The yard was illuminated by three lights-one over a side door to the house, a yard light on a pole by the corner of the house, and another on a pole by the barn. The barn and a couple of lower outbuildings, a garage and a machine shed, sat off to the right of the drive, with the glint of a silvery propane tank off to the left. No cars were visible in the yard lights: everything was buttoned up, and dark.
Virgil could see no tracks going to the front porch as he came up the drive; not unusual. The side door would be the main entry. He climbed out of the truck, took a second to look around, and to feel the cold night air on his face, and to look at the stars, then walked to the side door and rang the bell.
He could hear a thumping inside, somebody running. A moment later, the door popped open. Two teenage girls stood looking at him, in the dim light of a small overhead bulb, and he nodded and said, "I'm Virgil Flowers," and one said, "Yes, we were waiting," and the other, "Come in. Wipe your boots."
"I could take the boots off."
"No need. Nobody else does."
The girls appeared to be about twelve and fourteen, junior high school age. They were dressed almost identically, in dark blue jumpers with white blouses and black tights, with black lace-up shoes. They were sallow with winter, with deep shadows under their eyes: their father had been murdered.
Virgil asked, "So, what are your names?"
"I'm Edna," said the older one, and the younger one said, "Helen."
He followed them up four stairs into a kitchen and around a corner and through another door into a living room. One of the girls called ahead, "Mother, Mr. Flowers is here."
Alma Flood was sitting on a couch in a book-lined living room, a reading lamp over her shoulder, a Bible on the arm of her chair. A man, older, big, farm-weathered with a white beard, a big red nose, and small black eyes, sat facing her on a recliner chair. A glassed-in bookcase, built under the stairs going up to the second floor, was full of what looked like fifty-year-old novels, the kind you'd find in a used-book store or an aging North Woods resort.
Alma Flood was square in the body, as the girls would be, with her hair pulled into a bun; she wore a dark brown dress. There was a resemblance between her and the older man, and Virgil thought he might be Alma Flood's father. She said, "Mr. Flowers. You have news?"
"Maybe," Virgil said, smiling. The man gestured at the second recliner in the group of furniture, and Virgil sat down. A comfortable chair, and the house looked prosperous; but no sign of a television set. Virgil said, "You know the sheriff arrested Bob Tripp for Mr. Flood's murder. Bob Tripp was then killed in jail-"
"I thought he committed suicide," the older man said.
Virgil said, in his polite voice, "I'm sorry, who are you?"
"Emmett Einstadt. I'm Alma's father."
"Okay… An autopsy was done on Tripp, and the medical examiner believes that he was murdered."
"That's nonsense," Einstadt snapped. "We were told by the sheriff herself that there was nobody there but Jim Crocker."
Virgil nodded. "That's correct. The autopsy turned up indications that Tripp may have been killed by Crocker."
"Oh, no, that's not possible. Jim Crocker is a righteous man," Alma Flood said.
"When we went to talk to Deputy Crocker this afternoon, we found him dead at his house. He'd also been murdered."
They were astonished. Not faking it at all, as far as Virgil could tell. Alma's hands went to the sides of her head: "Jim Crocker is dead?"
"Somebody shot him," Virgil said. "There are indications that it may have been a woman." VIRGIL GOT ALONG okay with animals-dogs, horses, chickens-but his relationships with them were nothing special. Cats were different. For some reason, which he didn't entirely understand, cats liked him.
He'd come from a cat family, of course, and that might have had something to do with it. They'd supported numerous cats over the years, ranging from the conservative red tabby Luther to the radical black Savonarola, with a dozen in between, all named for religious figures by Virgil's minister father. Now a cat walked into the Floods' living room and sniffed at him, and Virgil reached out a hand.
Alma Flood and Einstadt exchanged exclamations about Crocker-"Can you believe that? How could that happen? What's going on?"-and then Edna Flood said to Virgil, about the cat, "Don't try to pet her. She'll bite your fingers off."
