Bad Blood

by John Sandford

  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.”

  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 ta
lk 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.”