Bad Blood

10
Virgil called Coakley, who suggested that they meet at the Holiday Inn restaurant, away from the office and “not at the café, where half the town is, waiting for you to show up.”
“Works for me,” Virgil said. “I’ll see you in twenty.”


MOST SHERIFFS in Minnesota wore uniforms; a few didn’t. Virgil hadn’t seen Coakley in a uniform until she showed up at the Holiday Inn. When she took her parka off, she was wearing a star and had a pistol on her hip.
Virgil had gotten to the restaurant a couple of minutes earlier, and already had a booth. When she came up, he said, “You look like a cop.”
“Feels weird, wearing a uniform,” she said. “I wore one for five years before I became an investigator, and never did like it. But since I was working with the girls today . . .”
“Show some solidarity,” Virgil said. “They come up with anything?”
“Nothing that we didn’t know. Crocker and Jacob Flood were close. They all belong to a fundamentalist church that goes back to the Old Country, meaning Germany. They homeschool their kids, church services move around from one home to another.”
“Services are held in barns,” Virgil said.
“Nobody seems to know much about the religion, except that it’s conservative,” Coakley said. “They’re all farmers, or come from farm families. Some people say they’re standoffish, but other people say they know members of the church who work in town and are like anyone else. Which sounds like Crocker.”
A waiter came up, and they ordered hamburgers and fries, and Coakley got coffee and Virgil got a Diet Coke, and when the waiter went away, Coakley asked, “Did Spooner have anything to contribute?”
“Not much,” Virgil said. “She kept trying to get around the questions. But I expect she’s the one who killed Crocker.”
Coakley’s eyebrows went up. “What?”
“She let me sit on her couch, and using a special BCA investigatory technique, I got some of her hair,” he said. “I need to get it up to our lab. Then I’m going to use unfair tactics to get the lab to do some rush processing on it, so we ought to know for sure by day after tomorrow.”
“Virgil, how . . . ?”
Virgil told her about it: about the gun in Spooner’s pocket, about the lipstick, how nobody knew of anyone Crocker was seeing. “On that basis alone—somebody familiar enough with him to get involved with oral sex—she’d be a suspect. The gun thing is big. She’s a member of the church, born to it. I’ve got a feeling that the church could be involved here. Or maybe there’s just something going on with this tight little knot of people, coming down through the generations. Most of them are related to each other, if I understood Spooner right. Lot of intermarriage.”
“If she’s the one, that’d be a pretty amazing clearance,” Coakley said. “It’s like you plucked her out of the air.”
“Nah. All you do is, you look around,” Virgil said. “Everybody says Crocker didn’t have much to do with women, and the woman we know that he had something to do with, happens to carry a gun in her pocket. So she knows how to use one, and is maybe prepared to do it. Plus, she wears lipstick, which most women out here don’t, except on special occasions. It’s just . . . obvious.”
“What if she killed him for some personal reason that has nothing to do with Flood or Tripp?” Coakley asked.
Virgil was already shaking his head. “Too big a coincidence. I’ll tell you something else. I led Spooner on a bit . . .”
“How unlike you . . .” But she said it with a smile.
“. . . and she told me that Einstadt gave a nice talk at Kelly Baker’s funeral. Einstadt and the Floods and the Bakers know each other very well, and they’re lying about it. Why would they do that?”
“They . . .”
“They’re covering something up. Maybe Kelly Baker’s death,” Virgil said.
She looked at him for a long time, then said, “Maybe. But it’s a jump.”


THE FOOD CAME, and Virgil asked if she could send one of her deputies up to the BCA, in St. Paul, with Spooner’s hair samples. She nodded. “Most of them would be happy for the chance, on the county’s dime. Do some shopping.”
“I’ll give you the sample when we leave,” he said.


SHE WAS PICKING at her food without much interest, and then she said, “I was talking to a friend up at the BCA. She said you’ve been married so often that the judge gives you a discount.”
Virgil nearly spat out his hamburger. “What? Who told you that?”
“A friend. She’s anonymous,” Coakley said. “She said she thought you’ve been married and divorced four times.”
“That’s slander; I’d arrest her if I knew who it was,” Virgil said.
“So how many times, then?”
“Three,” Virgil admitted. “But it’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“Tell me the truth,” Coakley said. “How bad did it hurt? When you got divorced?”
“It hurt,” Virgil said. “I’m human.”
