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 f*ckin’ 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 acreages 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.
COAKLEY WAS WAITING, with two deputies, big men in their thirties, both weathered, square-jawed Germans, one in civilian clothes, the other in a sheriff’s uniform.
“Agent Flowers,” Coakley said, “I’ve got your warrant. These men are Gene Schickel and Greg Dunn, they’ll be going out with you.”
He shook hands with the two, and Virgil said to Dunn, “I remember you from the Larson accident.” Dunn nodded and said, “That was a mess,” and added, “I gotta tell you, I don’t like this.”
“Nobody ever does,” Virgil said. “Me coming in, it’s like internal affairs. When I was a cop up in St. Paul, I shaded away from those guys as much as anybody. No reason to, but I know what you’re talking about.”
Dunn said, “Just a feeling that maybe we should clean up our own messes.”
Virgil nodded. “But you’ve got a lifetime job, if you don’t screw up. Sheriff Coakley has to get elected, and you’ve gotta see the political problem in all this.”
Dunn nodded. “Yeah, I do. I just don’t like it.”
Virgil looked at Schickel, the one in uniform. “What about you? Or are you the strong and silent type?”
Schickel’s lips barely moved: “We got to look at Crocker. I’d do it, even if nobody else wanted to.”
“Then let’s go,” Virgil said.
SCHICKEL RODE with Virgil, to fill him in on Crocker, while Dunn took a sheriff’s truck and led the way. Crocker lived seventeen miles out, most of it down I-90. Schickel said, “Greg wasn’t trying to give you a hard time. He says what he thinks.”
Virgil nodded. “I appreciate that. He didn’t cut Larson any slack, either.”
Larson had been a state senator who’d gotten drunk, but not very, had run a rural stop sign and T-boned another car on his way home from the bar. The driver of the other car was killed. The question had been whether it was purely an accident, or vehicular homicide. Virgil had helped with the investigation, and though Larson had been indicted on the homicide charge, he’d been acquitted.
“Greg’s a good guy, but he doesn’t cut anybody a lot of slack,” Schickel said. Then, loosening up a little, “Including his wife. He’s halfway through a divorce.”
“Been there,” Virgil said. “So what’s with Crocker? Good guy? Bad guy? You think he knew Tripp? Any rumors around?”
“Jimmy’s not a good guy,” Schickel said. “I’m not talking behind his back. He knows what I think, and I’ve told him to his face.”
“What’s his problem?”
“He’s got some bully in him, for one thing. Not physical—that’s one thing I’m not sure about in this Tripp thing. The Tripp boy was a hell of an athlete. Jim Crocker is a big guy and strong as a bull, but I don’t know if he’d have the guts to take on Bobby Tripp.”
“So when you say Crocker’s a bully . . .”
“He’s political, always sucking around for something,” Schickel said. “He was Harlan’s messenger boy, when somebody had to give out the bad news. You know, if somebody was gonna get fired, or laid off, or disciplined. He was like the assistant principal, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“And he enjoyed doing it. But he was also one for dodging serious work. When he went for the sheriff’s job, practically the whole department was out there talking up Lee. I would’ve quit, if he’d won.”
“But not crooked . . . not on the take, or anything.”
“Not like payoffs, like protection. But he’d do a favor for somebody,” Schickel said. “One time, two or three years back, a doctor’s kid got caught driving drunk, one-point-one blood alcohol. No accident or anything, pretty good kid, otherwise, but drunk. His old man came in to talk to the sheriff. Said they had a family cabin up in Canada, and the Canadians wouldn’t let the kid into the country with the conviction. He wanted a little consideration.”
“And the sheriff said . . .”
“Basically, that it was too late. Everybody in town knew about the situation. Best to hire a good lawyer. Anyway, when they went to send the file over to the county attorney, the key evidence was missing. The original ticket with the blow-tube numbers on it,” Schickel said. “So the prosecutor refused to prosecute, because of tainted evidence and mishandled paperwork. She was happy to do it, because she didn’t want to hang up the doctor’s family anyway. And she had an out: she blamed our office. Hell of an embarrassment. The eventual . . . conclusion . . . was that Crocker lifted the file.”
