“Had she graduated, or was she working?” Virgil asked.
Laurie said, “I don’t know, really. . . .”
A man two booths down from them cleared his throat and said, “She was homeschooled. She had a summer job here in Homestead, at the Dairy Queen. My daughter knew her.”
“You know how old she was?” Virgil asked, turning in the booth.
“About the same as my daughter—my daughter was a junior when the girl was killed, so, sixteen, seventeen.”
Virgil said, “Huh. Another mystery. I wonder if I could clear it all out, with another order of home fries?”
“You’d clear something out, but I don’t think it’d be the murder case,” the man in the booth said.
A waitress said, “Hey. No pie for you, Earl.”
4
Virgil left the café pleased with himself. He’d learned something, and it had made the case more intricate and therefore more interesting, and also more breakable. The more ways in, the better. He drove over to the sheriff’s office and found John Kraus, a tall, portly bald man who wore the department uniform, and looked like a cook, or a potential department-store Santa.
“Got your files right down the hall,” Kraus said. “We got them either on computer, or on paper, but I got you the paper ones. Easier to shuffle things around.”
“That’s terrific. Just the way I like it,” Virgil said.
Kraus said, “I’ll leave you to it. We got some coffee going down the hall, to the right. Can’s around the corner.”
Virgil started by calling Bell Wood, an agent with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. “Tell him his personal hero is calling from Minnesota,” Virgil told the woman who answered the phone.
Wood came up: “That fuckin’ Flowers. Everything was going so well, too. Just a minute ago, I told Janice, everything’s going too well—something’s wrong.”
“I heard the fools who run the National Guard made you into a major,” Virgil said.
“That is indeed the case. People now call me Major Wood.”
“That wouldn’t be any women you know,” Virgil said, “or have known, or will ever know.”
“Au contraire, my ignorant Minnewegan friend. My standing is well known in the female community. So, is this a social call?”
“Nope. Something’s wrong,” Virgil said.
“Ah, crap,” Wood said. Wood was the number two guy in the major crimes section. “Let’s hear it.”
“You know the murder of a young Minnesota girl named Kelly Baker?” Virgil asked. “Down by Estherville, a year or so ago?”
“That would be ‘up by Estherville,’ if you were correctly oriented. Yeah, I do know about it. Ugly. Ugly case, Virgil. October eleventh. Fourteen months ago. Our sex kitten. We got nothing.”
“You got sex kitten,” Virgil said.
“We do. Are you at your office? I’ll send you the file.”
“Actually, I’m in Homestead. . . .” He filled in Wood on the three murders, beginning with Flood. Wood listened, then said, “I heard about the jail hanging, but I didn’t know it was murder.”
“Just found it out today,” Virgil said. “This morning. Listen, that file on Baker, shoot it down to me. Up to me.”
“Sure. You want e-mail?”
“I don’t know if they’re running wireless,” Virgil said. “Hang on, let me walk down the hall and find my guy.”
Kraus said they did not have a wireless hookup. He got on the line with Wood, agreed that they could take and print a color PDF document, gave Wood the address, and handed the phone back to Virgil.
“It’s on the way,” Wood said. “It’s big, three hundred pages, in color. Let me look at this, for a minute, I’m looking at the computer. You probably want to read the whole thing, to see who we interviewed, and what they said, but right off, go to page thirty-four. That’s the beginning of the autopsy report.”
“That’s a big deal?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah. That’s the big deal, so far,” Wood said. “Virgil, if you can nail the guys who did this, man, I’ll get you tracks in the Iowa Guard. That’s the same as a Minnesota general.”
“I’ve had tracks,” Virgil said; he’d gotten out of the army as a captain. “When you say ‘guys,’ plural . . .”
“Read the report,” Wood said.
“You got DNA on these guys?”
“Read the report. And listen, keep me informed.”
