Bad Blood

by John Sandford

  “Studio art, at the U,” he said. “I’m a painter, when it isn’t too cold. So: how can I help, and why me?”

  Coakley said, “We’re looking at these murders—Flood, Tripp, Crocker. And Kelly Baker.”

  His eyebrows went up. “They’re connected?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Virgil said. “We’ve heard—we’re keeping our sources pretty close to our chest, and we’ll do the same with you—but we heard that you were friends with Baker and with Bobby Tripp.”

  Loewe sort of leaned back, the way people do when they’ve heard something they don’t like. He didn’t answer for a minute, then said, “Yeah, I was. I talked to the Iowa police a couple of times. Nothing ever came of it.”

  “We’re coming at it from a different angle,” Virgil said. “Because we also know about the relationship between Tripp and Kelly. We’re wondering if Kelly ever told you about that relationship, or if Tripp did. If there was something in there that could cause Tripp to kill Flood. Did Flood have some sort of abusive relationship with Kelly?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Loewe said. “Jake could be a jerk, that’s for sure. I just wonder if there wasn’t a fight between him and Bobby, and it got a little too serious?”

  Virgil shook his head. “If there’d been a fight, it would have shown up on Tripp—he would have been bruised or cut up or something. Flood was a big guy, and solid. We think Tripp snuck up on him, hit him with a ball bat.”

  “Mmm, boy, I don’t see him doing that. He was a pretty tough guy, football player and all, but he wasn’t mean,” Loewe said.

  “Do you think he was gay?” Coakley asked. She asked it with a motherly, understanding undertone that gave her thought away.

  Loewe flinched: “Gay? Doesn’t seem likely. He was a big football guy.”

  “It’s been suggested that you may have had a relationship with him,” Virgil said.

  Loewe took a step back, but didn’t say anything for a moment, then, instead of saying, “No,” he asked, “Who said that?”

  “Look, we’re keeping all of this very close. And we don’t even need to know whether or not you did, because that’s private, and I don’t see how it could affect the case. But: we need to know what Kelly did, what caused her to be murdered, and why Tripp would murder somebody in return, and then be murdered himself . . . and on down the line. Do not forget that there’s still a murderer running loose.”

  “You don’t think I’m involved . . .”

  “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Are you?”

  Loewe turned, walked away from them, picked up a roll of the plastic window sheeting. “I’m not going to talk to you anymore. This is crazy—I don’t know what happened to anybody.” His voice was climbing in pitch: he was scared, and Virgil decided to push it.

  “Do you think the killings might have anything to do with your church? We’ve noticed a lot of connections there—you know. Kelly Baker, Flood, even Crocker.”

  “The church? What connection could it have to the church?” he asked. “I think there might be some connection because everything happened in the same place . . . but not the church. Look, I really don’t want to talk about this anymore. But I’ll tell you: I have nothing to do with this. Any of it. I was freaked when Kelly Baker died, and I was freaked when Jake Flood got killed, and even more freaked when B.J. was killed.”

  “Did you ever know a woman named Birdy Olms?” Virgil asked.

  “Birdy? What does she have to do with it? She took off years ago. Back when I was a kid.”

  “Any idea where she went?” Coakley asked.

  “Nobody does,” Loewe said. “I guess that’s how she planned it. She’s gone.”

  Virgil looked at him for a couple of beats, and then asked, “You don’t have any idea why Kelly Baker was killed? Your friend Kelly.”

  “I’m not even sure she was murdered—the Iowa cops didn’t seem all that sure of it. Maybe . . . it was an accident.”

  “She’d been pretty severely abused,” Virgil said. “So that almost certainly makes it murder. If they were older than she was, the killers, that makes it statutory rape, a crime. If she died in the course of a crime, then it’s murder. Everybody involved, and everybody involved with hiding the killers, is going to prison for thirty years, no parole. No art school, nothing.”

  “Okay, that’s it. I’m done,” Loewe said, but his voice didn’t seem to Virgil to contain as much anger as it did fear. “I didn’t have anything to do with Kelly. We knew each other: that’s all. Now, please leave. Please.”

