night?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, yeah. The overnight deputy. Jim Crocker. Jimmy Crocker. He said Bobby was fine at five A.M., dead at six o’clock.” She set her coffee cup down and looked away from him. “Just . . . appalling. I couldn’t believe it. But there he was. I went down and looked at him—Crocker didn’t touch him, because it was obvious that he was long dead when Crocker found him.”
“It happens,” Virgil said. He turned the Diet Coke can in his hands, rolling it between them. “I could come up with a bunch of theories about what could have happened, especially if the kid was gay. Gay people can have a pretty hard time when their situation starts becoming undeniable. Especially small-town kids. Especially small-town jocks. Willie Nelson even has a song about it.”
“‘Cowboys Frequently Secretly,’” she said. “I’ve heard it. Makes me laugh.”
“So are you looking for an outside opinion?” Virgil asked.
“No, I’m not. I’m looking for a hard-nosed investigation. See, we sent B.J.’s body up here to Ike and . . .” She stopped talking, looking for the thread of her story, and then said, “First, let me say that Jim Crocker used to be the chief deputy. When Harlan announced he was going to retire, Jim thought he’d automatically get elected to be the new sheriff. Well, he didn’t. I did.”
“You were a town cop in Homestead. . . .”
“Yes. I was the lead investigator for the city. Anyway, I got elected, Crocker didn’t. He said some things both before and after the election that made it impossible to keep him on as chief deputy. It wasn’t legal to fire him, and he’d always been a bureaucrat,
more than a street cop or an investigator, so I moved him into a staff job. Anyway, he was working the overnight.
“We sent Bobby’s body up here for the autopsy, and that goddamn Patras—excuse my French—that goddamn Patras called me back and said it all looked like a suicide.”
She paused, and Virgil said, “Except . . .”
“Except for two things. Maybe three.” She scratched her eyebrow. “First: there was a bruise in the middle of Bobby’s back. A round bruise, almost like he’d been hit by a baseball. Maybe a little bigger than that. A softball. Hadn’t had time to develop much before the blood stopped, but it was there. Almost had to be incurred while he was in the cell. We took him in at four o’clock in the afternoon. Ike says if the impact that caused the bruise had happened before that, it would have been much more developed. The thing is, we couldn’t find anything in the cell that would make a bruise like that. You could almost say it looked like he had a knee in his back.”
“Okay. That’s one thing,” Virgil said.
“Two. He hanged himself with a strip of cloth he’d ripped off the end of a blanket. An acrylon blanket. Looped it around his neck.”
“His penis out of his pants?”
“No. Wasn’t sexual. Anyway, it looked all the world like he’d hanged himself, and Ike agrees. But Bobby had a broken fingernail, like he’d clawed at the cloth.”
“Changed his mind,” Virgil said. She shook her head, and he added, “Except . . .”
“Except that when they looked at the fibers under his nails, they were wool. Not acrylon. In fact, they were green wool. Our uniform pants are green wool. Ike says Bobby was scratching at green wool. And he says the way the blood from his nails mixed with the wool, there’s no doubt. He was alive when he was scratching at it.”
“What’s the third thing?”
“It’s not evidence, but . . . Bobby’s parents say he’d never commit suicide. Never would. They’re so sure, I give it some weight,” she said.
They sat at the table, looking at each other for a moment, and then Virgil said, “Crocker.”
“But why?” she asked. “When we brought them in, they acted like they didn’t even know each other. I mean, Crocker lives all the way out in the west end of the county. He’s closer to Jackson than he is to Homestead, so maybe they didn’t know each other.”
“So there’s no motive, that you know of.”
“Maybe a thin one. I’ve heard, but I don’t know, that Crocker and Jacob Flood, the man Tripp killed, were childhood friends. But I know Crocker, and that seems so unlikely—for one thing, he’s way too much of a chicken to do that.”
“Did they have any contact when Crocker processed him in? I mean, if they did the body cavity search . . . Tripp might have thrashed around some.”
“No. He was handcuffed during the search, and Ike says his nail was broken at the time of death. He’s sure about that.”
“Huh.”
“You see my problem?” Coakley asked. “The guy who ran against me, who I demoted, I’m now going to investigate for murder, in what everybody, including most of the people in the department, think was a suicide,” she said.
“I do see your problem,” Virgil said. “Let me make a phone call.”
SHE MADE HERSELF another cup of coffee, and Virgil got on the phone to his boss, Lucas Davenport. He outlined the situation, and Davenport said, “Go on down there. We bail her out of this, we’ll own her.”
“Not only that, but we’ll solve a vicious crime,” Virgil said.
“That, too. I mean, we can’t lose, huh? I’ll clear you out up here,” Davenport said.
VIRGIL PUT the phone down. “We’re good to go. If you want to head out, I’ll be a half hour or so behind.”
“Why do they call you ‘that fuckin’ Flowers’?” she asked, leaning back against his kitchen counter and crossing her ankles. He noticed her cowboy boots had handsome turquoise details of the type called pigeon guts. “You seem reasonably straightforward to me.”
“Cop alliteration, mostly,” Virgil said. “I didn’t mind at first. Then it started to piss me off. Now I’ve given up, and don’t mind again.”