VIRGIL DECIDED that he wanted to read about the murders in the order that they happened, and so went down and got a cup of coffee, then waited, watching, as the file came out of Kraus’s laser printer.
The autopsy report, including findings and conclusions, was fifteen pages long. When the last of it came out, Virgil said to Kraus, “Holler when it’s done. I’m going to start with this.”
The first few pages of the report laid out the reasons for Iowa DCI involvement: the department was asked in by Emmet County authorities after Baker’s body was found in the Lutheran cemetery north of Estherville. The body was nude, and half-hidden behind a tombstone in an older section of the cemetery, where it was found by chance by an elderly woman who’d come out to put the year’s last blooming wildflowers on her husband’s grave.
The Emmet County sheriff’s office had put out inquiries, and had been informed by the Warren County sheriff’s office that Leonard Baker, of Blakely, Minnesota, had reported that his daughter had not come home the night before, after an afternoon’s visit with an aunt, uncle, and cousins on a farm near Estherville.
The description fit, and the parents had later identified the body as Kelly Baker, seventeen. Her mother’s car, a 2004 Toyota Corolla, was found in downtown Estherville. Witnesses said it had been there overnight, and after nailing down the times, by interviewing owners of local businesses, and Baker’s uncle, DCI investigators determined that Baker must have left it there shortly after leaving her aunt and uncle’s farm.
That made it an Iowa murder, and explained why Virgil hadn’t heard more about it.
As Wood had suggested, the autopsy made interesting reading. The autopsy had been done in Des Moines, and the pathologist reported that Baker had died from strangulation, her windpipe crimped by some kind of collar with a sharp edge, either metal or stiff leather. The collar had been pulled straight back, as if it had been attached to a rope or chain, like a heavy leather collar on a pit bull.
Exact time of death was uncertain, because nighttime temperatures had gone down into the upper twenties, and the body had been heavily cooled. The contents of her stomach had been fully digested, and her uncle said the last thing she’d eaten was an ice cream sundae at about two o’clock in the afternoon. She’d left shortly before supper.
Baker’s buttocks and breasts were lightly striped, as though she’d been beaten with a narrow leather or flexible wood whip, or switch. There were indentations on her wrists, consistent with metal handcuffs. She had been sexually used, according to the pathologist, orally, vaginally, and anally, almost certainly by more than one man, and perhaps as many as four or five, judging from bruising around her anus and vagina. There was evidence that she had been simultaneously entered anally and vaginally.
There were faint marks, not quite scars, on her buttocks and breasts, indicating that she had been beaten before, with a whip similar to the one that had marked her this time.
There was no indication of resistance, which, along with the earlier whip marks, suggested that her involvement may have been voluntary. Virgil didn’t think the conclusion followed from the evidence: she could have also been too afraid to resist, although the earlier whip marks were hard to explain, unless she’d been thoroughly brainwashed.
There was no DNA evidence. Lubricants were found deep in her anus and vagina, of a kind used on a national brand of condoms, suggesting that the men had worn condoms. Whether they had worn them as protection against sexual diseases or pregnancy, or as a way to eliminate the possibility of DNA, was unknown.
If the former
was the case, the pathologist noted, then the death may have been accidental, in the course of extreme sex play; and may have indicated that the perpetrators didn’t know Baker very well—that it may have been prostitution. If the latter, it would suggest that the men involved were protecting themselves against criminal prosecution. If Baker died in the course of criminal activity, the death could be classified as a murder, depending on the exact nature of the criminal activity.
She had abrasions around her mouth, indicating that she had been orally penetrated, but no semen was found in her trachea or stomach. That might have meant that the oral sex had taken place well before her death, and the semen digested; that the man had withdrawn before ejaculation, which seemed unlikely in this kind of abusive sex play; or that he or they had worn condoms.
The latter case would again suggest protection against DNA evidence, which could lead to a finding of murder.