Virgil nodded and pulled his hand back, and he gave them a short summary of the findings at Crocker's place, then asked, "Do you know any reason Jim Crocker would want to… take revenge on Tripp, because of what happened to Mr. Flood?"
"Well, they were friends all their lives," Einstadt said. "If they weren't hanging around here when they were kids, they were hanging around the Crocker place. Started rabbit hunting together when they were ten, when we gave them their first.22s."
"So there might be something," Virgil suggested.
"There might be, but I can't see Jim killing because of that. He'd let the law take its course," Einstadt said. "If justice didn't get done, then he might… well, as a matter of fact, I doubt he'd do anything. He wasn't that kind."
The cat sniffed Virgil's pant leg, then hopped up on the arm of the chair, sniffed his ear, and then crawled up on his shoulders and settled down behind his neck. He could hear her purring.
"That's the darnedest thing I've seen in years," Helen Flood said, as though she were forty.
Virgil reached back and scratched the cat under the ear, and asked, "Did any of you know, or did Mr. Flood know, a girl named Kelly Baker, who was killed a year or so ago down by Estherville? She came from down south of here, a few miles…"
Flood and Einstadt looked at each other, and then both shook their heads. "We know them," Einstadt said. "They belong to the same church we do. But we don't know them well. We're not close. We know about what happened to Kelly Baker, of course. Everybody was talking about it."
Alma Flood asked, "Do you think they are connected? Kelly Baker and what happened to Jacob? That the Tripp boy did it?"
Virgil had been considering the possibility, but hadn't worked through it until Alma's question clocked a new scenario into place: what if Tripp and some other kids had been using Baker, and Flood found out? What if Tripp had confessed to Crocker, and Crocker had killed him because of some relationship between himself and the Baker family? And that the other person involved in the murder of Baker had killed Crocker…
But that didn't work well: Crocker had been involved with a woman. Could there have been some kind of teenage sex ring, that included females, and something went wrong with Kelly Baker? But why wouldn't Crocker simply have alerted the sheriff, rather than murdering Tripp?
There was no logic to it-though that didn't always mean much. But Virgil shook his head at Alma Flood and said, "No, we can't make that work. Although Tripp did know Kelly Baker."
"Then you've got one boy you know for sure is a cold-blooded killer, who killed Jake. And he knew another girl who was killed, somehow. I won't tell you how to do your business, but that looks like a solid connection to me," Einstadt said. "How many murderers do we got in this county, anyway? Looks to me like the Tripp boy and one of his friends might have been up to something here."
Another scenario flashed: suppose Kelly Baker had been gay, and they had a three- or four-way thing going, involving the other woman? Too far-fetched…
"Well, we'll sure look into it," Virgil said. "Like I said, we think Crocker was murdered. We'll know for sure soon enough, and we'll probably get some DNA from the killer." The cat made a snogging sound behind his ear, and he reached back and scratched her again.
They talked for a while longer, but on the central issue-what Jacob Flood might have known, or said, that triggered his murder-they came up empty. "I'd never heard of this Tripp boy before we were told that they arrested him," Alma Flood said.
When they were done, Virgil stood up and said, "I may come back, if I find more questions. I'm not familiar with this corner of the county. But if you talk to your acquaintance
s around here, you might ask if anybody knows of a connection between Deputy Crocker and Kelly Baker. Or Crocker and Tripp, for that matter."
"We'll do it," Einstadt said. "We're just buckling down for winter, so we'll be coming and going-we'll see a few folks."
Virgil gave them a business card, carefully removed the cat from his shoulders, scratched her head, and put her back on the floor. "I appreciate all your help," he said.
When he was gone, Einstadt looked at Alma Flood and said, "You know who killed Crocker?"
"I was thinking Kathleen."
"I was thinking the same thing," he said. "I'll get Morgan and we'll go have a talk with her."
He stood up and said, "Rooney will be over tomorrow."
Alma Flood whined, "We can get along all right. We don't need Rooney."
