“But she didn’t go to Northwest.”
“No, but she knew kids who did. So they were checking out the guys.”
Wenner didn’t have much more—said he’d be back to Homestead for the funeral, that he’d be a pallbearer. “I knew that guy since first grade. I didn’t care if he was gay, he was a good guy.”
“You didn’t see the violence in him?”
“I didn’t, except on the football field,” Wenner said. “The Flood thing is hard to believe. Maybe he was framed, or something. You think?”
“Not really,” Virgil said. “It’s pretty clear he killed Flood. Listen, if you think of anything else, call me. You can get me through the BCA, or I may see you at the funeral.”
“One more thing,” Wenner said. “Pat Sullivan and Bob were talking quite a bit, and we were all talking at the Dairy Queen a few times, and Kelly was there. If Sullivan ever saw who Kelly was hanging with, another guy . . . that might be the one. If she was really involved in some heavy sex things, maybe she gathered up gay guys to be her friends. You know, people she could trust.”
“Good thought, Jay. Thank you.”
HE CALLED Pat Sullivan. He was told the reporter was in Mankato for a regional flood-preparation meeting and wouldn’t be back until late.
VIRGIL MET Coakley back at her office, where she’d been talking with a couple of deputies. She looked up when he stuck his head in, and she said, “You got something.”
“Maybe. I need all that paper from Iowa, again, and a place to read it.”
She looked at him for a long moment, considering him, and not in a collegial way, Virgil thought, and then she nodded.
And Virgil thought: If what Wenner said was true, and Baker had set Tripp up with a homosexual contact, then there was at least one person out there who might know as much as Baker did—and exactly what kind of activities Baker had been into. But tracking that person down would be a problem, especially if he had to do it without broadcasting the fact that Tripp had been gay.
He would do that—broadcast, sit in the café and tell the patrons about it—if it became necessary, but he hoped it wouldn’t.
Coakley got him the Iowa paper, a spot in an interview room, and a Diet Coke, and he started wading through the paper again, looking for anything that might pinpoint a possible lover.
Two hours: he found nothing.
COAKLEY WAS STARING at a computer, and he asked, “Are you online?”
“Yes. What’s up?” she asked.
“Could we go out to Google Earth and spot the Baker place?” Virgil asked.
“We can.” She hit a few keys, enlarged the screen a couple of times, found the house, lost it, found it again, and enlarged to the maximum. “What do you need?”
“I want to know who lives in the houses closest to them.” Virgil got her to change the scale up and down, to get a map of a couple dozen farmhouses within a couple miles of the Baker place. “Print that,” he said. And, “I wonder who runs the rural route out there?”
“We can find that out,” Coakley said, looking at her watch. “Should still be some carriers around.”
She got on the phone, called the post office, talked to somebody, hung up, and said, “Clare Kreuger’s your girl. She’s not there at the moment, but she’s due back in anytime.”
“Good—now, where’s the post office?”
“Are you going back out there? To the Bakers’?” Coakley asked.
“Yeah. Gonna whisper in the ears of the neighbors . . . after I talk to Clare.”
KREUGER WAS SKEPTICAL: “What you’re saying is, you want to turn their friends against them.”
“No, no. I don’t want friends. I want people who already don’t like them,” Virgil said.
“That just seems rotten,” the carrier said. She was a dusty-looking woman, who looked like she’d spent too much time in the wind. She wore a nylon parka, nylon wind pants, and galoshes. They were standing at the post office loading dock, where Clare had parked.
“It is a little rotten,” Virgil said. “But we have four dead people, and a killer still on the loose. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.”
Kreuger said, “Neither would I. But you got me. Too many dead people. I know there’s bad blood between the Bakers and Brian Craig, because of a drainage problem off the Bakers’ land that they’ve never been able to work out. There’s another guy, Peter Van Mann, and I don’t think they get along, either. I don’t know what the problem is, something about a dog. That’s before my time on the route. Let’s go inside, and I’ll spot them on the map. . . .”
