There were faint marks, not quite scars, on her buttocks and breasts, indicating that she had been beaten before, with a whip similar to the one that had marked her this time.
There was no indication of resistance, which, along with the earlier whip marks, suggested that her involvement may have been voluntary. Virgil didn't think the conclusion followed from the evidence: she could have also been too afraid to resist, although the earlier whip marks were hard to explain, unless she'd been thoroughly brainwashed.
There was no DNA evidence. Lubricants were found deep in her anus and vagina, of a kind used on a national brand of condoms, suggesting that the men had worn condoms. Whether they had worn them as protection against sexual diseases or pregnancy, or as a way to eliminate the possibility of DNA, was unknown.
If the former was the case, the pathologist noted, then the death may have been accidental, in the course of extreme sex play; and may have indicated that the perpetrators didn't know Baker very well-that it may have been prostitution. If the latter, it would suggest that the men involved were protecting themselves against criminal prosecution. If Baker died in the course of criminal activity, the death could be classified as a murder, depending on the exact nature of the criminal activity.
She had abrasions around her mouth, indicating that she had been orally penetrated, but no semen was found in her trachea or stomach. That might have meant that the oral sex had taken place well before her death, and the semen digested; that the man had withdrawn before ejaculation, which seemed unlikely in this kind of abusive sex play; or that he or they had worn condoms.
The latter case would again suggest protection against DNA evidence, which could lead to a finding of murder.
Even more disturbing was the lack of any kind of DNA evidence at all on the body: no sweat, no stains. There was no lubricant on the outer parts of her vagina or anus. She was wearing no deodorant. The pathologist suggested that the body may have been washed after death, and thoroughly. The care with which it had been done suggested cool deliberation, not panic.
Virgil leaned back and closed his eyes. A prostitute? The age was right. Probably half the prostitutes in Minnesota were seventeen or younger. Why was the body left in the cemetery? Was there some effort to do right by her, as ludicrous as the effort seemed? Could it have been done by panicked high school boys? But the level of sexual deviation suggested older men, with longer-standing sexual tastes. Would her parents know the older men? Could it have been teachers, or familial abuse?
The care with which the DNA had been obliterated again suggested older men, and perhaps men experienced in removing DNA. Had they killed before?
He was thinking about it when Kraus appeared with a thick stack of paper and handed it to him. "That's it. We have some paper of our own on the case; we did interviews with friends and schoolmates of hers, but most of that's in the Iowa reports. Ours might have a little more detail, but probably nothing too significant."
"What I'd really like is a list of names of everybody you interviewed," Virgil said. "Not what they said, just a list."
"I could put that together. I'll do it now," Kraus said. "You think this is really tied to Flood and Bobby Tripp and Jim?"
"Well, Flood was killed in Battenberg, and came from two miles northwest of there. Crocker lived on a farm a couple miles southeast of Battenberg, and Baker here came from a farm five or six miles south. So you could probably put all their places in a twenty-five- or thirty-square-mile area. How big is the county? Seven hundred square miles? With maybe a murder every decade or so? And you have three killings, in little more than a year, with all the victims from that little square, who knew each other? Or another way-they all lived within a mile or so of Highway 7…"
"I'll get busy," Kraus said.
Virgil did a quick scan of the Iowa file, looking for names, especially Bob Tripp's. It wasn't there.
Going back through the paper, he found photos of Baker when she was alive, as well as crime-scene shots and several autopsy photos. The autopsy photos didn't do anything but gross him out, and he put them aside. She had been a reasonably pretty girl, blond, busty. When she'd fully filled out, she would probably have been stocky, with broad shoulders and hips, and overlarge breasts.
In the early flush of womanhood, though, she looked good. Salable, Virgil thought, with a little thrum of guilt. The Iowa investigators had dug hard into the possibility that she'd been involved in prostitution, and had found nothing.
Virgil got back on the phone to Wood. "Solved it yet?" Wood asked.