"Rooney's a good man and you'll knock some edges off him. The thing about it is, you leave a bunch of women alone in a house like this, you can't tell what they'll get up to. Rooney'll handle that, and take care of the farm, too."
"He's rougher'n a cob," Alma Flood said.
"Like I said: you'll knock some edges off him."
"Be happy if he took a bath," Alma Flood muttered.
"I'll tell him that," Einstadt said. He looked at the two girls, standing in a corner. "You girls get your asses upstairs. I'll be up in a minute."
One of them said, "Yes, Grandpa," the other one said nothing, and they both headed for the stairs.
Einstadt said to his daughter, "When Rooney gets here tomorrow, I want you to make him welcome. I don't want any trouble about this. But-don't tell anyone that he's moving in. That's private business."
He turned away and followed the girls toward the stairs. He hadn't had any sex for two days, and he needed it, and the last time he'd bent Alma over the kitchen table, she'd been dry as a stick.
The girls, though…
He left Alma sitting in her chair, with her Bible, and hurried up the stairs, the hunger upon him.
6
The Floods were unusual, Virgil thought, as he drove away. Reticent. The daughters looked morose, as might be expected, but had never mentioned their father. Neither had Alma Flood or Emmett Einstadt, except in direct discussion. There was no hand-wringing or remembrance or tears: they spoke of him almost as though he were a distant acquaintance.
Einstadt looked like an Old Testament image of Abraham, as he was about to stick the knife in Isaac's neck. And the way they dressed, all brown, black, and blue-he didn't know if this was a religious thing, similar to the plain dress of the Amish, or personal preference.
Back at Homestead, Virgil took the exit, looked at his watch: coming up on seven o'clock, not enough time to eat before he had to be at the Tripps'. He stopped at a convenience store, got a bottle of orange juice, a pack of pink Hostess Sno Balls, and a couple of hunting magazines to take back to the motel.
One of the problems with working in a small town was that whenever you went somewhere, you were already there-it was only six or eight or ten minutes from one end to the other, so if you were running early, you stayed early, and if you were running late, there was no way to make it up by speeding or taking shortcuts.
He stopped a block from the Tripps', parked, ate the Sno Balls and drank the juice, and watched a man walking along the dark street with two Labrador retrievers. The dogs were looking for a comfortable snowbank in which to take a dump; the product of their efforts would sink into the snow, and freeze, and in March, when the snow went away, there it'd be. Sometimes, if your yard was on a popular corner, whole piles of newly thawed dog poop ushered in the spring.
Virgil thought about the unfairness of it, and checked his watch. Still early, but not too; he stuffed the juice bottle and Sno Ball packaging in a trash bag hung from the back of the passenger seat, and went on down the block. THE TRIPPS HAD GOTTEN dressed up for their visit to the funeral home. George Tripp was wearing a church suit, black wool with a white shirt and black-and-blue tie, and Irma was wearing a black dress with black boots with low heels. They looked simply, ineffably, sad.
George Tripp was standing in front of the picture window again, waiting for him, and opened the door when he came up the walk. "Come in, please," he said.
Irma Tripp came into the living room, carrying a long coat. She said, "We haven't gone into his room except once, to make his bed. It's just… too much."
"Did you figure anything out?" George Tripp asked.
"We did learn one thing-your son did know Kelly Baker," Virgil said. "We know that for sure. They hung around together the summer before last, but probably stopped seeing each other when the summer ended. We don't think they were intimate, but, of course, we really don't know, one way or the other."
"Crocker killed them both," George Tripp said. "Or Flood killed the Baker girl, maybe with Crocker. Is that what you think?"
"It's a possibility," Virgil said. "But I just talked to Flood's wife, and they turn it around from that-they think your son killed Baker, and Flood found out something, so Bobby killed him." They both objected, and Virgil held up his hands: "I'm just sayin'. I will tell you that I'm not buying any theories, yet. But we know that we have at least one killer running around loose, and that's the thread we've got to pull on."
"You don't have any idea who he is?" Irma Tripp asked.