“But she said all of this, all three marriages and divorces, were like in five years. And you have another girlfriend about every fifteen minutes. And that you’ve supposedly slept with witnesses. I don’t know. I was kind of shocked.”
“Hey . . .”
“Because when I got divorced, I mean, I was lying there for months, at night, trying to figure out what went wrong—and whose fault it was. I still do it,” she said. “You know. I could no more have gotten married again in six months . . . I was still a basket case in six months.”
“Well, I didn’t have so much of that,” Virgil said. “It was pretty clear, pretty quick, that me and my wives weren’t going to make it. One of them, it was about a week and a half, you know, that we had the talk.”
“That’s absurd,” Coakley said.
“Yeah,” Virgil said. “I know. I did like the first one. But she had lots of plans. I didn’t have much input into them, and I wasn’t doing what she planned. Then, one day, I just wasn’t in the plans anymore. She’d decided to outsource her expectations.”
“How about sex. Did she outsource the sex?”
“Not that I know of—that wasn’t the problem,” Virgil said. “The problem was more . . . business-related. She’d decided I couldn’t really be monetized.”
“Hmph,” Coakley said.
“That was a denigrating hmph.”
“Well. Might as well get it out there,” she said. She glanced around the room. “The thing is, when Larry stopped having sex with me, I thought maybe he was . . . just losing interest in sex. I’d never gotten that much out of it. I’m not especially orgasmic, and so, I just let it go. But then, he dumps me off, for this other . . . person . . . with big . . . and I start to wonder, maybe I’m just a complete screwup as a woman.”
Virgil held up his hands, didn’t want to hear it. “Whoa, whoa, this is a lot of information—”
She said, “Shut up, Virgil—I’m talking. Anyway, I’m wondering, am I a complete screwup? The major relationship in my life is a disaster—”
“Hey, you’ve got three kids,” Virgil said. “Is that a disaster?”
“Shut up. Anyway, I know I’m not all that attractive—”
“You’re very attractive,” Virgil said. “Jesus, Lee, get your head out of your ass.”
“Well, see, nobody ever told me that—and you might be lying,” she said. “I suspect somebody who got married and divorced three times in five years probably lies a lot.”
“Well . . .”
“So, you can see where this is going,” she said.
“I can?”
“Of course you can. I’m the sheriff of Warren County. There are twenty-two thousand people here, and all twenty-two thousand know who I am. I can’t go flitting around, finding out about myself. If I pick out a man, that’s pretty much it. But how can I pick out a man if maybe I’m a total screwup as a woman? I mean, maybe I should be gay. I kind of dress like a guy.”
“Do you feel gay?”
“No, I don’t. What I feel like, Virgil, is a little experimentation, something quick and shallow, somebody with experience,” she said. “I can’t experiment with the locals, without a lot of talk. So I need to pick somebody out and get the job done.”
She peered at him with the blue eye and the green eye, waiting, and Virgil said, finally, “Well, you’ve got my attention.”
011
WHEN VIRGIL LEFT the Holiday Inn, he drove over to the café, thinking about Coakley on the way—the proposition seemed pretty bald—parked, went inside, and ordered a piece of cherry pie and a Diet Coke. Jacoby, the owner, sidled over with the pie and asked, “Hey, Virg. Any more news?”
The close-by people stopped eating, and one man who’d been at the end of the bar picked up his coffee and moved to a closer stool.
Virgil asked, “Have you ever heard of a man, or a place, called Liberty? Some man around here, or some place around here?”
“Liberty?” Jacoby moved his lips as though he were sampling the word. Then, “No, I never did. Is it important?”
“Could help us out with the Kelly Baker murder,” Virgil said.
“There’s a ‘New Liberty,’ but it’s way down in Iowa, way down past Cedar Rapids,” said a guy in the booth behind Virgil. “That wouldn’t be it.”
“I got a feeling it’s something around here,” Virgil said. “And maybe a person. Huh. I guess I’ll just have to keep asking around.”
“Well, if we hear anything, we’ll let you know,” Jacoby said. He watched as Virgil took a bite of the pie. “How is it?”
“I’ve had worse,” Virgil said.
“He just can’t remember when,” said the guy on the stool.


HAVING DONE his data dump at the café, Virgil was headed out to his truck, followed by one of the customers, a thin man with thin hair, wearing a sheepskin-lined jean jacket and leather gloves: a cowboy-looking guy, except for his big round plastic-rimmed glasses, and not ungrizzled.