She cocked her head. “So it didn’t have anything to do with romantic activity . . . on your part.”
“Good God no,” Virgil said. He gave her his third-best innocent-cowboy grin. “I’m a lonesome guy. I don’t understand it, but . . .”
He noticed then that her pale eyes weren’t the same color: one was blue, and one was green. She closed the green one, squinting at him. “I’m a trained investigator. I sense a certain level of bullshit here.”
“Hey . . .” Virgil said. And, serious again, “If Crocker killed the kid, it’s possible he doesn’t know about the pants. That the pants might have the kid’s blood on them. If they’re wool, he’d probably dry-clean them, so maybe we could still get them—but we gotta move fast. When you get down there, could you pull me a search warrant? I’ll pick it up coming through town. Maybe send a couple of deputies along with me? You personally ought to stay clear.”
“I will,” she said. She turned to rinse her cup at the kitchen sink. “I’ve got a judge who can keep his mouth shut, too.”
Virgil said, “That’s always an asset.” He watched as she fumbled the cup, and said, “If you’re seriously sleepy, I mean, the roads aren’t that good. If you want to bag out on my couch for an hour or two, you’re welcome to it.”
She stretched and yawned and said, “Thanks, but I’ve got to keep going. I’ll see you in Homestead. Quick as you can make it.”
3
Deep snow, with barely a nose stuck into December.
Sometimes it happened that way, and then Minnesotans would be running around warning each other that they were about to get payback for all those warm winters. Exactly what warm winters weren’t specified, but it was that one back a couple of years ago when there was a forty-degree reading in January. Or maybe that was five years ago, and actually, they’d been freezing their asses off ever since.
In any case, it was cold, with snow.
VIRGIL BELIEVED THAT he might be in Homestead for a while, so he packed up his winter travel kit, which he kept in a plastic bin, and put it in the back of the truck, along with a duffel bag of winter clothes. The National Weather Service said it wasn’t going to get any warmer, which usually meant it was going to get colder.
He wore a fleece pullover and jeans, with Thinsulate-lined hiking boots, and threw a parka and downhill-ski gloves on the passenger seat. A shotgun and a box of four-ought shells went in the back, and a 9mm Glock, with two extra magazines, in the center console. Only two extra, because he figured if he needed more than forty-two shots, he’d be better off running away.
He turned the house heat down to 64 and hooked up his new answering gadget. When you called, and pressed “9,” the machine would answer and tell you the inside temperature. That way, if the furnace went out while you were gone, you had a chance to catch it before the pipes froze, burst, and flooded the place.
He went next door and told Mrs. Wilson that he’d be out of town for a few days. “See anybody in my house, go ahead and shoot ’em.”
“I’ll do that,” she said. She was about a hundred years old, but reliable. “You take care, Virgil. And don’t go fuckin’ around with them country women.”
HE ROLLED OUT of the driveway at noon, got Outlaw Country on the satellite radio—the Del McCoury Band with “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”—and was on his way, down Highway 60 to Highway 15, and down 15 to I-90 to Fairmont, and west from there to Homestead. Eighty-plus-plus miles, snowplow banks on both sides of the highways, but bare concrete under the wheels.
The countryside was nothing but farms: corn and beans and corn and beans and corn and beans, and over there some wild man had apparently planted wheat or oats, judging from the stubble; the countryside all black trees and brush and white snow and houses and red barns, with a little tan where the wind had scoured the snow down, squared off acreag
es rolling away to the horizon, with lines of smoke climbing out of chimneys into the sky.
And over there, a yellow house, like a finger in the eye.
He didn’t worry much about the fact that his target was a cop. Virgil wasn’t a brother-cop believer; he was not disposed to either like or dislike other cops before he met them, because he’d known too many of them. To Virgil, cops were just people, and people with more than their fair share of stress and temptation. Most resisted the temptations. Some didn’t. Fact of life.
He did wind up liking most of them, though, simply because of shared backgrounds, and the fact that Virgil was a social guy. So social, he’d been married three times over a short space of years, until he finally gave it up. He didn’t plan to resume until he’d grown old enough to distinguish love from infatuation. He felt he was making progress, but he’d thought that the other three times, too.
He considered Lee Coakley, and thought, Huh. She had a glint in her eye, and he knew for a fact that she was recently divorced. And she carried a gun. He liked that in a woman, because it sometimes meant that he didn’t have to.
HE CUT I-90 at Fairmont, stopped to stretch and get a Diet Coke, and headed west. The sun was already low and deep into the southwest, and the sky was going gray.
Homestead was an old country town of fourteen thousand people or so, the Warren County seat, founded in the 1850s on rolling land along a chain of lakes. Warren was in the first tier of counties north of the Iowa line, west of Martin County, east of Jackson. Most of the downtown buildings, and many of the homes, were put up in the first half of the twentieth century. Interstate 90 passed just to the north of town, and Virgil stopped as he went by and reserved a room at the Holiday Inn. That done, he drove on into town, to the sheriff’s office. Her office was in an eighties-era yellow brick building built behind an older, mid-century courthouse. The office included working space for the worn deputies, a comm center, and a jail.