“I saw him up in the Cities a couple of years ago,” she said. “He wears these plutonium suits and his hair is still waxed and he’s got one of those little telephone clip things on his ear, like he’s expecting a call from his agent,” she said. “Like his movie is being made.”
They both had a nice laugh, and then Virgil said, “All right. Now. Whoops, here comes a waiter. Shoo him away.”
She did and Virgil went on: “I’m getting more and more of a feeling that there’s something seriously wrong with this church. And that it might involve underage sex on a pretty wide scale. How underage, I don’t know.”
“Farm girls, not all of them, but some of them, can grow up pretty early. Sex is no big mystery if you grow up on a farm with animals,” Coakley said. “And when you’re out in the country, you spend quite a bit of time on your own, if you want. It’s easy to sneak off with a boyfriend.”
Virgil nodded. “Get a blanket out in a cornfield and you’re good.”
“Except you get corn cuts all over your butt, and itch like crazy,” she said.
They looked at each other and laughed again, and then she said, “If it’s under age seventeen, I think people would look past it. If it’s under age thirteen, we could get a lynch mob going.”
“Think about the fact that Kelly Baker was pretty badly abused, in a hard-core way, a porno-movie way,” Virgil said. “Whips. Multiple partners, possibly simultaneously, according to the Iowa ME. And that she’d been previously abused in the same way, and that nobody can find any sign that she was hooking, or any partners.”
“Virgil, that’s really ugly, what you’re thinking,” Coakley said, dead sober.
“Yes. It is.”
He told her about trying to call Sullivan, based on the interview with Tripp’s friend Jay Wenner, that she already knew about. “These farm guys, Craig and Van Mann, kept coming back to the fact that these church people are really tight with each other, and don’t much socialize with outsiders. If this gay kid was a friend of Kelly Baker, then he’s probably a church kid, and he probably knows everything she did. About everything. We need to find him. We need to talk to Sullivan, soon as we can.”
“He’s probably with his friend up there. You think we should try to track him down?”
“Ah, they told me he’s working tomorrow, so we can probably get him early tomorrow. Can’t do much more tonight, anyway,” Virgil said.
“Have you thought about the possibility of spying on one of these church meetings?”
He smiled: “Yes.”
“I’m up for that.”
“It’d have to be one of your guys you absolutely trust,” Virgil said. “It’s possible that Crocker was actually planted on the department by the church. . . . If you’re involved in some kind of mass child abuse thing, even if it’s religion-based, you’re going to be curious about what the local law enforcement agency is up to.”
She said, “It’ll be someone we can trust. Me.”
He nodded. “Okay. We’ll be like ninjas, black ghosts slipping unseen across the Minnesota countryside.”
“Probably get eaten by hogs,” she said.
“Minnesota ninjas fear no hogs,” Virgil said.
“And what else?”
“We need to track down a woman named Birdy Olms,” Virgil said. He explained. “With a name like that, I think we’ve got a chance.”
“I’ll get on that. And your DNA sample is at your lab. Jeanette took it up, and said they whined at her.”
“Yeah, well, I got my boss to jack them up,” Virgil said. “The problem is, everybody wants DNA. DNA for everything. We’re jumping the line, which pisses everybody off.”
“We’ve got four dead,” she said.
“But if the DNA pans out, we’ll have a hammerlock on Spooner. She grew up in the church, but she’s already stepped away from them. If we can get her with a murder charge, we might be able to open her up.”
She thought about that, and then said, “They’ve been out there for a long time, this church. I wonder what they’d do if they thought it was about to come down on them?”
11
Patrick Sullivan, the reporter, woke Virgil at seven o’clock in the morning: “Hope I didn’t wake you up. I just found your message.”
“I need to talk to you,” Virgil said. “Are you at home?”
“Right now, I am. I need to get cleaned up and head into work by eight,” Sullivan said.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Virgil said.