He said, “Uh, Virgil. I need to chat for a minute. About the Tripp boy.”
“Sure,” Virgil said. “Back in the café, here, somewhere? Or we could take a ride in my truck.”
“Not here. How about the truck?”
The man’s name was Dick Street, he said, and he had a farm out toward Battenberg, though he lived in Homestead. “I use the elevator at Battenberg, and met the Tripp kid. You know he was a football player?”
“Yeah. Hurt himself this year, was going out to Marshall next year,” Virgil said, as he backed out of the parking place and started around the block.
“Yup. Anyway, I mentioned to my daughter that he seemed to be a pretty nice kid. Hard worker, good-looking. She was the same grade as him. She said, ‘Yes, but I think he’s gay.’”
“Your daughter said that?”
“Yeah. I almost fell off my chair,” Street said. “I said, ‘Why do you think that?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know, I just think so.’ Turns out, some of her girlfriends thought the same thing, that he might be a homosexual.”
“Did everybody think that? His schoolmates?” Virgil asked.
“I don’t know. But it wasn’t exactly nobody. Some people suspected. So anyway, if he was a homosexual, I guess that’s neither here nor there, when it comes to killing somebody. But. This sort of came to be a hot topic around the dinner table, because my daughter also thought that he might’ve been . . . doing something . . . with somebody.”
“Does she have any idea who?” Virgil asked.
“I was gonna say, you oughta talk to her,” Street said. “She works at the Christmas Barn. Anyway, I can tell you that a lot of the farmers around here don’t care too much for homosexuals. I was thinking, maybe Flood found out and said something, like he was going to tell everybody. And Bob Tripp hit him to stop that from happening. I mean, if he’s gay, maybe he’d lose his football scholarship or something?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Virgil said, though he had.
“Or, maybe he had something going with Jake Flood, and it was like a lovers’ thing.”
“Jake Flood was married,” Virgil said.
“Yeah. But just between you, me, and the fence post, there was something not quite right about him,” Street said. “He had a strange way of looking at people. There was a sex thing in it. You know how some guys will look a woman up and down, seeing what she got? You got the feeling that Jake did that with everybody. Men, women. Whatever. Well, not dogs or anything. Maybe a heifer, if it was a good-looking one.” He shot a quick glance at Virgil, and hastily added, “That was a joke, Virgil.”
“I’m laughing myself sick, inside,” Virgil said, but he said it with a grin. “Back to Jake Flood . . .”
“He was a weird one. I would not have wanted one of my daughters to be around him,” Street said. “I just wonder if that weirdness might have set something off with Bobby?”
“Huh. Something to think about.” They were almost back at the café. “I’ll stop and talk to your daughter. What’s her name?”
“Maicy. She’ll talk to you. She’s a talkative girl.”
They turned the corner and Street said, “You can let me out by that Tundra up there, the gray one. Don’t tell anybody what I said about this—the fact is, we don’t know if Bobby was a homosexual, and it’s not right to bad-mouth the dead. But since more people were getting killed, I thought I should mention this.”
“Glad you did, Dick. Thank you.”
“The Christmas Barn is four blocks straight ahead, on your right. They also sell some of the best saltwater taffy on the face of the earth.”
“Okay. How do you like that Tundra?”
“It’s all right. It’s my first Jap truck,” Street said. “They had a recall for the floor mats, and then for the gas pedal, but I haven’t had any trouble. Probably go back to Chevy, though. I don’t know why I ever jumped the fence. You have any trouble with your 4Runner?”
“Not yet,” Virgil said. “I asked you about the Tundra because the 4Runner is based on it. . . .”
They chatted about trucks for a few minutes, especially the tow package, then Street looked at his watch and said, “Got to get back. See you at the café, maybe.”
“Thanks again,” Virgil said, and he rolled on down the avenue.


MAICY WAS a talkative girl: “A lot of us thought Bobby might be a little, you know, gay. We’d be sitting around talking, and he wouldn’t be checking you out,” she said. “He’d be checking out the guys. Not real obviously, he wasn’t drooling over them or anything, but you could kind of feel it.”
Virgil: “You don’t know if he was actually actively involved with somebody?”
“I don’t know, but I could tell you who might. He had a friend named Jay Wenner. Jay’s kind of a geek—totally straight, though. He’s up at the university in Minneapolis, at the Institute of Technology. You should call him.”
“I’ll do that,” Virgil said.
