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 café 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 café 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 café, 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 café, 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 café 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.”
7
Virgil hadn’t known exactly what a surface sealer did, but when he found the small dealership and showroom, he discovered that Son Wood used a variety of paintlike substances to seal concrete or wood floors from whatever might get poured on them—like cow or pig urine, gasoline or oil, or grease.
An auburn-haired woman was sitting behind the reception counter, typing into a computer screen and, when Virgil walked in, took off her reading glasses and asked, “Are you Harvey?”
“Nope. I’m Virgil. Flowers. I’m an agent for the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, looking into your murders. Is Mr. Wood around?”
“Well, yes, he’s in the back, talking to Roger. Can I tell him what it’s about? Specifically?”
“He was a friend of Jim Crocker’s, and we’re talking to all of Crocker’s friends.”
“That was just terrible,” she said. “Let me get him.”
WOOD CAME OUT a moment later, followed by the woman. He was a tall man, thin, weathered, with flinty blue eyes an
d a three-day beard. He was wearing a red flannel shirt and pipe-stem jeans, and cowboy boots. He and Virgil shook hands and Virgil said, “We’ve been interviewing people around town, and a couple have mentioned that you knew Deputy Crocker. We know that he’d been intimate with a woman shortly before he died, and we’d really like to talk to her. Do you have any ideas?”
“Well, you know, I don’t,” Wood said. “As a matter of fact, I can tell you right out front that I’m surprised there was a woman with him, because he never seemed that much interested.”
“In women?”
“Well, not so much women . . . as any particular woman.” Wood scratched his head, just above his left ear, and said, “I don’t know how to put it. He was interested in women, okay? He was married for a while, but I never knew him to date. You see what I’m saying? He didn’t seem interested in particular women. He didn’t go out with anyone.”
“Would there have been any takers?” Virgil asked. “If he started looking?”
“Oh, yeah. There’s not a big surplus of women around here, but he had a good job. You know how it is.”
Virgil nodded. “So you guys hung out, had a few beers . . .”
“That was pretty much it. We’d go fishing a couple times a year,” Wood said. “We weren’t all that close. I’m married and he’s single . . . but, yeah, we go back a way.”
“Can you think of anything . . . ?”
“Well, you know he was tight with Jake Flood. They knew each other since they were kids. There must be something in there . . . something in that whole mess. Jake getting killed, then Jim.”
Virgil said, “That’s what we think, too. We’re looking for the connection.”
“Maybe you ought to talk to his ex-wife,” Wood suggested. “She’s over in Jackson, her name’s Kathleen Spooner. Kate. Changed her name back to her maiden name after they broke up.”
“Bitter breakup?”
“Well—no. He told me he didn’t know what the hell happened. He came home one day, and she said she was moving on, that she’d filed for divorce that day at the courthouse, and did he want pork chops for dinner, or meat loaf?”
The woman chipped in: “I talked to her for a minute, downtown, and she said she just got tired of his act. She said she didn’t much want to marry him in the first place, and she’d been right.”
“So she just went on down the road,” Wood said.
“You know if he went for the meat loaf?” Virgil asked.
“More of a pork chop man,” Wood said.
They talked for a few more minutes, but nothing else came up—Wood didn’t know Kelly Baker or any of her family. “I know where they’re at, but they ran a pretty small grain operation, and that doesn’t need my product so much.”
“Do you know anything about the religion he belonged to?” Virgil asked.
“Just that it was a little unusual,” Wood said. “He didn’t talk about it that much, and he didn’t go to services much. But some.”
“I thought they stayed pretty much to themselves.”
“Some of them do, some of them don’t so much,” Wood said. “I never exactly figured them out, because, to tell the truth, I wasn’t much interested. But they’re not like the Amish. I’ve been in some of their houses, and they have TVs and stereos and computers and so on. They’re not so much for fancy cars—Fords and Chevys, mostly. But they do buy the Star Wars farm equipment. They got money.”
VIRGIL GAVE HIM a card, and walked out to the truck. He’d just gotten in and started it when Wood came out of the front of the showroom, jogging toward the truck, his shoulders up against the cold. He pointed at the passenger seat, and Virgil popped the door and Wood climbed in.
“I didn’t want to say a couple things in front of Delores, because she’s a good bookkeeper, but the woman does tend to run her mouth. This all might be nothing, and I don’t want to get good people in trouble, because of a bunch of rumors.”
“They won’t be in trouble, if they didn’t do anything,” Virgil said.
Wood shook his head and said, “Okay: Every few years I’m out at the Flood place. They run a hundred head of Charolais up there, grass-fed stuff for the specialty stores, and they’ve got some winter feeding platforms that I coat. . . . Anyway, I was up there a couple of years ago, and I made some comment to Jim about how religious the Floods were. He was a little loaded and he said, “Yeah, really religious, but that don’t keep them from fuckin’ like a bunch of goats.”