“But no proof.”
“No proof, but I’m on board with the conclusion,” Schickel said. “Crocker . . . you can have a beer with the guy, and he can tell a story, but basically, not a good guy.”
THEY FOLLOWED DUNN off I-90 at Highway 7, turned south through the town of Battenberg. Schickel pointed out a grain elevator: “That’s where Tripp killed Jake Flood.”
“Oh, yeah? Was Crocker in on that? The investigation?” Virgil asked.
“No, he had nothing to do with that. That all happened in the daytime, and Crocker’s been working nights,” Schickel said.
“Did he work last night?”
“Nope. Yesterday and the day before was his weekend. He’s on tonight.”
They passed the high school and went on down Main Street to the intersection of a county highway, turned back east for a couple miles, jogged south.
“He’s really out here,” Virgil said. “He got a family?”
“No. Wife took off a few years ago. She’s married to a guy over in Jackson, now. Or was. This house belongs to his uncle: he gets it free, as I understand it. Otherwise, it’d probably be abandoned. His folks have a farm further on south.”
THE FARMHOUSE SAT on the south side of a tangled woodlot of cottonwoods and box elders, beside a shallow drainage creek that crossed the roadway south of the house. The house was typical old Minnesota: a narrow two-story clapboard place in need of paint and new shingles, and probably new wiring. A thin stream of heated air was coming from a chimney, visible as a shimmer against the sky.
A machine shed, showing fresh tracks going in, but not out, with a new garage door, sat to the left of the driveway, with a ten-foot-long propane tank to one side. The front porch was covered by untracked snow; entry was apparently through the side door, next to the driveway. A satellite dish was bolted to one of the porch pillars, aimed to the southwest.
Dunn led the way in, and Virgil parked behind him, and they got out and stretched and stomped their feet in the snow-covered drive, and Dunn said to Virgil, “Well, time to do your thing.”
Virgil nodded and said, “You know what?” He went back to the truck and got the Glock out of the center console and put it in his pocket.
Schickel’s eyebrows went up: “You don’t carry?”
“I’m more of an intellectual,” Virgil said.
Dunn actually smiled: “I’ve heard that.”
VIRGIL CLIMBED the stoop and knocked on the door. No answer. No sound, except the faint hiss of the chimney. Knocked again, louder. Called, “Crocker? Jim Crocker?”
Silence.
Virgil stepped back from the stoop, asked the deputies, “There’s no chance that anybody called him? That he’s running for it?”
Dunn shook his head: “I know for a fact that the sheriff didn’t tell anybody but me and Gene, and Judge O’Hare, who’s about as tight-lipped as a guy could get.”
“O’Hare didn’t tell anybody,” Schickel said. He climbed the stoop and banged on the door again, yelled, “Jimmy?”
Dunn said, “Let me look in the shed. Maybe he’s over in Jackson or something.” He walked across the driveway to the shed, peered in a window, came back. “His Jeep’s there,” he said.
The three men looked at each other, and Virgil said, “I’m going in, on the warrant.”
Dunn nodded and said, “Probably best to take out a pane of glass, instead of breaking the door. Be hell to get somebody out here to fix the door.”
Virgil used the barrel of the Glock to knock out a pane of glass in the door, reached in, and turned the lock. He pushed the door open, then stepped back.
“Somebody dead in here,” he said.
Dunn, suddenly pale-faced, said, “What?”
“I can smell him,” Virgil said. “Not much stink, but somebody’s dead in here.”
“A mouse?”
“Not a mouse . . . You guys step careful, here. If he’s dead, we don’t want to screw up the scene.”
They found him on the living room couch, staring with blank eyes at a rerun of Married . . . with Children.
“Ah, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Schickel said, crossing himself. “He ate his gun. He must’ve killed Bobby.”
A pistol, a matte-black Glock like Virgil’s, except in .45 caliber, lay on the floor next to the couch.