He called the BCA researcher, Sandy, from the car, and asked her to find Wenner’s phone number. She said, “Hold on.” A minute later, she was back with a cell phone number.
“How do you do that?” Virgil asked.
“It’s technical,” she said. “You’d have to take a couple of years of computer science to understand the explanation.”
“So you look it up on a computer,” Virgil said.
“Virgil . . . Yes. That’s what I do. I look it up on a computer. Any fool could do it.”
And she was gone. Sandy had been prickly for a while, but Virgil thought she might be mellowing out. Then again, maybe not.


VIRGIL CAUGHT Wenner between classes, identified himself, and Wenner asked, “How do I know you’re not spoofing me?”
“I don’t know what that means,” Virgil said. “I’m a cop.”
“How’d you get this phone number?” Wenner asked. “It’s unlisted.”
“A BCA researcher looked it up on a computer,” Virgil said.
“You have to excuse me, but that doesn’t sound likely,” Wenner said.
Virgil said, “Look. I’m sitting here in my truck in Homestead, and I could go over to your parents’ house, and show them my ID, and have them call you. Or, you could call the BCA and ask for the duty officer, and get my phone number. But, one way or the other, I need to talk to you.”
“Huh. You make the offer, you’re probably okay. I’ve been reading about Bobby on the net. I’m like totally freaked. So: what do you want to know?”
“Do you think Bobby was gay?” Virgil asked.
A moment of silence, then, “Who are you going to tell about this?”
“Nobody who doesn’t need to know,” Virgil said. “The question is, did some kind of homosexual involvement lead to his murder? Or his murder of Jacob Flood?”
“Huh. I couldn’t tell you about that. But he was gay,” Wenner said. “Only a couple of us knew. He’d had some contact with . . . somebody. I don’t know who that was.”
“You mean sexual contact? We haven’t heard that, though we know he was talking to a gay man in a more . . . what would you call it? More of a mentoring thing.”
“Pat Sullivan. Not him, I think there was somebody else,” Wenner said. “Do you know about that Kelly Baker girl, who got killed a year or so ago?”
“Yes, and we know that she and Bobby had some kind of relationship.”
“They did. I think she might have known somebody else who was gay, and put Bob in touch.”
“Was Baker a hooker?” Virgil asked.
“Interesting question,” Wenner said. “I have no idea. I only saw her a few times, and she looked like a regular girl except . . . she looked kind of beat up, too. You know?”
“Not exactly,” Virgil said.
“Well, sometimes you see girls who look like they’ve been around a little too much,” Wenner said. “They start to look tired when they’re still young. She looked like that.”
“Good description . . . I know what you mean. Did her relationship with Bobby extend to sex?”
“No—but they talked about sex all the time,” Wenner said. “Bob once told me that she told him about doing some really freaky things, but he thought maybe she was lying, because he couldn’t believe she’d do that stuff. But then, a friend of ours from Northwest said the Iowa cops came around and were asking about whether she might have been a prostitute. Or something like that—that was the idea.”
“But she didn’t go to Northwest.”
“No, but she knew kids who did. So they were checking out the guys.”
Wenner didn’t have much more—said he’d be back to Homestead for the funeral, that he’d be a pallbearer. “I knew that guy since first grade. I didn’t care if he was gay, he was a good guy.”
“You didn’t see the violence in him?”
“I didn’t, except on the football field,” Wenner said. “The Flood thing is hard to believe. Maybe he was framed, or something. You think?”
“Not really,” Virgil said. “It’s pretty clear he killed Flood. Listen, if you think of anything else, call me. You can get me through the BCA, or I may see you at the funeral.”
“One more thing,” Wenner said. “Pat Sullivan and Bob were talking quite a bit, and we were all talking at the Dairy Queen a few times, and Kelly was there. If Sullivan ever saw who Kelly was hanging with, another guy . . . that might be the one. If she was really involved in some heavy sex things, maybe she gathered up gay guys to be her friends. You know, people she could trust.”
“Good thought, Jay. Thank you.”


HE CALLED Pat Sullivan. He was told the reporter was in Mankato for a regional flood-preparation meeting and wouldn’t be back until late.


VIRGIL MET Coakley back at her office, where she’d been talking with a couple of deputies. She looked up when he stuck his head in, and she said, “You got something.”
“Maybe. I need all that paper from Iowa, again, and a place to read it.”