He got cleaned up in a rush, stood for an extra minute in a hot shower, storing up some warmth, dressed, and headed out. The predawn was bitterly cold, the dry air like a knife against his face; and dark, as the season rolled downhill to the winter solstice, and the days were hardly long enough to remember. Sullivan had given him simple directions, and Virgil was at the curb outside his house twenty-nine minutes after he’d gotten out of bed, street-lights twinkling down the way.
Sullivan lived on the second floor of a stately white-and-teal Victorian on Landward Avenue. When Virgil arrived, the reporter was in the driveway, chipping frost off the windshield of a three-year-old Jeep Cherokee.
“When did you get in?” Virgil asked, as they headed up the walk to his apartment. If he’d driven down from the Cities, he wouldn’t have been chipping frost.
“I came back late last night. I was afraid if I stayed over, I’d get jammed up in traffic. What’s up?”
“A couple more questions about Tripp,” Virgil said. Sullivan led the way through the front door and up an old wooden staircase with a polished mahogany railing curling around a halfway landing.
“Not bad,” Virgil said.
“The price is right,” Sullivan said. He unlocked the door of his apartment. “Up in the Cities, this place would cost me fifteen hundred more’n I’m paying here.” He had three rooms—living room, bedroom, and kitchen, with a bath off the bedroom. “Microwave some coffee?”
“Fine,” Virgil said. He took a chair at the kitchen table, and when Sullivan brought the cups over, took one, and Sullivan sat opposite. “So.”
“There’s a lot going on out there,” Virgil said. “Kelly Baker, these other killings, they’re all hooked together, I think. We’ve been talking to people, and one guy who should know tells us that Kelly hooked up Tripp with another gay guy. Probably somebody she knew from this church she belonged to.”
“And you want to know if I know who he is,” Sullivan said.
“In a nutshell.”
“I don’t,” Sullivan said. “I’d be a little surprised if Bob was sexually active.”
“What if he kept it from you? I mean, this would be something he might not even want to admit to himself, much less to somebody outside the relationship,” Virgil said. “Since whoever he is was a friend of Kelly’s, we wonder if you ever saw a guy hanging around with her, who might’ve given you a look . . .”
Sullivan stared down into his coffee for a minute, then said, “There’s something . . .”
Virgil took a sip of coffee, waiting.
“I didn’t hang around with Bob in public. He wasn’t ready for people to know. But I ran into him once at the Dairy Queen, and he and Baker were with another man. The other guy gave off this vibration. . . . I didn’t remember until you asked.”
“You know him?”
“No. He was a real tall guy,” Sullivan said. “I mean, six-seven or six-eight. Not real good-looking, but interesting-looking, like somebody had chipped him out of wood. Abe Lincoln.”
“How old?”
Sullivan fingered the rim of his ear, thinking, then said, “I can’t say for sure, but I’d say, older than Bobby. Twenties. Probably not thirty. Dark hair, wore it long. Not hippie-long—farmer-long.”
“Huh,” Virgil said. “Thank you.”
THAT WAS WHAT Sullivan had, and Virgil stood up to leave. “Give me one thing for my story,” Sullivan said. He reached over to the kitchen counter and picked up a narrow, half-used reporter’s note
book and a ballpoint. “Anything good.”
Virgil considered, then said, “We think we’ve linked the Baker killing to the murders of Jacob Flood and Bob Tripp. I can’t tell you more than that. I will say that we’ve collected a variety of evidence, which is now being processed by the BCA lab, and we could get a break in a day or two. Chemistry takes time. But—I would like you to attribute this to an unnamed source, if you can. If not . . . I could take some heat.”
“I can do that.” Sullivan scribbled in the notebook. “What about the evidence involving Bob in a homosexual affair?”
“We don’t know that there was one,” Virgil said. “I guess you can’t libel a dead man, but what’s the point in saying that, until it leads somewhere?”
Sullivan nodded and closed the notebook: “So—why are you looking into it? If it doesn’t matter?”