Even more disturbing was the lack of any kind of DNA evidence at all on the body: no sweat, no stains. There was no lubricant on the outer parts of her vagina or anus. She was wearing no deodorant. The pathologist suggested that the body may have been washed after death, and thoroughly. The care with which it had been done suggested cool deliberation, not panic.
Virgil leaned back and closed his eyes. A prostitute? The age was right. Probably half the prostitutes in Minnesota were seventeen or younger. Why was the body left in the cemetery? Was there some effort to do right by her, as ludicrous as the effort seemed? Could it have been done by panicked high school boys? But the level of sexual deviation suggested older men, with longer-standing sexual tastes. Would her parents know the older men? Could it have been teachers, or familial abuse?
The care with which the DNA had been obliterated again suggested older men, and perhaps men experienced in removing DNA. Had they killed before?
HE WAS THINKING about it when Kraus appeared with a thick stack of paper and handed it to him. “That’s it. We have some paper of our own on the case; we did interviews with friends and schoolmates of hers, but most of that’s in the Iowa reports. Ours might have a little more detail, but probably nothing too significant.”
“What I’d really like is a list of names of everybody you interviewed,” Virgil said. “Not what they said, just a list.”
“I could put that together. I’ll do it now,” Kraus said. “You think this is really tied to Flood and Bobby Tripp and Jim?”
“Well, Flood was killed in Battenberg, and came from two miles northwest of there. Crocker lived on a farm a couple miles southeast of Battenberg, and Baker here came from a farm five or six miles south. So you could probably put all their places in a twenty-five- or thirty-square-mile area. How big is the county? Seven hundred square miles? With maybe a murder every decade or so? And you have three killings, in little more than a year, with all the victims from that little square, who knew each other? Or another way—they all lived within a mile or so of Highway 7. . . .”
“I’ll get busy,” Kraus said.
VIRGIL DID a quick scan of the Iowa file, looking for names, especially Bob Tripp’s. It wasn’t there.
Going back through the paper, he found photos of Baker when she was alive, as well as crime-scene shots and several autopsy photos. The autopsy photos didn’t do anything but gross him out, and he put them aside. She had been a reasonably pretty girl, blond, busty. When she’d fully filled out, she would probably have been stocky, with broad shoulders and hips, and overlarge breasts.
In the early flush of womanhood, though, she looked good. Salable, Virgil thought, with a little thrum of guilt. The Iowa investigators had dug hard into the possibility that she’d been involved in prostitution, and had found nothing.
Virgil got back on the phone to Wood. “Solved it yet?” Wood asked.
“About halfway there,” Virgil said. “I’ve been reading the file, and want to know what you thought about the prostitution angle. Your guys asked a lot of questions. . . .”
“Let me run down the hall and grab a guy,” Wood said.
He was back in a minute, and another phone was picked up. Wood said, “I’ve got Mitch Ingle on the phone; he worked that the hardest.”
“I’ve got all the paper here,” Virgil told the Iowans. “What I want is some opinions. Was she hooking?”
Ingle said, “It’s easy to think so, looking at the whole package. But I don’t believe it. In a community that size, the word would get around. You got a school full of horny high school boys in a small community, where everybody knows everything, and we couldn’t turn up a hint of that. What I started to believe was that she may have been picked up by a couple of older guys who were working on turning her out, and killed her before that got done. That would also explain the other prostitution problem—there was no sign that she had any money. And she had no birth control pills, she had no condoms. She had no hooker stuff.”
“Estherville can’t be that big. . . .”
“Checked every apartment and every loose male, anyplace she might have gone for sex. We concluded that she might not have actually . . . performed whatever it was . . . in Estherville. She might have been dumped there from somewhere else.”
“Her car was found there.”
“Yes, but we don’t know that she drove it there. Nobody saw who parked it. It was alongside a convenience store and coin-op laundry, off to the side, people coming and going. Could have been her, but maybe not. The thing is, we’re assuming that she was not kidnapped. She went with these guys, maybe not because she wanted to, but she didn’t fight them. She met them. She left her uncle’s place, and drove somewhere and met them. Judging from those earlier marks on her breasts and legs, she’d met them before.”