"About halfway there," Virgil said. "I've been reading the file, and want to know what you thought about the prostitution angle. Your guys asked a lot of questions…"
"Let me run down the hall and grab a guy," Wood said.
He was back in a minute, and another phone was picked up. Wood said, "I've got Mitch Ingle on the phone; he worked that the hardest."
"I've got all the paper here," Virgil told the Iowans. "What I want is some opinions. Was she hooking?"
Ingle said, "It's easy to think so, looking at the whole package. But I don't believe it. In a community that size, the word would get around. You got a school full of horny high school boys in a small community, where everybody knows everything, and we couldn't turn up a hint of that. What I started to believe was that she may have been picked up by a couple of older guys who were working on turning her out, and killed her before that got done. That would also explain the other prostitution problem-there was no sign that she had any money. And she had no birth control pills, she had no condoms. She had no hooker stuff."
"Estherville can't be that big…"
"Checked every apartment and every loose male, anyplace she might have gone for sex. We concluded that she might not have actually… performed whatever it was… in Estherville. She might have been dumped there from somewhere else."
"Her car was found there."
"Yes, but we don't know that she drove it there. Nobody saw who parked it. It was alongside a convenience store and coin-op laundry, off to the side, people coming and going. Could have been her, but maybe not. The thing is, we're assuming that she was not kidnapped. She went with these guys, maybe not because she wanted to, but she didn't fight them. She met them. She left her uncle's place, and drove somewhere and met them. Judging from those earlier marks on her breasts and legs, she'd met them before."
"I haven't been through all the paper, and I'm not sure you put every name in, but do you remember if the names Jacob Flood, Bob Tripp, or Jim Crocker show up anyplace along the way?"
After a moment's silence, Wood said, "Doesn't ring a bell with me," and Ingle said, "Me neither. I can run a search on my computer."
"If you could," Virgil said.
He and Ingle exchanged phone numbers, and Ingle said, "Minor Wood has filled me in on your investigation there, and if there's anything I can do, I'll come up. If you need help down on the Iowa side…"
"Don't know where it's going yet," Virgil said. "But I appreciate it." HE WAS BACK in the paper when he heard cowboy boots coming down the hall, and Coakley stuck her head in the door: "You got the file. John said you're pulling the Kelly Baker case into it."
"I haven't found any direct connection, but it's a pretty interesting coincidence," Virgil said.
She came in and sat down at the side of the table, leaned toward him, and said, "I got to Baker about halfway back from Crocker's folks' house. I would have gotten to it quicker, if I hadn't been so run over by the murder. The Baker case is no coincidence, Virgil. You remember I told you that Crocker belonged to a private religion? Flood was a member of the same group-and so was Baker."
"Okay-that's good," Virgil said. "What about Tripp? Was his family-"
"No. Lutherans. But still, there has to be a connection."
"I think you've made up the same story I have," Virgil ventured.
She said, "Crocker and Flood somehow get on to Baker's availability, maybe because of their church activities. Who knows ho
w? They begin some kind of complicated sexual relationship, probably a four-way, between Crocker, Flood, Baker, and the other woman. Baker's in on it, voluntarily. Maybe Bobby and Baker have a secret relationship of some kind. She tells him what Flood is doing to her… maybe doesn't tell him about Crocker… and he reacts by killing Flood. We bring him in. Crocker realizes that Bobby could spill the beans about their sex ring, and also realizes that Bobby doesn't know who he is. But he's a danger, so Crocker sneaks into Bobby's cell while he's asleep, and kills him."
"The other woman?" Virgil asked.
"The woman who was doing oral sex on Crocker when she killed him."
"You think?"
"I think. It's plausible." Her mismatched eyes narrowed as she ran through it. "His penis is sticking out of his pants, he's lying way back on the couch, with his legs spread, one foot on the floor, and he gets shot under the jaw. If it's murder, and I think it is, that means that he let somebody get close enough to him to put that gun right under his jawline, and doesn't react. That's because he's reacting to something else."