“The sex in itself doesn’t matter, though it might technically be a crime, if there’s a disparity of ages, and depending on when Bob’s birthday was.”
“Oh, horseshit . . .”
“I’m just sayin’,” Virgil said. “But the main thing is, if this other guy was tight with Baker, he might know what happened to her, and who might have done it. You’ve given me enough information that I think I can find him. And if he is older, and if he was involved with Tripp when he was a minor, then we might have a handy little sex-crime tool kit for getting him to talk.”
“But you’re not going to mess with him just because he’s gay.”
“Look—I really don’t care what people do with each other, as long as everybody consents. And they’re old enough to consent,” Virgil said. “I’ve got more important things to think about. Like what to have for lunch.”
“I knew you were a secret liberal,” Sullivan said.
OUT IN HIS TRUCK Virgil called Van Mann, the farmer whose dog had bitten Louise Baker. “I’ve got a question for you, which I’d appreciate it if you could keep it under your hat.”
“I can do that,” Van Mann said.
“I’m looking for a guy who may be a member of the church. . . .” He relayed Sullivan’s description.
“That’s probably Harvey Loewe,” Van Mann said. “He lives a couple of miles down south of me. He’s got an old farmhouse more or less across the road from his folks’ place. His folks are Joe and Marsha Loewe. Harvey’s probably twenty-six or twenty-seven. He would have been God’s gift to the Northwest High basketball team, if he’d gone to public school.”
“Is Harvey married?”
“No, I don’t believe so. Never really seen him with a woman,” Vann Mann said.
“Thank you. And listen, keep it—”
“Under my hat. I’ll do that.”
VIRGIL CALLED COAKLEY: “You up?”
“Not entirely,” she said. “I still got the boys to get out of here, and I’ve got to figure out my word for the day. Hang on—okay, it’s ‘porcine,’ which means related to pigs, or piglike. I have to use it five times, in context.”
“I’m going to go interview the homosexual guy who had the affair with Bobby Tripp. I need to spot his place, and—”
“Is he porcine?”
“Not as far as I know. But if you could look him up . . .”
“All right. And I’m coming,” she said. “Give me forty-five minutes.”
“I thought you might be,” Virgil said. “Bring a gun with you.”
“You think there might be trouble?” she asked.
“No, but we’re cops, and I think somebody should have a gun.”
VIRGIL WENT by the Yellow Dog for some pancakes. Jacoby came over with a cup of coffee and asked if there was anything new. “Not at the moment,” Virgil said. “But we’re pushing ahead.”
“Let me know,” Jacoby said. He dropped the cup of coffee on the table and went to get the pancakes.
Ten seconds later, a short, thin man with a waxed mustache stood up from the booth where he’d been reading the Star Tribune , folded it, looked around, and walked down and slipped into the booth opposite Virgil.
“I’m Rich,” he said.
Virgil nodded: “Good for you. Hard to get that way, with all the high taxes.”
The man half-smiled, showing brown teeth. He leaned forward on his elbows and said, “I know something that might be of interest in your investigation.”
“I’m listening,” Virgil said.
“Is there any kind of reward?”
Virgil nodded again: “The knowledge that you’ve helped your fellow man.”
“I was afraid of that,” the man said. His furtiveness seemed to be a built-in part of his personality, Virgil decided. “Anyhow. People are talking. They’re saying you’re looking at all these church people, out there in the sticks. And they might have been doing dirty by this Kelly Baker girl. That got me to thinking.”
Virgil said, “We’d be very interested in anything about Kelly Baker.”
“Not exactly about her. But I work down at the Wal-Mart. You know where that is?”
“I do.”
“So. I’m the photo technician. I used to run the print-making machine and so on, back when we developed film, and I got to know who was who in the local photography community. One of these church people out there, his name is Karl Rouse, this is back in the film days, he used to buy a load of Polaroid film. I mean, a load. You know what I mean?”
“A lot,” Virgil said. He took a sip of coffee.
“A load. And when people bought that much Polaroid, unless they were a real estate agent or something, I’d get ideas of what they were taking pictures of. You know?”