“I haven’t been through all the paper, and I’m not sure you put every name in, but do you remember if the names Jacob Flood, Bob Tripp, or Jim Crocker show up anyplace along the way?”
After a moment’s silence, Wood said, “Doesn’t ring a bell with me,” and Ingle said, “Me neither. I can run a search on my computer.”
“If you could,” Virgil said.
He and Ingle exchanged phone numbers, and Ingle said, “Minor Wood has filled me in on your investigation there, and if there’s anything I can do, I’ll come up. If you need help down on the Iowa side . . .”
“Don’t know where it’s going yet,” Virgil said. “But I appreciate it.”
HE WAS BACK in the paper when he heard cowboy boots coming down the hall, and Coakley stuck her head in the door: “You got the file. John said you’re pulling the Kelly Baker case into it.”
“I haven’t found any direct connection, but it’s a pretty interesting coincidence,” Virgil said.
She came in and sat down at the side of the table, leaned toward him, and said, “I got to Baker about halfway back from Crocker’s folks’ house. I would have gotten to it quicker, if I hadn’t been so run over by the murder. The Baker case is no coincidence, Virgil. You remember I told you that Crocker belonged to a private religion? Flood was a member of the same group—and so was Baker.”
“Okay—that’s good,” Virgil said. “What about Tripp? Was his family—”
“No. Lutherans. But still, there has to be a connection.”
“I think you’ve made up the same story I have,” Virgil ventured.
She said, “Crocker and Flood somehow get on to Baker’s availability, maybe because of their church activities. Who knows how? They begin some kind of complicated sexual relationship, probably a four-way, between Crocker, Flood, Baker, and the other woman. Baker’s in on it, voluntarily. Maybe Bobby and Baker have a secret relationship of some kind. She tells him what Flood is doing to her . . . maybe doesn’t tell him about Crocker . . . and he reacts by killing Flood. We bring him in. Crocker realizes that Bobby could spill the beans about their sex ring, and also realizes that Bobby doesn’t know who he is. But he’s a danger, so Crocker sneaks into Bobby’s cell while he’s asleep, and kills him.”
“The other woman?” Virgil asked. br />
“The woman who was doing oral sex on Crocker when she killed him.”
“You think?”
“I think. It’s plausible.” Her mismatched eyes narrowed as she ran through it. “His penis is sticking out of his pants, he’s lying way back on the couch, with his legs spread, one foot on the floor, and he gets shot under the jaw. If it’s murder, and I think it is, that means that he let somebody get close enough to him to put that gun right under his jawline, and doesn’t react. That’s because he’s reacting to something else.”
“Why would she do it?”
“Because she was in on the Baker murder,” Coakley said. “She was in on a statutory rape, which meant that Baker’s death was murder.”
“Like she had some legal knowledge. She knew she’d been contaminated by the death of Baker. And she knew Jimmy and knew how to handle his gun,” Virgil said, with a faint smile.
She leaned back, picking up the implication. “I didn’t do it, you jerk. If I had a choice between giving that moron a blow job and going to the chair, I’d take the chair.”
“We don’t have the death penalty—”
“You get the point,” she said. “Jeez, I’m starting to understand ‘that fuckin’ Flowers’ thing.”
“Don’t get in a huff,” he said. “I was filling out your line of reasoning. And maybe teasing you a little.”
“Fill it some other way,” she said.
“Any other female deputies, or cops, who might have known what Crocker had done? Who he might have confided in?”
“Two, but they didn’t do it. I know them well enough to say that. Though I guess we have to talk to them.”
“You knew Crocker pretty well, too,” Virgil pointed out. “Was he attractive to the other women in the department? Did he hang around with any of them? Where was his social life? In the department, or outside?”