THE SUN WAS SLIDING hard to the southwest when Virgil pulled into the Craig place. Craig, said his wife, was out in the barn trying to fix the front frame of a hay wagon, which had bent while they were pulling in the last cut of hay in late summer. They had lived with it then, but once winter shut down the field work, it was time to do repairs.
Virgil found Craig struggling to get the left side of the frame up on a jack, under a couple of work lights. He saw Virgil come through the door, stopped struggling, and asked, “Who are you?”
“A cop. State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to you for a bit.”
“About what?”
“About Kelly Baker, and the Bakers in general,” Virgil said.
“I don’t know much about Kelly. . . .”
His wife pushed through the door behind them. She’d pulled on a letter jacket and run over to listen in.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” Virgil said. “We’ve got a hell of a problem here and . . .” He hesitated, then asked, “What’s the deal with your frame?”
“I cut out the bent part, and when I jack up one side, there’s enough torque to twist the frame when I’m jacking up the other.”
“Let me give you a hand with that.”
Craig didn’t say no, and they spent five minutes getting both sides of the front frame up on jacks and lined up to each other. Craig fit a piece of steel across the gap and clamped it in place, put on welding glasses, and said, “Don’t look at the spot.” He made a number of quick welds to hold it square, and the barn was suffused with the odor of burning iron. When it cooled, he used a spare piece of L-bar to check the squareness, and took the clamps off.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You want to come in for coffee?” his wife asked. “It’s pretty cold out here.”
Virgil shrugged, and Craig said, “Might as well. I can do the final weld anytime, now.”
They sat at the kitchen table, and Virgil said, “I understand that you and the Bakers haven’t always gotten along. One thing cops do is, we talk to people who don’t like other people, because they’re usually less reluctant to talk. It sounds mean, but that’s the way it is.”
“Does sound mean,” Craig’s wife said, and Virgil said, “You didn’t mention your first name.”
“Judy,” she said.
“It is mean,” Virgil said. “But we’re talking some nasty murders here. I’ve spoken to the Bakers, and what they tell me isn’t as consistent with the evidence as it should be.”
“For example?” Craig asked.
“For example, Jacob Flood and members of the Flood family say they don’t know the Bakers that well, and the Bakers agree with that, but we’ve talked to other people who have suggested that they’re actually quite close. And that they’re all involved in a fundamentalist religion that’s really pretty tight.”
Craig and his wife glanced at each other, and then Judy Craig asked, “What do you know about their so-called religion?”
“Nothing,” Virgil said. “It seems to be pretty private, but you do see some of that around.”
Brian Craig leaned forward and tapped his finger on the table. “Our kids both go to public schools, and I’ll tell you what: I do not encourage them to hang around with anybody from this church. I just don’t want those people around them.”
“Tell me why you feel like that,” Virgil said. “I’m not talking abou
t formal testimony, here. Nobody’s going to write anything down. Anything helps . . .”
The couple glanced at each other again, and then Judy Craig said, “You see people every day out here, and even if you don’t talk much, you know them. Know when they have babies, for example, and about how old their kids are. Even when they don’t go to school. You know what I mean?”
“Sure. I’m a small-town kid,” Virgil said.
“Okay. If you keep track of what’s happening around the countryside, it doesn’t take too many years to realize that all the people from this church are intermarrying with each other, and some of them, the girls especially, at a pretty early age. And to some pretty odd guys. You see a lot of eighteen-year-olds getting married to guys who are thirty or forty, and you wonder, how’d they get to know each other that well? When they are that young? Then Kelly gets murdered, and the Iowa police came around and asked if we knew who she dated, and we said, ‘No,’ because we didn’t. We had no idea she was dating anybody. But every once in a while, you’d see her riding around with some older guy, somebody old enough to be her father, somebody who’s already married. All members of the religion.”