  Virgil said, “Wait a minute, Harvey. We’re investigating three murders, for Christ’s sakes. We’re not trying to inconvenience you—we’re trying to find a killer. And there’s still a killer out there, trying to shut people up. You wanna be on that list?”

  And Coakley said, “Harvey—we know about you and Bobby. We really don’t want to embarrass you. And we’re not embarrassed about gay people; one of the people who’s helping us on this case is gay.”

  “Who’d that be?” Loewe asked.

  “Well, we can’t say.”

  “So you’re making it up,” Loewe said.

  “I’ll tell you, as a police officer, that I’m not,” Coakley said. “What we need to know is, if you were close to Bobby—we won’t even ask you about sex—but if you were close to him . . . do you have any idea of why he’d go off on Jake Flood?”

  “We think it’s something he learned not long ago,” Virgil said, “because if he’d known it all along, he would have done something sooner.”

  Loewe looked down at the floor, as if trying to make up his mind.

  Virgil prodded him: “Bobby was murdered, not out of revenge, but because he knew something. Jim Crocker was killed because he knew something. We need to know what that was.”

  Loewe backed up and sat down in a chair and said, “You can’t tell anybody.”

  “We won’t, unless we absolutely have to—if we’re required to in court,” Coakley said. “I tell you that last part so I won’t be lying to you. It could come out that way, but that’s the only way. And we’ll do everything we can to avoid that.”

  “Ah, God, it’ll come out,” Loewe said. And, “I’ve got to get out of here anyway.”

  “Tell us, Harvey,” Virgil said.

  LOEWE SAID, “I really felt close to Bobby. And I want to tell you that our relationship didn’t start until he was eighteen, almost nineteen. He was a good guy, and I don’t say that because of our relationship. He was a good guy with everybody.”

  “I buy that. He was a good guy,” Virgil said.

  Loewe said, “When Kelly got killed, nobody knew anything. But, she was in the church, and the word got around pretty fast, about the sex and all. Bobby had been around with her quite a bit, and they’d gotten pretty close. They used to talk a lot, about everything. Ah, jeez . . . we were together once, and I told him about the sex. But he already knew.”

  “He already knew what? That she had a sexual relationship with somebody?”

  “Yeah. She told him. She told him that things got rough, sometimes, and that she kinda liked it, I guess. She didn’t tell him everything, though. I told him . . . the rest of it. From the autopsy report—that got around the church pretty fast. About how a bunch of guys were on her. About how somebody had whipped her and all of that. Everybody in the church knew about it, I think from her parents, or maybe her uncle. He was really freaked out.”

  “Had Bobby had a sexual relationship with her?” Coakley asked.

  “Oh, no. Kelly knew he was gay. She actually introduced us. . . . Kelly and I knew each other for a long time, and she knew I was that way. But I think they both felt a little bit like sex freaks, him being a gay football guy, and she because of the sexual things she did.”

  “So he freaked out,” Virgil said. “But how did that get him to Jacob Flood?”

  “I did that, too, I guess,” Loewe said. He looked everywhere but at Coakley and Virgil. “The la
st time I saw him, he asked me if Jake Flood knew Kelly. I said, ‘Well, yeah. They’re in the church.’ He asked if Jake ever hung around Kelly. I don’t know why I said it, but I said, ‘They know each other, for sure.’ Then he said that Jake had come into the elevator, with his shirt off, and he had a Statue of Liberty tattoo on his stomach. I said, ‘Yeah, he does. It goes right down to his . . .” He glanced at Coakley. “. . . You know, down there.”

  Virgil: “And he said?”

  “He said Kelly used to . . . have rough sex with somebody named Liberty. And I said, ‘Maybe it was him. People who know him call him Liberty sometimes.’ You know, I was joking.”

  “Did people really call him that?” Virgil asked.

  “A few,” Loewe said.

  Virgil said to Coakley, “On the drawing of the statue, the one I got from Tripp’s backpack, there was a long oval, drawn in pencil. You remember that?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It was an erect penis,” Virgil said. He turned back to Loewe: “Did he say anything about taking the information to the police?”