She looked at him for a long moment, considering him, and not in a collegial way, Virgil thought, and then she nodded.
And Virgil thought: If what Wenner said was true, and Baker had set Tripp up with a homosexual contact, then there was at least one person out there who might know as much as Baker did—and exactly what kind of activities Baker had been into. But tracking that person down would be a problem, especially if he had to do it without broadcasting the fact that Tripp had been gay.
He would do that—broadcast, sit in the café and tell the patrons about it—if it became necessary, but he hoped it wouldn’t.
Coakley got him the Iowa paper, a spot in an interview room, and a Diet Coke, and he started wading through the paper again, looking for anything that might pinpoint a possible lover.
Two hours: he found nothing.


COAKLEY WAS STARING at a computer, and he asked, “Are you online?”
“Yes. What’s up?” she asked.
“Could we go out to Google Earth and spot the Baker place?” Virgil asked.
“We can.” She hit a few keys, enlarged the screen a couple of times, found the house, lost it, found it again, and enlarged to the maximum. “What do you need?”
“I want to know who lives in the houses closest to them.” Virgil got her to change the scale up and down, to get a map of a couple dozen farmhouses within a couple miles of the Baker place. “Print that,” he said. And, “I wonder who runs the rural route out there?”
“We can find that out,” Coakley said, looking at her watch. “Should still be some carriers around.”
She got on the phone, called the post office, talked to somebody, hung up, and said, “Clare Kreuger’s your girl. She’s not there at the moment, but she’s due back in anytime.”
“Good—now, where’s the post office?”
“Are you going back out there? To the Bakers’?” Coakley asked.
“Yeah. Gonna whisper in the ears of the neighbors . . . after I talk to Clare.”


KREUGER WAS SKEPTICAL: “What you’re saying is, you want to turn their friends against them.”
“No, no. I don’t want friends. I want people who already don’t like them,” Virgil said.
“That just seems rotten,” the carrier said. She was a dusty-looking woman, who looked like she’d spent too much time in the wind. She wore a nylon parka, nylon wind pants, and galoshes. They were standing at the post office loading dock, where Clare had parked.
“It is a little rotten,” Virgil said. “But we have four dead people, and a killer still on the loose. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.”
Kreuger said, “Neither would I. But you got me. Too many dead people. I know there’s bad blood between the Bakers and Brian Craig, because of a drainage problem off the Bakers’ land that they’ve never been able to work out. There’s another guy, Peter Van Mann, and I don’t think they get along, either. I don’t know what the problem is, something about a dog. That’s before my time on the route. Let’s go inside, and I’ll spot them on the map. . . .”
012
THE SUN WAS SLIDING hard to the southwest when Virgil pulled into the Craig place. Craig, said his wife, was out in the barn trying to fix the front frame of a hay wagon, which had bent while they were pulling in the last cut of hay in late summer. They had lived with it then, but once winter shut down the field work, it was time to do repairs.
Virgil found Craig struggling to get the left side of the frame up on a jack, under a couple of work lights. He saw Virgil come through the door, stopped struggling, and asked, “Who are you?”
“A cop. State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to you for a bit.”
“About what?”
“About Kelly Baker, and the Bakers in general,” Virgil said.
“I don’t know much about Kelly. . . .”
His wife pushed through the door behind them. She’d pulled on a letter jacket and run over to listen in.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” Virgil said. “We’ve got a hell of a problem here and . . .” He hesitated, then asked, “What’s the deal with your frame?”
“I cut out the bent part, and when I jack up one side, there’s enough torque to twist the frame when I’m jacking up the other.”
“Let me give you a hand with that.”
Craig didn’t say no, and they spent five minutes getting both sides of the front frame up on jacks and lined up to each other. Craig fit a piece of steel across the gap and clamped it in place, put on welding glasses, and said, “Don’t look at the spot.” He made a number of quick welds to hold it square, and the barn was suffused with the odor of burning iron. When it cooled, he used a spare piece of L-bar to check the squareness, and took the clamps off.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You want to come in for coffee?” his wife asked. “It’s pretty cold out here.”
Virgil shrugged, and Craig said, “Might as well. I can do the final weld anytime, now.”
They sat at the kitchen table, and Virgil said, “I understand that you and the Bakers haven’t always gotten along. One thing cops do is, we talk to people who don’t like other people, because they’re usually less reluctant to talk. It sounds mean, but that’s the way it is.”