"Well, we're pretty sure it's not a he. We think it's a woman," Virgil said. "Somebody who was intimate with Deputy Crocker. We're pushing that aspect of it."
"If you look hard enough, you'll find out that Bobby comes out okay," George Tripp said.
"That's why I want to look at his room," Virgil said. "Maybe there's something. Maybe he left a letter or a note or something that would explain this to us."
Bob Tripp's bedroom was at the far end of the house, in the front corner. The bed was neatly made-Irma went in and made it after he was killed, as though it were a final favor-but the rest of the room was about as messy as any teenage boy's might be. Books and papers were scattered over a desk, where a MacBook sat in front of an old-fashioned wooden office chair. A backpack lay at the foot of the bed, and a sports trophy, with a tennis player on top, stood on a chest of drawers. There were none of the expected jocko pennants on the wall, but there were posters for the Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans Saints, a couple of dozen postcards, mostly of nude women, stuck on the wall with pushpins. The place smelled faintly of sweat socks and male deodorant.
Irma said, "Those postcards aren't anything-those dumb boys would find them and mail them to their friends with, you know, messages, on the back. Trying to embarrass each other. They were all doing it."
"We'll just leave you," George Tripp said. "We don't want to see any of this, to be honest. And we have our appointment, you know, we have to pick out…" He trailed off, and Virgil mentally filled it in: a coffin.
"Take off," Virgil said. "I'll wait until you get back."
They left him, but then Virgil stepped into the hallway and asked, "Did he have a cell phone?"
"Yes, it's on his desk."
"Okay. You don't know if he had a password on his computer, do you?"
Irma smiled for the first time, an almost shy smile, and she said, "Yes, he did, and he wouldn't tell us what it was. He said it was his private business. You know, I think with what boys look at on the Internet… We have wireless."
"Okay. I may want to take the computer with me," Virgil said. "We have some people in St. Paul who can work around the password."
George Tripp said, "I don't know how valuable it might be…"
"I'll get it back to you," Virgil said. "I'll give you a receipt. You go on-we'll work it out later." HE WENT to the computer first, and the first thing it did was ask for a password. He tried "Tripp" and "BJ" and "Bobby" and "RJ," "Irma," and "George," and, from a school poster taped to the wall, "Cardinals" and "Vikings," "wide receiver" and "receiver." Nothing worked.
He checked the phone and came up with a list of names and phone numbers. He recognized "Sullivan," the repor
ter, but the rest meant nothing to him. No Baker, Flood, or Crocker.
The phone would have to be run. He set it aside and turned to the room, starting with the chest of drawers. He pulled each drawer three-quarters of the way out, felt through the underwear and summer clothing, then pulled each drawer completely free to look under it.
Under the bottom drawer he found a plastic baggie containing a couple of joints and a package of rolling papers. He thought about it for a moment, then put the dope and the papers in his pocket.
Going to the closet, he shook down all the clothing, looking for paper, found a few gasoline receipts. Nothing in the shoes.
On impulse, he went back to the computer and typed in "gay" and "homosexual" and "homo" and the computer shook him off. He lifted the mattress off the box springs, found nothing. He went through the desk drawer, found it stuffed with receipts, ticket stubs, photographs. Nothing that set off a buzz.
He started sifting through papers and books, looking for anything that might be personal. Not much-no notes from anyone, just old schoolwork. The backpack contained workout clothes and two twenty-pound weights, probably to work his quads, and a printed-out calendar with a workout schedule on it, over the background image of a running horse, its tail flaring out behind it.
And a much-folded piece of copy paper, with a line drawing of the Statue of Liberty on it. No words, just the drawing. There was a long oval drawn from the base of the statue right up to its face, which might have been the number "eight" but, if so, heavily distorted, with the upper loop nearly round, the lower loop a very long oval. The distortion seemed to mean something, Virgil thought, but he couldn't think what-but it looked as though the paper had been something that Tripp had looked at over and over, and carried with him on his daily workouts.
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