  Loewe shook his head. “No, he never said anything about that. I think, you know, he thought that if he told anybody about all that, about him and Kelly, that it’d all come out. About him being gay, and all. About me being gay. So . . . I didn’t think he’d do anything. It never really . . . occurred to me.”

  “I want you to tell me the truth, here, Harvey,” Virgil said. “Does this sex thing have anything to do with the church? I mean, okay, you’re gay, so you’re out of it. But a lot of church guys are hooking up with young women. Real young women. Is there some sort of thing where the church says the marriage age, in the eyes of God, is younger than, you know, the regular age?”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” Loewe said. “The people in the church are close, so they all know each other, and I guess guys are looking for girls who share . . . church stuff. I don’t share it so much anymore, I’m thinking about getting out. But, the church is the church.”

  “So you know Emmett Einstadt?”

  “Everybody knows Emmett. He’s like . . . the pope of our church.”

  “And there’s no kind of organized sex.”

  “It’s a church,” Loewe said.

  They talked about it a bit more, and Virgil said, “You’re going to have to come in and make a formal statement, Harvey. This is important stuff.”

  “Ah, God.”

  “Doesn’t have to be right this minute. But we’re going to need it, sooner or later.”

  “You said it wouldn’t have to come out.”

  “That was before we knew how important it is. Maybe the information won’t get us anywhere, and you won’t have to. But if it breaks this case, then you will.” Virgil slipped a business card out of his pocket, dropped it on the kitchen counter. “If you think of anything, call me. Don’t talk to anyone else about it. We were serious about there being a killer out there.”

  LOEWE FOLLOWED THEM to the door, said, “Please help me out. Don’t tell anybody.”

  They left him standing in the doorway, and when he shut the door behind them, Coakley said, pulling on her gloves, “I feel a little bad about Harvey.”

  “He should have talked to the Iowa cops a long time ago,” Virgil said. “It might have taken them to Flood. Then there’d be three guys still alive.”

  “Not if he didn’t know that Kelly was having sex with Liberty when he was talking to the Iowa people,” she said.

  “All right. Maybe he didn’t,” Virgil conceded. “But maybe he did. I think he was lying to us, a little bit.”

  “I just hope he doesn’t do anything awful,” Coakley said. They looked back at the house and saw a sheet of plastic move in the window.

  “What do we do from here?” Coakley asked. She’d been wearing a Fargo-style watch cap, and now she took it off, tossed it in the backseat, and shook her hair out.

  “Surveillance. They’ll be having church services tonight. We watch Flood’s place, and we watch Baker’s, and we follow them to wherever the service is.”

  “That’d be tough out here,” she said. They both looked across the flat, snow-covered fields; you could see a car a mile away. With lights at night, maybe three or four miles.

  “I’ll make some calls—see if I can get a highway patrol plane to park over the Floods’ place, track them from a distance,” Virgil said. “They can call us on the ground. We could wait in Battenberg or wherever.”

  “You think you can get it?”

  “I think so. I’d have to talk to my boss, but the dimensions of this thing are getting to be interesting,” Virgil said. “He’ll go for it.”

  “It is interesting,” Coakley said, “but I doubt that it’ll do me much good in the next election.”

  “You can live with it,” Virgil said. “If what I think is going on, is going on . . .”

  “I can live with it,” she said.

  HE STARTED the truck and eased out of Loewe’s driveway, turned left, back toward town. “The thing is,” Virgil said, as they drove along, “if we get the DNA back from the lab tomorrow, we may be close to finished—if we can show that Spooner killed Crocker, and that closes the chain of murders.”

  “But we’re not done,” Coakley protested. “Flood is dead, but there were more people involved with Kelly Baker—”

  “That’s an Iowa case,” Virgil said. “We send them a file with what we think.”

  “Oh, come on, Virgil,” she said. And apparently without thinking about it—or maybe she did, he thought later, because he sometimes tended toward cynicism, or at least the study of human calculation—she reached over with her inboard hand and put it on his thigh. “This is our case now. Iowa’s going nowhere with it.”