“Okay,” Virgil said. “You ever see any evidence of that?”
“No, not exactly. But I can tell you, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to shoot with a film camera and have us develop it. And he did that, too. He was a regular shutterbug, taking church pictures and so on. So I’m asking myself, ‘How come we’re only getting half of his business? The non-Polaroid part?’”
“But no real indication . . .”
“No. I can tell you, when digital came in, he was first in line to buy a photo printer, and he still buys a lot of paper from us. Keeps really busy. Anyhow, I thought you’d like to know that.”
“Well, I’ll keep it in mind,” Virgil said. “But I’ll tell you, there’s no Rouse in this investigation so far.”
Rich was disappointed, but said, “Well, you oughta take a look. I got an instinct for these things, and I think something was going on there.”
Jacoby came back and said, “Hey, Rich. You find a clue?”
“Maybe,” Rich said. He slid out of the booth. “I gotta get going, I’m due at work. But: think about that. I believe it could be important.”
“What was that?” Jacoby asked, when Rich was out the door.
“Nothing much, I’m afraid,” Virgil said. “Another guy trying to help out.”
Jacoby dropped his voice: “Not so much a guy, as the village idiot.”
VIRGIL PICKED COAKLEY up at her house, a pleasant wood-and-brick sixties rambler. She met him at the door, invited him in, led him through a kitchen that smelled like toast and peanut butter and jam, to a tiny office. “I’ve got Harvey Loewe’s house spotted on Google,” she said. She touched the mouse, and a satellite shot popped up on the screen. “He’s on Twentieth Street, way down here in the southwest. Right . . .” She reached out and pushed the scale on the map, then tapped the screen with a fingertip. “Here.”
The picture had been taken in the summer, in a raking, early-morning light, and Loewe’s house, which was white, stood out clearly in the green fields that ran right up to it.
“No yard,” Virgil said. “Not even a front yard. No outbuildings.”
“It’s like with Crocker. It’s an old vacant farmhouse,” she said. “Some of them get burned by the fire department, but some of them aren’t so bad. You can live in them, with a little work, if you’re handy. Most farm kids are.”
“His folks are right around there someplace,” Virgil sa
id. There was nothing exactly across the road, but there were single houses both east and west of Loewe’s, and both were across the road, and appeared to be inhabited. “I’d rather not have them know we’re talking to their kid, you know?”
On the way out, Virgil detailed his talk with Sullivan.
“Do you trust him?” Coakley asked.
“No, not entirely,” Virgil said. “He seems like a good enough guy, but he is a reporter, and they are weasels, just by their nature. Though I don’t know what he’d be hiding from us.”
“Maybe had a sexual relationship with Tripp that he’d rather not talk about,” Coakley suggested. “Talking about it could cause him some trouble. You know, with his boyfriend.”
“That’s possible. But I still don’t see where it’d take us. I think Tripp was the end of a string of information, and Sullivan would be even further out. We need to follow the string into the source, not further out.”
THEY FOUND Loewe taping 3M window-sealing plastic over his kitchen windows. He saw them coming, met them at the door. They told him what they were doing, and a transient little muscle spasm seemed to pass over his face, and the corners of his mouth turned down, but he was polite: “I don’t know how I can help, but come in.”
He was a tall man, who did look a bit like Lincoln, thin but hard, with knobby shoulders and hands, and big, square, slightly yellow teeth. His hair was as long as Virgil’s, and he was wearing low-rise jeans, a purple cotton shirt, and loafers. “Putting this plastic up—the house has got no insulation in the walls whatsoever. I put in sixteen inches of fiberglass in the attic, and when I get the windows sealed, I can at least keep the place warm without going broke.”
“You own it, or gonna buy it?” Coakley asked.
“Nah, probably not,” he said. “I’m thinking of moving up to the Cities, after next fall, go back to school.”
“Good idea,” Coakley said. “What’d you be taking?”
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