“Did he carry a .45 Glock?” Virgil asked, looking at the big black hole at the end of the barrel.
“Yeah, he did,” Dunn said.
Crocker was on his back, an entry wound under his chin, a massive exit wound at the back of his skull. The arm of the couch, covered with a plush green material, was soaked with blood, hair, and what might have been pieces of bone; a couple of small holes in the wall beside the couch looked like they might have been made by fragments of the exiting slug.
“Maybe he knew he was gonna get caught,” Dunn said.
“Didn’t kill himself,” Virgil said. “He was probably murdered. Let’s clear the house, just to make sure there’s nobody hurt, somewhere. We don’t want to dig around, just clear it. Two minutes.”
The three of them moved through the place, but found it empty. Crocker had lived only on the first floor; the second floor was closed down, the door at the top of the stairs sealed with 3M insulating tape. They pushed through, and found a bunch of old dusty furniture sitting in cold, dry, dusty rooms.
When they were sure there was nobody else in the place, Virgil said, “Let’s call the sheriff. This is really gonna make her day.”
They stepped carefully past the body and back outside. Dunn made the call, and Schickel asked Virgil, “Why’d you think it’s murder?”
“When Lee was telling me about B. J. Tripp, she mentioned him being hanged from the bunk. I asked her if his dick was hanging out—you know, strangled himself while masturbating.”
“Heard of that, but never seen it,” Schickel said.
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t. Hanging out. But if you go up there and look, you’ll see that Crocker’s fly is down, and you can see his dick sticking out. I never, ever, heard of anyone who was yanking his crank and stopped to kill himself. Or anyone who took his dick out, and left it out, and killed himself. It’s not dignified. When people kill themselves, they tend to think about how they’ll be found—they imagine it. They imagine how sad everybody’ll be. They’re going to show them . . . but they don’t stick their dick out.”
“I didn’t pick up on that,” Schickel said. “His dick.”
Dunn came back: “The sheriff’s on the way. What about his dick? Whose dick?”
004
LEE COAKLEY LOOKED in on Crocker’s body. Her mouth was a thin line, with a twist at the end, as though she’d been sucking on a lemon. “He could be a jerk, but I’d never have wished this on him,” she said.
“I called our crime-scene people up in the Cities. I thought you might want to go that way, given the situation, instead of using your own man,” Virgil said. “You say yes, I’ll get them on the way.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Get them started. I’ll get Gene to set up in the driveway, keep people out. I better go down and tell Jim’s folks.”
“You okay with that?”
She nodded again. “Yes. My job, and I won’t dodge it. I’d feel better if I could spit, but I don’t think I can.”
“Got a preacher you can take along?”
“We do, but his folks belong to some kind of private religion. I think it’d be best not to try to sneak a Lutheran in the door. I’ll just have Greg ride along.”
They went outside, and she told Schickel and two other deputies to shut the scene down and wait for the crime-scene crew from the Cities. “I don’t want anybody in or out. Anybody.”
“They’ll be three hours,” Virgil said. “They’re loading up.”
“What’re you gonna do?” Coakley asked.
“Not much to do until the crime-scene guys have a look,” Virgil said. “I think I might go get a bite to eat.”
He walked along with Coakley to her truck, and said, “I’d like to look at the files on this whole chain of events—the Flood killing, Tripp’s death, the personnel file on Crocker.”
“I’ll call in. You’ll want to talk to a deputy named John Kraus. I’ll have John put you in the conference room. I’ll be back in a couple hours, at the latest. I’d like to read through them again myself.”
VIRGIL STOPPED at the Yellow Dog Café in downtown Homestead, got a California burger and home fries, with a Diet Coke, and thought about the three killings. Had to be tied. He didn’t know how often Warren County had a murder, but he’d guess one about every ten years or so, if that often. To have three, in a week, all cryptically linked, was pressing coincidence.