“Do you think, uh, these young girls are being abused?” Virgil asked.
“Haven’t ever seen any proof—but I wouldn’t want my kids around them,” Brian Craig said, unknowingly echoing the verdict of the man who’d known that Bobby Tripp was gay.
“They meet on Sunday? I understand they meet in people’s barns and so on.”
“Yes. Not everybody’s barns, just a few of them. The Floods, the Bochers, the Steinfelds. The biggest barns, all sealed up, with some heat. They meet Wednesday nights, too. Sundays in the mornings, Wednesdays after dark. Sometimes they’ve got something going on Fridays.”
They talked about that for a while, and then Virgil moved on to the Tripp angle: “Had you ever seen Kelly Baker around with a boy who you thought might be gay?”
Craig frowned. “Don’t have many gays out here.”
“There must be some,” Virgil said. “There usually are.”
“I just wouldn’t know that,” Craig said.
“Do you know Peter Van Mann?”
“Sure, we know Pete,” Craig said. “He’s not gay. What’d he do?”
“I was told he’s another guy who might not care for the Bakers.”
“That’s true,” Judy Craig said. “He once had a German shepherd who bit Louise Baker pretty bad. He paid for the doctor and everything, but then the Bakers sued him for pain and suffering, and they won. He had to sell off some land to pay up.”
“She wasn’t disfigured or anything, was she? I didn’t notice anything,” Virgil said.
“No, not much of that. I think it was just pain and suffering,” Craig said. “They saw their chance, and they took it.”
Craig, on his way back to the barn, walked Virgil to his truck and said, “If you really need to find out what’s going on in that church, it’s gonna be tough. I don’t know anybody around here who really walked away from it. It’s all the same families, and they stick to it.”
VIRGIL WENT DOWN the road to the Van Mann place, and saw a lonely figure walking up a snow-packed drive, followed by a black Labrador retriever. Virgil turned in, and he and the man got to the farmyard at the same time. Virgil hopped out of his truck, introduced himself, and Van Mann said, “Come on in. Come on, Jack.”
They settled at the kitchen table, with Jack lying by Virgil’s feet, where he could smell Virgil’s pants.
Peter Van Mann was a widower farmer, a tall, thin bald man with gold-rimmed glasses and a way of looking at Virgil from the corner of his green eyes. From their chairs, they could look out through a bay window, at a tree with a tire swing. His kids had all gone out to California, Van Mann said, one after another, looking for jobs in computers. “They won’t be coming back, except to sell off the property when I croak,” he said.
“Gets dark here in the winter,” Virgil said.
“And quiet and cold,” Van Mann said. “I think it was the quiet that pushed them out. I’ve always liked it, the quiet and cold both.”
His wife, he said, had died of cancer, which he suspected was brought on by farm chemicals used when she was a girl, after World War II. “I can remember when the mosquito sprayers used to come, and blast everything with DDT. We’d walk around in a cloud of it, sometimes. Now I think we’re paying for it.”
He didn’t have much to say about the Bakers, except that their lawsuit against him had been a fraud. “The thing is, there’s a lot of asparagus that grows in the ditches, and Louise Baker was out cutting a mess of it. Old Pat, that was my dog back then, went after her. I don’t know why, he’d never bit anybody before. I suspect she threw a rock at him or hit him with a stick or something, though she says he just came at her. Anyway, she got bit, no doubt about that. Mabel Gentry, she was the rural route carrier out here then—this was years ago, maybe twenty years now, all the kids were still here—carried her down to her house, and then her old man took her to the doc. I paid for that, a couple hundred bucks, she had stitches and pills and so on. Then they sued. This was back when farming times was pretty bad. When they won, I had to sell forty acres to pay them off. Land prices was nowhere at the time. That same land is worth five or six times as much now. Pains me every time I see somebody on it.”