“Does sound mean,” Craig’s wife said, and Virgil said, “You didn’t mention your first name.”
“Judy,” she said.
“It is mean,” Virgil said. “But we’re talking some nasty murders here. I’ve spoken to the Bakers, and what they tell me isn’t as consistent with the evidence as it should be.”
“For example?” Craig asked.
“For example, Jacob Flood and members of the Flood family say they don’t know the Bakers that well, and the Bakers agree with that, but we’ve talked to other people who have suggested that they’re actually quite close. And that they’re all involved in a fundamentalist religion that’s really pretty tight.”
Craig and his wife glanced at each other, and then Judy Craig asked, “What do you know about their so-called religion?”
“Nothing,” Virgil said. “It seems to be pretty private, but you do see some of that around.”
Brian Craig leaned forward and tapped his finger on the table. “Our kids both go to public schools, and I’ll tell you what: I do not encourage them to hang around with anybody from this church. I just don’t want those people around them.”
“Tell me why you feel like that,” Virgil said. “I’m not talking about formal testimony, here. Nobody’s going to write anything down. Anything helps . . .”
The couple glanced at each other again, and then Judy Craig said, “You see people every day out here, and even if you don’t talk much, you know them. Know when they have babies, for example, and about how old their kids are. Even when they don’t go to school. You know what I mean?”
“Sure. I’m a small-town kid,” Virgil said.
“Okay. If you keep track of what’s happening around the countryside, it doesn’t take too many years to realize that all the people from this church are intermarrying with each other, and some of them, the girls especially, at a pretty early age. And to some pretty odd guys. You see a lot of eighteen-year-olds getting married to guys who are thirty or forty, and you wonder, how’d they get to know each other that well? When they are that young? Then Kelly gets murdered, and the Iowa police came around and asked if we knew who she dated, and we said, ‘No,’ because we didn’t. We had no idea she was dating anybody. But every once in a while, you’d see her riding around with some older guy, somebody old enough to be her father, somebody who’s already married. All members of the religion.”
“Do you think, uh, these young girls are being abused?” Virgil asked.
“Haven’t ever seen any proof—but I wouldn’t want my kids around them,” Brian Craig said, unknowingly echoing the verdict of the man who’d known that Bobby Tripp was gay.
“They meet on Sunday? I understand they meet in people’s barns and so on.”
“Yes. Not everybody’s barns, just a few of them. The Floods, the Bochers, the Steinfelds. The biggest barns, all sealed up, with some heat. They meet Wednesday nights, too. Sundays in the mornings, Wednesdays after dark. Sometimes they’ve got something going on Fridays.”
They talked about that for a while, and then Virgil moved on to the Tripp angle: “Had you ever seen Kelly Baker around with a boy who you thought might be gay?”
Craig frowned. “Don’t have many gays out here.”
“There must be some,” Virgil said. “There usually are.”
“I just wouldn’t know that,” Craig said.
“Do you know Peter Van Mann?”
“Sure, we know Pete,” Craig said. “He’s not gay. What’d he do?”
“I was told he’s another guy who might not care for the Bakers.”
“That’s true,” Judy Craig said. “He once had a German shepherd who bit Louise Baker pretty bad. He paid for the doctor and everything, but then the Bakers sued him for pain and suffering, and they won. He had to sell off some land to pay up.”
“She wasn’t disfigured or anything, was she? I didn’t notice anything,” Virgil said.
“No, not much of that. I think it was just pain and suffering,” Craig said. “They saw their chance, and they took it.”
Craig, on his way back to the barn, walked Virgil to his truck and said, “If you really need to find out what’s going on in that church, it’s gonna be tough. I don’t know anybody around here who really walked away from it. It’s all the same families, and they stick to it.”


VIRGIL WENT DOWN the road to the Van Mann place, and saw a lonely figure walking up a snow-packed drive, followed by a black Labrador retriever. Virgil turned in, and he and the man got to the farmyard at the same time. Virgil hopped out of his truck, introduced himself, and Van Mann said, “Come on in. Come on, Jack.”
They settled at the kitchen table, with Jack lying by Virgil’s feet, where he could smell Virgil’s pants.
Peter Van Mann was a widower farmer, a tall, thin bald man with gold-rimmed glasses and a way of looking at Virgil from the corner of his green eyes. From their chairs, they could look out through a bay window, at a tree with a tire swing. His kids had all gone out to California, Van Mann said, one after another, looking for jobs in computers. “They won’t be coming back, except to sell off the property when I croak,” he said.