They had no reason for Tripp’s murder of Flood; no reason for Crocker’s murder of Tripp; no reason for an unknown killer to murder Crocker, especially when Crocker was lying on a couch with his penis sticking out. Crocker hadn’t been surprised; everything in his old house rattled, so he must’ve known that he wasn’t alone in the house, must’ve known the person who killed him. And he hadn’t feared that person; probably had some sexual relationship with her. Or him.
Hmm. Or him. A few months earlier, Virgil had worked a case in the North Woods in which a bunch of lesbians had been involved. Didn’t seem right that he’d go right on to another case involving homosexuals.
On the other hand, Tripp may have been gay, active or inactive. He had wanted to talk to a newspaper reporter about the Flood killing, and the only fact known to Virgil about the reporter was that he was gay.
On the third hand, he did only know one fact about the reporter, and taken with all the facts he didn’t know about him, his sexual orientation was probably irrelevant.
Maybe.
He took out his cell phone and called Coakley. She answered on the third ring, and he asked, “Are you at Crocker’s folks’?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t say anything else, and Virgil realized that she was sitting there with them, and they were listening. “Is there any possibility that Crocker had homosexual inclinations?”
“Very, very unlikely. But nothing’s impossible, as I’m sure you know,” she said.
“You gonna come with me when I talk to this newspaper reporter?”
“Absolutely. I’ll see you in an hour.”
Virgil hung up, toyed with his home fries. Unless the crime-scene crew came up with something that definitely pointed at a particular person as the killer, or somebody came forward with information, it would be tough to get into the Crocker killing . . . though it would be interesting to learn more about friends and relatives of Tripp, to see if they blamed Crocker for the death.
And with Crocker dead, it’d be tough to get into the Tripp killing, as well. Had to be some private motive. Some motive that involved Tripp and Crocker and almost certainly Flood.
Tripp had wanted to talk to somebody about Flood, so that killing can’t have been on impulse. Tripp planned it. Took the T-ball bat with him. Could be an entry there . . .
HE WAS ABOUT to leave the café when a man in a dark suit and close-cut silver hair came through the door, followed by a pretty, dark-haired woman carrying a briefcase and dressed in a gray lawyer suit. He looked familiar, and the man did a double take when he saw Virgil.
“Virgil Flowers,” he said, and, introducing himself, “Tom Parker—I cross-examined you in the Larson case.” He said it with a friendly smile and Virgil remembered him. Good attorney, he thought, though he’d been on the other side.
“Oh, sure,” Virgil said. “Nice to see you again.”
They shook hands, and Parker said, “This is my associate, Laurie . . . and I bet you’re not here on a social visit. There’s a hot rumor going around the courthouse that Jimmy Crocker’s been murdered. That true?”
Virgil said, “I can’t really talk to you about it in detail. But, yeah. I’m just in from his place. The sheriff’s out telling his folks.”
“Better her than me,” Parker said.
Laurie asked, “You know who did it?”
“No idea, yet.”
“When you find out, let me know,” Parker said. “I want to rush out there with my card.”
“Maybe not. That didn’t work for me the last time,” Virgil said. They chatted for a couple more minutes, Parker and the woman probing for more facts, Virgil telling them only that it superficially looked like a suicide, by gun, but that he thought it was probably a murder. Other than that, he didn’t know anything.
“Three murders, though, I figure they should be connected,” he said, aware that everybody in the café was listening to the conversation. “If you have any ideas, I’d listen to them. I’m fresh out of my own.”
“I’ll give you a ring,” Parker said.
But Laurie said, “In a way, it’s four murders.”
Virgil: “Four?”
“About a year ago, a girl was murdered out there . . . not murdered here in Warren County, but across the line in Iowa, north of Estherville. But she came from a farm by Blakely.”
“That’s right,” Parker said. “Kelly . . .”
“Baker,” Laurie said.
Virgil snapped his fingers: “I remember something about that. Found her in a cemetery, right? The Iowa guys covered it, out of Des Moines. Did she go to school here in Homestead?”
Laurie said, “Maybe, but her house would be out in the Northwest High area. . . . I mean, some people transfer around depending on where their parents work. So, I don’t know where she went.”
“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.”