Wood paused, put his hands over the warm air registers on the dashboard, then said, “The thing is, he said it in a way like there was something weird about it. Then he shut up. When I asked him about it the next time I saw him, he said he couldn’t remember saying anything like that, but I could see he did. Like he was keeping a secret. He really seemed to want to walk away from what he said.”
“So what was weird?”
“Just his . . . voice. And then his attitude. Not scared, exactly, but like there was some dark secret. About the religion, I think. So—for what it’s worth.”
“But you really don’t know about the religion.”
“No, I don’t. There are a lot of little different ones scattered around here, mostly, you know, Bible-thumpers of one sort or another. There’s quite a few Muslims around now, immigrants, and there’s even a rabbi or two over at the slaughterhouse—that’s what I understand, anyway.” He shook his head again, and added, “Anyway, I thought I should mention it, because it seems odd, and because both Jim and Jake Flood have been murdered.”
“Glad you did. If anything else pops into your head, give me a ring. Whoever did all this is dangerous, and we need to get him off the road.”
Wood nodded and said, “The other thing that I didn’t want Delores to hear, is that Jim was seeing his ex every once in a while. He didn’t even want me to know that, I think, but it came out a couple times. They weren’t talking about getting back together, but they were . . . you know, whatever the kids call it: hooking up.”
Virgil said, “Thanks for that, too. Stay in touch.”
“I’ll do that,” Wood said, and he popped the door and ran back through the cold to his shop.
VIRGIL MADE a note to talk to Crocker’s ex-wife as soon as he could, and eased out onto the highway. As soon as he got going, he called Coakley; she had finished talking to the women, was sending them out to Battenberg to knock on doors.
“I’m going out to the Bakers’ place. You want to go out in your truck, or you want to ride along with me?” he asked.
“Huh. Why don’t I meet you there? I might need my truck later on.”
“Tell me how to get there. . . .”
She gave him some simple directions, said, “That’s not the shortest way, but it’s the easiest, you won’t get lost—and it’ll let me catch up to you.”
“See you there. Before you come out, run Jacob Flood through the NCIC, see if you get a hit.”
“Already did that—no hits.”
“See you at Bakers’.”
The trip out took half an hour, the countryside not quite flat, but rather a series of broken planes, now a frozen wash of gentle blues and grays with the new snow. Virgil had read once that Grandma Moses was a primitive painter because she thought snow was white. The writer said if you really looked at it, snow was hardly ever white. It mostly was a gentler version of the color of the sky—blue, gray, orange in the evenings and mornings, often with purple shadows. When he looked, sure enough, the guy was right, and Grandma Moses had her head up her ass.
On the way over, he called a researcher named Sandy at the BCA and asked her to find Kathleen Spooner, called Kate, formerly called Kathleen Crocker.
“If she’s still in Minnesota, I’ll get it in a minute or two,” she said.
“Text it to me so I’ll have a record.”
LIKE MOST of the farmhouses around, the Baker place sat facing a county highway, a hundred yards back, perched on a rise with a windbreak of box elders and cottonwoods to the north
west. Virgil slowed to check the name on the mailbox and saw Coakley’s truck coming up from behind. He waited on the side of the road, and she slowed, and pointed, and he followed her up the freshly plowed driveway to the house. On the way up the drive, his cell phone burped: a text message. He looked at the screen and found an address and a phone number for Kathleen Spooner.
Out of the truck, Coakley said, “I called ahead. They’re both here, and waiting. They’ve got a boy, he’s off studying wind power at Minnesota West in Canby.”
“Would he be Bobby Tripp’s age?”
Her eyes narrowed: “I think . . . he might be three or four years older. We can ask.”
They were walking up to the side door of the farmhouse, and Virgil filled her in on the conversation with Son Wood, and added, “I’ll try to find Crocker’s ex-wife this afternoon.”
“Worth a try,” she said. “She’s been gone for a while, though. Five or six years, I guess.”
“But Wood thinks they may have been back sleeping together,” Virgil said. “That’s interesting. A familiar female.”
“We could use some DNA. . . .”
THE BAKERS WERE as different as grapes and gravel; Leonard Baker had yellowish-red hair that flopped over one side of his head, so that if it had been black, it would have looked like Hitler’s haircut. He had a pointed chin and a pointed nose, and freckles all over his face and hands.
When he nodded and smiled at them, a formal smile, as they followed him through the door, Virgil saw that he was missing one of his upper eyeteeth; and a moment later, picked up a periodic whistle that came through the empty space when Leonard said a word that began with a “W.”
Louise Baker was raven-haired and black-eyed; not pretty, but noticeable. She wore a formless dress, with a tiny red-dotted floral design, that fell to her ankles, and she was not, Virgil thought, wearing anything beneath it. Like, nothing—but what was under there was definitely of an interesting quality.