“Gets dark here in the winter,” Virgil said.
“And quiet and cold,” Van Mann said. “I think it was the quiet that pushed them out. I’ve always liked it, the quiet and cold both.”
His wife, he said, had died of cancer, which he suspected was brought on by farm chemicals used when she was a girl, after World War II. “I can remember when the mosquito sprayers used to come, and blast everything with DDT. We’d walk around in a cloud of it, sometimes. Now I think we’re paying for it.”
He didn’t have much to say about the Bakers, except that their lawsuit against him had been a fraud. “The thing is, there’s a lot of asparagus that grows in the ditches, and Louise Baker was out cutting a mess of it. Old Pat, that was my dog back then, went after her. I don’t know why, he’d never bit anybody before. I suspect she threw a rock at him or hit him with a stick or something, though she says he just came at her. Anyway, she got bit, no doubt about that. Mabel Gentry, she was the rural route carrier out here then—this was years ago, maybe twenty years now, all the kids were still here—carried her down to her house, and then her old man took her to the doc. I paid for that, a couple hundred bucks, she had stitches and pills and so on. Then they sued. This was back when farming times was pretty bad. When they won, I had to sell forty acres to pay them off. Land prices was nowhere at the time. That same land is worth five or six times as much now. Pains me every time I see somebody on it.”
“So why was it a fraud?”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly, but you know what I mean,” Van Mann said. “Things happen when you’re farming. She was bit, and it hurt, but it was nothing anybody else would have thought was serious. No farmers, anyway. And sure as hell not fifty thousand dollars’ worth.”
“No insurance?”
“Let it slip—the liability. Like I said, things were really tough back then,” Van Mann said. “This was back before gasohol.”
They talked about bad times for a couple of minutes, and Van Mann said that he didn’t know much about the church, but that his father had said that it was “bad business” and wouldn’t talk about it. “They keep to themselves, and always have. They’re very tight. Don’t socialize with their neighbors, don’t get involved in politics, never run for anything.”
“Is there a sex thing going on in the church?”
Van Mann leaned back and crossed his legs, a defensive move, but then said, “The thought has occurred to me. But I don’t have any direct information.”
“You ever know anybody to take off? Leave the church?”
Van Mann’s eyes narrowed as he thought about it, and he said, “There was some talk about a woman who ran away to somewhere. Her name was Birdy, that’s what I remember about it. Must have been ten or twelve years ago. Birdy Olms. I can’t remember what the situation was, or even how I know about it, but it seems to me that she was going to a doc, and left the office, and when her husband came to pick her up, she was gone. They went looking for her, and it turns out she’d gotten on a bus and that was it.”
“Never came back?”
“Not that I know of. She was an outsider. From up north, somewhere. I don’t know where Roland Olms picked her up. “
“Birdy Olms.”
“Yup.”
Virgil asked the gay question, and Van Mann shook his head. “The thing about those people is that they’re standoffish. If Kelly Baker knew a gay boy, he was probably a member of the church. Or maybe a relative.”
“She worked at a Dairy Queen in the summer.”
“Yeah, you see some of them working around,” Van Mann said. “I think maybe the Bakers needed the money. For somebody who’s been doing it as long as he has, Baker is one horseshit farmer.”


BY THE TIME Virgil left Van Mann’s place, it was dark. He tried calling the newspaper again, and was told that Sullivan had already filed his copy from Mankato, and might be heading north to the Cities to spend the night.
He called Coakley as he turned onto I-90 and said, “Holiday Inn, twenty minutes?”
“The restaurant. See you there.”
He thought about that as he drove into the gathering darkness: they could have met at the restaurant, or they could have met in his room. He’d known and carefully observed a reasonably large number of women in his life, and the choice of the restaurant was significant, he thought, and in a good way.


COAKLEY WAS BACK in civilian clothes, tan canvas jeans, a black blouse and deep green sweater, and her cowboy boots. Virgil had found a booth well away from the three that were already occupied, and she slid in across from him and said, “I can’t do it.”
“Really.”
She leaned toward him and said, “I want to, but I just can’t jump into bed with somebody, cold. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon.”
“So have I,” Virgil said.
“And what do you think?”
Virgil leaned back and closed his eyes and said, “You know what? It’s been a while since I’ve been in bed with a woman, and I miss it. I’m just . . . needy enough . . . that I would have gone for it, and tried to patch the holes later. You are a seriously attractive woman. But this is better. We need to talk a lot more. Then jump in bed.”
