"Bullshit. You done it because you wanted to. If it had to be done, there'd be better ways to do it," Einstadt said. "Coulda had him out to the house, taken him out back, and buried the body in the field. Never would have found it in a thousand years."
"That's water down the drain," she said. "I had to do something, and I did it."
Morgan took a step toward her, but spoke to the others: "We oughta get her airtight one more time, then wring her neck."
She lifted her hand from over the arm of the couch, with the.45 in her grip, and laid the hand and gun across her lap. "Time to leave," she said.
A quick relay of glances, and Rooney took a step back. She was crazier than a bucket of frogs. WHEN THEY'D GONE, Spooner put the.45 back in the couch sleeve, looked out to the parking lot, saw them talking and looking up at her apartment window. Cold out: steam coming out of their mouths as they talked, mostly Morgan and Einstadt. Rooney's opinions were given to him by Einstadt, especially since he'd given Rooney Alma and the girls.
Maybe, Spooner thought, she ought to give a gun to Alma. Or the girls. Surprise that old sonofabitch someday. She waited until the men got in their trucks and rolled out of the parking lot, then went and put a Lean Cuisine chicken carbonara in the microwave. While she waited for it to ding, she thought about Morgan and his threat, went and got the small 9mm Taurus pistol from her purse, and put it in the pocket of her fleece.
The microwave dinged, and she took out the plastic tray, ate standing up at the kitchen counter, thought about DNA, thought she should know more about it, and had just tossed the tray into the trash when the doorbell rang.
The doorbell hadn't rung unexpectedly more than three or four times since she'd been in the apartment. She went to the door and looked through the peephole, and saw a tall, blond man, hatless, waiting in the hall. Didn't know him. Wary, she left the chain on the door, opened it, and peeked out.
"Yes?"
Virgil said, "Miz Spooner? I'm Virgil Flowers, with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I'm investigating the death of your ex-husband, and some related problems. I'd like to talk to you a minute."
"Oh…" A chill ran up her spine. They were already here. "I've got to get back to work," she said. "I'm due back in ten minutes."
"I could talk to your boss. I'm sure he'd be cooperative…"
She looked at him for another two seconds, then said, "Let me get the chain." She took the chain off, opened the door, and said, "Come in. I really haven't seen Jim in a long time. I heard about it, him being killed, but I just… I mean, I felt a little sad, I guess, we were married for five years, but that's all back then."
And Virgil thought, Interesting. She's lying already.
Virgil stepped inside, looked around. Compact kitchen off to the left, with the smell of pasta still in the air; a small living room straight ahead, down a hall, with another door to the left, presumably to a bedroom. Neat, not expensive. "Okay, well, if we could sit down for five minutes…"
They sat in the living room, Virgil taking the couch as it faced the television, and started with a thirty-second summary of what he thought: that Tripp had killed Flood for reasons unknown, that Crocker had killed Tripp to hide something that Tripp had known-something linked to the killing-and that both killings were somehow linked to the murder of Kelly Baker.
"Do you know if Jim knew any of those people? The Floods, the Bakers, the Tripp family… any of those?"
"He and Jake Flood were old friends since they were kids," she said. "We all came from the same place. And we knew the Bakers, 'cause we were all from the same part of the county, and the same business. Went to church services together."
"You're from the same area? Over around Battenberg?"
"Oh, yeah-my folks have a farm a mile down the road from the Floods. They all go back like to the nineteen hundreds, the families. Came from Germany. So we all know each other." As she was talking, she was trying in her mind to stay out front of the conversation: what he could find out easily, she'd tell him, so she couldn't be caught in a lie.
"When Iowa investigated, I guess they talked to all the folks in the church to see if anybody knew or heard anything?" Virgil asked.
She shook her head: "I don't think the church ever came into it. It's not really a church, you know. There's no church. We'd have services at different people's houses, usually in the barn, unless it's too cold. Sometimes, there'll be a couple different services going on, so we don't all go to the same one. We talk about the Bible, and all of that."
