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 reporter, 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.
Virgil looked at the statue drawing, then the calendar with the horse, went back to the computer, typed “Mustangs”—the Southwest Minnesota State Mustangs, where Tripp would have gone to college—and the computer bit: he was in.
“Excellent,” he said to himself, as the Mac started to load.
He found 776 incoming e-mail messages and 538 outgoing. He clicked on the “From” queue to alphabetize the incoming messages, and found twenty-two from KBaker.
Nothing from a Crocker or a Flood.
With the sense that he was on to something, he began paging through the KBaker mail, noting the dates. The e-mail began in June of the summer before last, and rather than ending at the end of the summer, continued through the autumn, with the final KBaker note coming two days before Baker was killed.
As he went through the mail, his sense of anticipation dwindled: the exchanges were letters between teenagers, about when Baker would be in town, about who was dating whom, about summer jobs, about football. Baker was apparently religious: she mentioned a couple of times that she couldn’t come to town because she had to go to church that night: the nights included Tuesday and Friday.
Three interesting notes from Baker.
The first: “Definite stud muffin.”
The second: “I wish I could go with you. If I was in high school, it’d almost be like I was normal. You’re about the only outside person that I know, who knows how lonely this can be.”
The third: “Can’t: Got Liberty.”
The third note was the last e-mail from Baker, the one just before she was killed. He looked for antecedents to the two notes, either from Baker or Tripp, and found nothing. They were like remnants of oral conversations.
The e-mail, as a whole, had a curious flatness to it: no flirtation, nothing in the least controversial. Something, he thought, was missing—and he suspected that Tripp had cleaned it up. The “definite stud muffin” message struck Virgil as a reply to something—and possibly a hint that Baker knew that Tripp was gay, and was commenting on some previous e-mail about somebody Tripp was attracted to.
“Can’t: Got Liberty.” There was that paper in the backpack with the Statue of Liberty drawing on it. A connection? But to what? Or who? Was the capitalized word “Liberty” a proper noun, a specific person or place?
Could the computer guys recover the deleted mail? Have to try.
He looked through all the rest of the mail, scanning quickly, and most of it was the same as the mail to and from Kelly: meet me there, let’s do this or that, going up to the MOA with my folks. MOA was Mall of America, in the Twin Cities.
Huh.
He went to Safari, the browser, and clicked on “History,” and came up empty—not a single entry. He checked the settings and found that Tripp had set the browser to erase his website visits on a daily basis.
He went to the “Security” icon, clicked on it, and found that the computer was set to accept cookies from the sites Tripp visited. He clicked on “Show Cookies” and came up with a list that ran into the hundreds of items. Scanning down the list, he found a lot of what appeared to be sports sites and, from the names, what appeared to be gay porno sites.
All right, he knew that.
A thought popped into his head. What if Flood had somehow discovered that Tripp was gay, had ridiculed him, or challenged him—or even solicited him—and Tripp had lashed out purely in anger, with no other connection to anything?
No: Tripp had taken the T-ball bat from home. He’d gone to work prepared to kill Flood.
Besides, there were too many dead people for something that simple.
And where in the hell did a woman fit in, a killer?
Virgil continued working the room, no longer expecting to find much: Tripp had been covering himself.
THE TRIPPS WERE back in a little under an hour, and Virgil was done with the room, sitting on the bed, looking around, wondering what he’d missed. He heard them come in, sighed, stood up, picked up the cell phone and the computer, and walked down the hall to meet them.
“Find anything?” George Tripp asked.
“I don’t know—I
will
have to take the computer. Your son was e-mailing back and forth with Kelly Baker, right up until the time she was killed. They were pretty friendly. . . .”
“You figured out the password?”
“Mustangs,” Virgil said, and George Tripp showed the tiniest of smiles.
“How friendly were they?” Irma asked. She asked in a way, Virgil thought, that solicited a response that Bobby Tripp and Kelly Baker were in bed together. Because, Virgil realized, Irma knew or suspected that her son was gay.
“Friendly. I can’t say more than that, but there’s no feel of . . . violence in it,” Virgil said. “Of potential violence. At this point, I really don’t believe your son was involved in hurting her.”
“Of course he wasn’t,” George Tripp said. “It was that goddamn Flood, or Crocker, or both of them.”
“I’m going to look into that,” Virgil said.
He asked them to go through the contact list on Tripp’s phone; standing together, they did that, and identified each of the people on the list, including Sullivan, who, they said, had interviewed their son a half-dozen times.
“Everybody knew Bobby was going to be a college star. He could’ve gone to the Gophers, but they wanted to make a corner-back out of him and he didn’t want that,” George said. Wistful, now, with a glint of tears in his eyes: “He was going to be something.”
ON HIS WAY to the motel, Virgil threw the joints out the window—they were biodegradable—and crumbled the Ziploc bag into the trash. No need for Tripp’s parents to know about that.
He called Coakley from the motel, told her about the search, about the relationship with Baker, and about the “Liberty” note.