“So why was it a fraud?”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly, but you know what I mean,” Van Mann said. “Things happen when you’re farming. She was bit, and it hurt, but it was nothing anybody else would have thought was serious. No farmers, anyway. And sure as hell not fifty thousand dollars’ worth.”
“No insurance?”
“Let it slip—the liability. Like I said, things were really tough back then,” Van Mann said. “This was back before gasohol.”
They talked about bad times for a couple of minutes, and Van Mann said that he didn’t know much about the church, but that his father had said that it was “bad business” and wouldn’t talk about it. “They keep to themselves, and always have. They’re very tight. Don’t socialize with their neighbors, don’t get involved in politics, never run for anything.”
“Is there a sex thing going on in the church?”
Van Mann leaned back and crossed his legs, a defensive move, but then said, “The thought has occurred to me. But I don’t have any direct information.”
“You ever know anybody to take off? Leave the church?”
Van Mann’s eyes narrowed as he thought about it, and he said, “There was some talk about a woman who ran away to somewhere. Her name was Birdy, that’s what I remember about it. Must have been ten or twelve years ago. Birdy Olms. I can’t remember what the situation was, or even how I know about it, but it seems to me that she was going to a doc, and left the office, and when her husband came to pick her up, she was gone. They went looking for her, and it turns out she’d gotten on a bus and that was it.”
“Never came back?”
“Not that I know of. She was an outsider. From up north, somewhere. I don’t know where Roland Olms picked her up. “
“Birdy Olms.”
“Yup.”
Virgil asked the gay question, and Van Mann shook his head. “The thing about those people is that they’re standoffish. If Kelly Baker knew a gay boy, he was probably a member of the church. Or maybe a relative.”
“She worked at a Dairy Queen in the summer.”
“Yeah, you see some of them working around,” Van Mann said. “I think maybe the Bakers needed the money. For somebody who’s been doing it as long as he has, Baker is one horseshit farmer.”
BY THE TIME Virgil left Van Mann’s place, it was dark. He tried calling the newspaper again, and was told that Sullivan had already filed his copy from Mankato, and might be heading north to the Cities to spend the night.
He called Coakley as he turned onto I-90 and said, “Holiday Inn, twenty minutes?”
“The restaurant. See you there.”
; He thought about that as he drove into the gathering darkness: they could have met at the restaurant, or they could have met in his room. He’d known and carefully observed a reasonably large number of women in his life, and the choice of the restaurant was significant, he thought, and in a good way.
COAKLEY WAS BACK in civilian clothes, tan canvas jeans, a black blouse and deep green sweater, and her cowboy boots. Virgil had found a booth well away from the three that were already occupied, and she slid in across from him and said, “I can’t do it.”
“Really.”
She leaned toward him and said, “I want to, but I just can’t jump into bed with somebody, cold. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon.”
“So have I,” Virgil said.
“And what do you think?”
Virgil leaned back and closed his eyes and said, “You know what? It’s been a while since I’ve been in bed with a woman, and I miss it. I’m just . . . needy enough . . . that I would have gone for it, and tried to patch the holes later. You are a seriously attractive woman. But this is better. We need to talk a lot more. Then jump in bed.”
“Deal,” she said, and she smiled, and the smile lit up the booth—and Virgil’s heart as well. But then, his heart wasn’t all that hard to light up. “God, you made that easy. Is it because you’re generous, or because you’re slick?”
“Hey, I’m from Marshall. There aren’t any slick guys from Marshall.”
“I once knew a slick guy from there,” she said.
“Now you’re lying,” Virgil said. “There are no slick guys from Marshall.”
“No, no, really—his name was Richard Reedy—”
“Richard,” Virgil said, laughing. “I know Richard. He was two years ahead of me. My God, you’re right. He used to wax his hair, so he had this little pointy thing that stuck up from his forehead, like the crest on a cardinal. He used to wear sport coats to school when he didn’t have to.”
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