"Huh. Okay." Virgil scratched his head. "I thought Iowa had been all over everything-that they'd have talked to all of the Bakers' friends and neighbors. Anyway, when Kelly Baker was killed, did you have any feeling of what she might have been involved in? Who she might have been hanging with? Was she still going to the religious services, or had she dropped away?"
"I really couldn't tell you. I mean, she was there, but the Bakers are down at the far south end of the county, so we didn't see them every day," Spooner said. "I really don't know. I mean, I guess… they say, the word is, she was sexually active. I was surprised, but I wasn't really close enough to her to have any… instinct… about that. Maybe she was working in town, maybe she got loose somehow. I don't know."
"Were you homeschooled?"
"Oh, yes," she said. "Reading, writing, arithmetic, German. Every year, for thirteen years, five days a week."
"Is that part of the, uh, religion?"
"That's one of the main parts-to keep the kids away from the influences in schools," she said. She glanced at her watch. "I've really got to go."
Virgil asked, "Jim-was he violent with you?"
She shook her head: "No. Jim was boring. That's why I left. He'd get up, eat eggs, go to work, come home, eat dinner, sit on the couch and drink beer, go to bed. Every day. I couldn't see living my whole life like that. This idea that he could have killed the Tripp boy… I mean, that's very strange. I couldn't believe it."
"Do you know if he was dating anyone?"
"I don't know. Really. I haven't seen him in years… All I know is history." She looked at her watch again and said, "Now I've got two minutes to walk two blocks."
"Come on," Virgil said, "I'll give you a ride. Where do you work?"
"At the CVS. I'm the assistant manager, I take care of the non-pharmacy items."
On the way down the hall, zipping their parkas, he said, "I'm interested in the relationship between Jacob Flood and the Bakers. Flood and Baker both being murdered. Were they close?"
"Everybody in the church is fairly close-that's mostly eighty or a hundred families, I guess. But I don't know that the Floods were any closer to the Bakers than anybody else-they're at the other end of the county from each other."
Virgil said, "I chatted with Emmett Einstadt about Jacob Flood, and their relationships with the Bakers, Kelly Baker. He seemed to have about the same feeling as you did-close, but not every day. He was pretty upset about Kelly, you know, in a German way. If you know what I mean… My mother is pure German."
She smiled. "I do know," she said. "Emmett never shows much, but because there aren't so many church members, compared to the big churches, when somebody dies, you feel it. He gave a nice talk at her funeral."
Virgil nodded and said, "That's good. That's good." They were outside, and he pointed her at the truck, and they climbed inside.
"How long has the church been around? Is this a longtime thing, or did you all get converted?"
"Been around since the families came over from the Old Country," Spooner said. "My great-grandfather was in it."
"Most people marry into the church?"
"Oh, yeah. Because we know each other all our lives, and we have all these background things-don't go to regular schools, so we don't have any regular school friends. I always thought I might marry an outsider, if I fell in love, but when it came time to get married, I wound up with Jim. Somebody I'd known all my life."
They pulled into the pharmacy, and Virgil s
aid, "I might come back and talk to you again. I'm puzzled about Jim's part in all of this. Why he might kill somebody like Tripp, and why he'd be so quickly killed in return."
"I don't have the faintest idea," she said. "But if the Tripp boy knew both Kelly and Jacob, and you know he killed one of them…"
"But then why did Jim kill him?"
"That's the mystery," she said. "The only thing I can think of, is that he went a little crazy if the boy told him about killing Jake. Maybe he made a joke out of it, or something. Jim and Jake grew up together-they used to hunt and trap together, when they were kids, wander around the countryside. That's all I can think of."
"But then who'd kill Jim? And why?"
She shrugged. "Don't know. Have you investigated the Tripps?"
"Well, we think the killer was a woman."
"Oh. Well, it wasn't me," she said. "Mrs. Tripp is a woman…"
"You're right. You're right. I'll think about that," Virgil said. He put out his hand and they shook, and she popped the door and climbed out, wiggled her fingers at him as she went through the door.
Virgil sat staring at the door for a minute, running it all through his head.