"Why would she do it?"
"Because she was in on the Baker murder," Coakley said. "She was in on a statutory rape, which meant that Baker's death was murder."
"Like she had some legal knowledge. She knew she'd been contaminated by the death of Baker. And she knew Jimmy and knew how to handle his gun," Virgil said, with a faint smile.
She leaned back, picking up the implication. "I didn't do it, you jerk. If I had a choice between giving that moron a blow job and going to the chair, I'd take the chair."
"We don't have the death penalty-"
"You get the point," she said. "Jeez, I'm starting to understand 'that fuckin' Flowers' thing."
"Don't get in a huff," he said. "I was filling out your line of reasoning. And maybe teasing you a little."
"Fill it some other way," she said.
"Any other female deputies, or cops, who might have known what Crocker had done? Who he might have confided in?"
"Two, but they didn't do it. I know them well enough to say that. Though I guess we have to talk to them."
"You knew Crocker pretty well, too," Virgil pointed out. "Was he attractive to the other women in the department? Did he hang around with any of them? Where was his social life? In the department, or outside?"
She shook her head: "Not an attractive man, no. The other deputies… no."
"Of course, even if Crocker was getting oral sex, we don't know it was a woman."
"You think…?"
"What I think is, the sex with Baker was so crazy that they probably do a little of everything. Just for the excitement."
"That's a point," she said. And, "You know what? We need to talk to Bob Tripp's folks, like right now."
"And a newspaper reporter," Virgil added. "And Flood's wife."
She went to make phone calls, and Virgil kicked back and thought about Bob Tripp. And he thought, Why did he wait this long?
If Baker had told Tripp that she was being sexually abused, and he killed Flood out of a misplaced sense of justice, why did he wait more than a year? One possibility was that Tripp had been afraid to do it, and that suddenly having access to Flood at the grain elevator had triggered him. Maybe that was why he wanted to talk to the reporter-he'd confided in the reporter, in an effort to get something done, and the reporter hadn't been able to help.
Virgil preferred a second possibility: that Tripp had only recently learned something that triggered the murder of Flood. If that was true, then there was a way into the case, a source of information, if he could find it. If Tripp had learned something, then Virgil could find it.
Coakley came back and said, "We're in luck. Everybody's around. We'll do the Tripps first, and then run over to the Dispatch. The reporter's name is Pat Sullivan. Sully. I hate to say it, but he's usually pretty accurate. Flood's wife works in Jackson, but her father says she's due home at six o'clock."
The Tripps, George and Irma, lived in a fifties ranch-style single-story house, yellow, with a two-car garage at one end, arborvitae poking out of the snow along the driveway and under the picture window. George Tripp was standing behind the picture window, with his hands in his pockets, when they pulled into the driveway.
"The big issue here," Coakley said on the way over, "is that we haven't released Bobby's body yet, and they are getting pretty upset about it. They want to have a funeral, get him in the ground."
"When are you going to release him?" Virgil asked.
"Ike Patras says he doesn't think he can get anything more off the body, so I'm going to okay the release tomorrow morning. I'll tell George as soon as we're in the house. Maybe that'll loosen them up a little."
"You said you guys were friends."
"Friendly. Not friends," Coakley said. "We didn't see each other socially or anything, but we'd stop to talk on the sidewalk. They've been pretty unhappy with me since Bobby's arrest, and then his death-like I betrayed them." George Tripp waited until they were halfway up the walk before he left the window and opened the front door. He said, "Sheriff," with a nod, and a cold chill in his voice; he backed away from the door, his hands back in his pockets. Not going to shake with the law. Irma Tripp came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. The house was neatly kept, with family photos in frames, and wildlife art on the walls; it smelled of chili and wood cleaner. Virgil thought the Tripps were probably in their middle forties, Irma a bit younger than her husband.