“Deal,” she said, and she smiled, and the smile lit up the booth—and Virgil’s heart as well. But then, his heart wasn’t all that hard to light up. “God, you made that easy. Is it because you’re generous, or because you’re slick?”
“Hey, I’m from Marshall. There aren’t any slick guys from Marshall.”
“I once knew a slick guy from there,” she said.
“Now you’re lying,” Virgil said. “There are no slick guys from Marshall.”
“No, no, really—his name was Richard Reedy—”
“Richard,” Virgil said, laughing. “I know Richard. He was two years ahead of me. My God, you’re right. He used to wax his hair, so he had this little pointy thing that stuck up from his forehead, like the crest on a cardinal. He used to wear sport coats to school when he didn’t have to.”
“I saw him up in the Cities a couple of years ago,” she said. “He wears these plutonium suits and his hair is still waxed and he’s got one of those little telephone clip things on his ear, like he’s expecting a call from his agent,” she said. “Like his movie is being made.”
They both had a nice laugh, and then Virgil said, “All right. Now. Whoops, here comes a waiter. Shoo him away.”
She did and Virgil went on: “I’m getting more and more of a feeling that there’s something seriously wrong with this church. And that it might involve underage sex on a pretty wide scale. How underage, I don’t know.”
“Farm girls, not all of them, but some of them, can grow up pretty early. Sex is no big mystery if you grow up on a farm with animals,” Coakley said. “And when you’re out in the country, you spend quite a bit of time on your own, if you want. It’s easy to sneak off with a boyfriend.”
Virgil nodded. “Get a blanket out in a cornfield and you’re good.”
“Except you get corn cuts all over your butt, and itch like crazy,” she said.
They looked at each other and laughed again, and then she said, “If it’s under age seventeen, I think people would look past it. If it’s under age thirteen, we could get a lynch mob going.”
“Think about the fact that Kelly Baker was pretty badly abused, in a hard-core way, a porno-movie way,” Virgil said. “Whips. Multiple partners, possibly simultaneously, according to the Iowa ME. And that she’d been previously abused in the same way, and that nobody can find any sign that she was hooking, or any partners.”
“Virgil, that’s really ugly, what you’re thinking,” Coakley said, dead sober.
“Yes. It is.”
He told her about trying to call Sullivan, based on the interview with Tripp’s friend Jay Wenner, that she already knew about. “These farm guys, Craig and Van Mann, kept coming back to the fact that these church people are really tight with each other, and don’t much socialize with outsiders. If this gay kid was a friend of Kelly Baker, then he’s probably a church kid, and he probably knows everything she did. About everything. We need to find him. We need to talk to Sullivan, soon as we can.”
“He’s probably with his friend up there. You think we should try to track him down?”
“Ah, they told me he’s working tomorrow, so we can probably get him early tomorrow. Can’t do much more tonight, anyway,” Virgil said.
“Have you thought about the possibility of spying on one of these church meetings?”
He smiled: “Yes.”
“I’m up for that.”
“It’d have to be one of your guys you absolutely trust,” Virgil said. “It’s possible that Crocker was actually planted on the department by the church. . . . If you’re involved in some kind of mass child abuse thing, even if it’s religion-based, you’re going to be curious about what the local law enforcement agency is up to.”
She said, “It’ll be someone we can trust. Me.”
He nodded. “Okay. We’ll be like ninjas, black ghosts slipping unseen across the Minnesota countryside.”
“Probably get eaten by hogs,” she said.
“Minnesota ninjas fear no hogs,” Virgil said.
“And what else?”
“We need to track down a woman named Birdy Olms,” Virgil said. He explained. “With a name like that, I think we’ve got a chance.”
“I’ll get on that. And your DNA sample is at your lab. Jeanette took it up, and said they whined at her.”
“Yeah, well, I got my boss to jack them up,” Virgil said. “The problem is, everybody wants DNA. DNA for everything. We’re jumping the line, which pisses everybody off.”
“We’ve got four dead,” she said.
“But if the DNA pans out, we’ll have a hammerlock on Spooner. She grew up in the church, but she’s already stepped away from them. If we can get her with a murder charge, we might be able to open her up.”
She thought about that, and then said, “They’ve been out there for a long time, this church. I wonder what they’d do if they thought it was about to come down on them?”