Einstadt had lied about not knowing the Bakers; he knew them quite well. That seemed critical, somehow. With Crocker being close to Flood, and married to Spooner, the church seemed more and more central to the whole situation. The only person not involved with it was Bobby Tripp.
And he wondered who'd been in Spooner's apartment, not very long before himself, who'd left behind the damp footprints on the carpet, big bootlike footprints. And whether those footprints had anything to do with the fact that the hausfrau-looking Kathleen Spooner had a pistol in her pocket.
And he wondered about the color of the lipstick found on Crocker's penis. Most Minnesota working women didn't use lipstick, during the day, anyway. It was like a Minnesota thing. But Spooner wore it. Could the crime-scene people get enough of it off Crocker to match it to lipstick in Spooner's bathroom or dressing table?
Stuff to think about: and while he was thinking about it, he carefully peeled off his parka and pulled back the sleeve of his shirt. He had a two-inch piece of double-sided carpet tape on his wrist. The sticky side was covered with fuzz, with a few dark hairs, from Kathleen Spooner's couch.
Should be enough for DNA, he thought, if the lab guys would just give him the time. He peeled the tape off his wrist and stuck it in a Ziploc bag. Might not be an entirely legal search, but he was invited in… and once he knew, he could always come back.
Or not.
9
Virgil headed south to Iowa, and called Bell Wood, the agent with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation: "I'm going down to Estherville," he said, when Wood came up. "There're interesting things going on, and I need to talk to John Baker and his family."
"You won't get much. They were pretty much mystified-Kelly backed out of their driveway and went on down the road," Wood said. "We took a look at them, and nothing came up. We interviewed them all separately-John and… I can't remember the wife's name…"
"Luanne."
"Yeah. John and Luanne, and their kids, and they all had the same story. Not rehearsed, just… the same."
"All right. But I want to ask them about these new killings, see if they knew any of the people involved… Did you guys look into their religion?"
"Not really. I remember they were churchy. Very dark dressers, kids homeschooled, and all that."
"Huh. Okay-listen, would it be possible to get a highway patrol guy, or maybe an Estherville cop, whichever is better, to ride along with me? Somebody with an Iowa badge?"
"Let me make a call," Wood said. "I'll get back to you before you're there."
"Thanks."
"Virgil… you're getting somewhere?"
"Somewhere. But it's murky. I'll stay in touch."
The highway patrolman's name was Bill Clinton, "but not that Bill Clinton," he said, as he shook Virgil's hand. He was a thick-set, shaved-head man of perhaps thirty-five; he had three fleshy wrinkles that rolled down the back of his neck like stair steps. They'd hooked up at a cafe across the street from the Emmet County Courthouse.
"Hope you're a Democrat, anyway," Virgil said. Virgil got a cup of coffee while Clinton finished his lunch.
Clinton shook his head. "Lifelong Republican. My old man is the Republican county chairman down in Sac County. But I didn't mind-it was kinda fun. I was in the army back then."
Virgil gave him a quick outline of the investigation, and Clinton whistled and said, "Man, that's a hell of thing."
"You heard anything about Kelly Baker since last year?"
"Oh, sure, all kinds of stuff. But it's all bullshit," Clinton said. "There was a cop from Des Moines who came up here on his own and was poking around, looking for Satanists. One of the churches here, pretty fundamental, he got the pastor all churned up, but it didn't come to anything. Nobody believed it."
"Neither do I," Virgil said. "I've met a couple Satanists. They're about what you expect-people who never got over Halloween."
Clinton nodded. "Exactly right. People here are pretty commonsensical. The thing nobody could get around was what actually happened to her. The state ran the investigation, but technically, the Emmet County sheriff was in charge, so they got all the reports. When the autopsy came in, word about it got out in a couple of hours. Whips and multiple partners. People here look at the Internet, just like anybody, but they don't believe that stuff happens here. Not with little farm girls."