Coakley said, "We have some news for you, George, Irma. We'll release Bobby tomorrow morning, so you can get on with a service."
"' Bout time," George Tripp said. He was looking at Virgil. "Who would this be?"
"Virgil Flowers, he's an agent with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension," Coakley said. "He works the southern part of the state."
Irma said, "I thought we were all done with investigation."
Virgil shook his head. "No, no. We do have some more news for you. Could we sit down? We really do need to talk."
They sat in a conversation group, a couch on one side of a wood-and-glass coffee table, two overstuffed chairs on the other side. Virgil leaned forward and said, "I really want to express my sympathy over the death of your son. It's an awful thing."
"How would you know?" Irma asked.
"Because I see a lot of awful things, and I'm pretty much like you folks. I grew up in Marshall, and my father is a minister. When a kid died, half the time the service would be in our church, and I'd know him. Know the family. I've been through it a lot."
Irma nodded: "He was the best thing we had. He was our only child."
Virgil glanced at Coakley, who nodded at him, and Virgil turned back to the Tripps. "We need to tell you that we no longer think that your son committed suicide. We've developed evidence that he may have been murdered by Jim Crocker, the sheriff's deputy who was on duty that night."
George Tripp lurched off the couch, to his feet, and said, "I knew it. I knew it," and Irma began to weep. George Tripp said, "Where is he? Crocker?"
Coakley said, "He's dead, George. We went to his house with a search warrant, and found him dead. He also looks like a suicide, but agent Flowers and I both believe that he was also murdered."
"What the hell is going on?" George Tripp demanded. His wife was twisting the dish towel into a rope; but Virgil's statement had stopped the weeping.
"We don't know yet, George, but… uh…"
"Things are getting very strange, and very complicated," Virgil said. "We need to ask you something: do you know whether or not Bobby was acquainted with, or dating, a young woman, a girl from the west end of the county, named Kelly Baker?"
Irma: "Baker? Wasn't that the girl who was murdered?"
"Yes. Last year, down by Estherville," Coakley said.
"You can't think that Bobby had anything to do with that," George Tripp said, anger threading back into his voice.
"No, no, we don't," Virgil said. "But we're wondering if Jacob Flood might ha
ve."
The Tripps stared at him for a moment, then Irma Tripp rocked back on the couch and said, "Ohhh. Oh, no. You think Bobby found out about… Ohhh."
"Did they know each other?"
The two looked at each other, and then George Tripp said, "Our son, you know, never really had much to do with girls, yet. He was shy. But there was something going on a year ago. We don't know with who, because he wouldn't talk about it."
"He didn't take anybody to the junior prom," Irma Tripp said. "We kept trying to get him to take Nancy Anderson, she's really a nice girl, and we'd hoped… Do you think he was seeing this other girl? Kelly?"
"She lived out in the countryside," Virgil said.
"He was always borrowing the car, soon as he got his license," George Tripp said. "That wouldn't have been a problem."
"She worked at the Dairy Queen here in Homestead, during the summers," Coakley said.
"There you go," George Tripp said. "The Dairy Queen's a regular meeting place for the kids. He would have been down there most every day, at one time or another."
"So there's a possibility he could have known her, but you don't know that specifically," Virgil said.
Irma's head bobbed. "That would be it. But now that you bring it up, I think he must have known her. He was so strange last fall. He grew up a cheerful, outgoing kid…"
"Got a football scholarship, over in your hometown," George Tripp said to Virgil.
"I heard that," Virgil said.
"… but last fall, he was so gloomy," Irma continued. "We thought maybe the football team, it didn't do as well as people hoped. We thought he was down about that. But if…"
"We would like to look through his private things… anything would help," Coakley said.
"What would you look for?" Irma asked.
"Any indication that he had prior contact with Flood, with Baker, with Crocker, any notes or letters…"
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