  She pulled her hand back, leaving behind a hand-sized warm spot; and she still seemed unaware of the casual intimacy. Virgil tended to think that women were hardly ever unaware of even the most casual intimacy; they had intimacy detectors more powerful than a rat’s cheese detector, although, he decided, the analogy might not be precise.

  “So we agree on that,” he said. “In fact, I was planning to kill most of the rest of the day hanging out, waiting for the DNA to come in. But now I’m thinking I’ll go talk to Alma Flood. I’d like to catch her without her father around.”

  She patted him on the thigh again: “Do that. Check the plane first. And call the lab about the DNA, see where they’re at. I’m going to get some of the boys who know about the church, get a list of names, and run every one of them through the feds. Maybe something will pop up.”

  They came up to a stop sign and Virgil said, “I hate this truck for this. The guy who invented consoles must’ve been some kind of über-nerd.”

  “What?”

  He put the truck in park, reached an arm around her shoulder, pulled her as close as the console would allow, and kissed her. She saw it coming and went with it, and when they ran out of air, he backed off a few inches, then kissed her again, and when she sank into him, he twisted a bit more so he could cup her far breast in his left hand. She went with that, too, though only for a few seconds, before rolling away from him, and she said, “Mmmm.”

  “Well, hell, it’s a start,” he said, putting the truck back in gear. “I’ve never kissed a sheriff before.”

  “Probably never felt one up, either,” she said, patting her hair back into place. “Not that I didn’t like it.”

  He thought about a wisecrack, but instantly suppressed it, going instead for a sincere-sounding, and possibly shy-sounding, “I wouldn’t have . . . characterized it like that.”

  She squinted at him, one eye blue, one eye green, and then, he thought, bought it. If you can sell sincerity to a woman, you’re halfway home. Not to be cynical about it.

  VIRGIL CALLED the BCA office as soon as he got a cell phone signal, talked to Davenport. “You fly around in that plane more than any six other guys,” Davenport said.

  “I don’t want to fly in it,” Virgil said. “I’ll
be on the ground. We’ll send along one of Lee’s deputies to watch one of the houses, maybe the Floods, or this Einstadt guy, see where the meeting is.”

  “I sense an emotional resonance in the way you said ‘Lee,’ ” Davenport said. “I heard she’s a looker.”

  “That’s correct,” Virgil said. “I plan to further explore those aspects of the case.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to hear it,” Davenport said. “Well, actually I do, but some other time.”

  “Wouldn’t be good right now,” Virgil said.

  “She’s sitting right next to you, right?”

  Virgil nodded at his phone. “Yup.”

  “You know, if the DNA comes through, we could just let the rest of it slide.”

  “Lucas, there are girls in this church who are much younger than your daughter,” Virgil said.

  “Ah, man,” Davenport said. “Where do you want the plane?”

  THEY SETTLED THAT, and he got Davenport to switch him up to the DNA lab, where he talked to a tech. The lab was still processing the DNA from the hair taken from Spooner’s couch, but, the tech said, she’d have something to tell Virgil by noon the next day.

  Virgil got off and said to Coakley, “Noon tomorrow. I do believe we’ll have Miz Spooner in jail by two o’clock.”

  “That could crack it,” Coakley said. She patted him on the thigh again.

  12

  Loewe watched the two cops go out to their truck and pull away, and he stepped away from the window and grabbed the roll of window plastic and began unrolling it, quickly, then frantically, his hands shaking. He cut a sheet and carried it to a window and began trying to tape it up, but he was so frantic now, shaking so badly, that he finally let it crumple to the floor, and dropped into his only easy chair and covered his face with his hands.

  He should have left. He should have left right after Kelly was killed, should have gotten everything together and gone out to San Francisco. He was a good carpenter, had taken cabinetry classes, knew enough electric and plumbing to get along. He’d been told he could make a fortune out in San Francisco. He could find jobs in the underground economy, paid with cash, and live quietly and invisibly and mostly legally, until he found out how everything shook out.