Virgil had called ahead to the Bakers' and had gotten directions on how to get there. Clinton left his patrol car in Estherville, and they rode together out to the Baker place. The Bakers' house was a low, pale yellow rambler, with a miniature windmill in the front yard and an attached garage. The usual collection of farm sheds and buildings stood behind it, along with an early-twentieth-century brick silo, with no roof. A collection of rusted farm machinery was parked behind the old silo.
As they went up the drive, Virgil asked, "You know anything about these folks?"
"Not a thing. I looked them up after Bell Wood called, and law enforcement doesn't even know they exist. Not even a traffic ticket."
John Baker was Kelly Baker's uncle. He was a tall, thin man with hollowed cheeks, long, lank black hair and a beard going gray; he wore oversized steel-framed glasses, like aviators, dark trousers, and a dark wool shirt. His wife was more of the same, without the beard, and with smaller glasses, and an ankle-length skirt that looked homemade.
A brilliant crazy quilt, made of postage-stamp-sized snips of cloth, hung from pegs on the front-room wall; Virgil liked quilts, and this was a good one. He took a minute to look at it, as they were sitting down, and realized that in its natural craziness, it concealed a spring landscape.
The house smelled of vegetable soup-very good vegetable soup-and something else, some kind of herb, perhaps.
"Terrific quilt," he said to Luanne Baker.
She nodded, and then, almost reluctantly, "My mom made it." She had a dry, tinny voice, and Virgil realized that she was frightened.
Virgil smiled and asked, "Do you quilt yourself?"
"Yes, I do," she said, and nothing more.
John Baker asked, "Is this about Kelly? It must be."
Virgil said, "Yes, it is…" He looked around, tipping his head, and asked, "I understand you have kids?"
"They're over at a neighbor's," John Baker said. "We got them out of the way of this-they're scared enough."
"All right," Virgil said. "What we've got going up north… you may have heard some of it-"
"You have a killer running around loose," John Baker said.
"Yes. And we think the killer knows something about what happened to Kelly. We're linking up the cases. For one thing, Kelly, and two other victims, Jim Crocker and Jacob Flood, are members of your church. That doesn't necessarily mean anything-there are a lot of church members out in the same area-"
"A lot of people don't li
ke us. They say we're standoffish," Luanne Baker blurted. "Kelly was wearing her bonnet when she left, and I think some perverts spotted her and they took her right off the street. This boy who killed Jacob, he must've been one of them."
Virgil shook his head. "That really doesn't fit with the facts, Mrs. Baker. It appears that Kelly had been with these men more than once."
"I don't believe it," she said. "She was a good, cheerful girl. I would have spotted something like that. We all would have. There's something rotten in the state of Iowa, and I think that medical examiner is part of it. You know, he's a Muslim?"
"I don't see-"
"Then you should look harder," John Baker said. "A good Christian girl gets kidnapped off the city streets and who examines the body? A Muslim. And what happens? People start saying stuff about our church. Start tearing it down." THEY ALL SAT looking at one another for a moment, the Bakers rigid in their chairs, Bill Clinton staring at them with his mouth open, not quite in amusement, and Virgil finally said, "Why don't we just talk about what happened that day? When Kelly was here. Did she leave in a rush? Was she in a hurry? Did she seem like she had an appointment?"
John Baker: "No. You know why she came down?"
"I don't-"
"She was going down to the locker in Estherville. My brother and I go in together on a couple of stocker calves every spring; we got a piece of pasture down by the crick. We take 'em to the locker in the fall, and she drove down to pick up some beef. She stopped here on the way."
"There was no beef in her car when it was found," Virgil said.
"No. She never got there. There were two women and a man working at the locker place, and they said they never saw her. The police believed them, and so do I. I know them, a bit, and they're okay, in my opinion."
Virgil said, "So she left here, in daylight, and went to Estherville, and something happened there. She met somebody or was picked up, probably in daylight, if she was on her way to the locker-"
"That's not the way I see it," Baker said. "I think somebody probably stopped her on the road, flagged her down, asking for directions or something, or acted like they was having car problems, and they took her. And the accomplice drove the car to Estherville. There's parking right at the locker, and the car was found four or five blocks from there."
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