“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.”
“Maybe she decided to stop and do some shopping—”
“That’s not the way I see it,” Baker said. “For one thing, it was later in the afternoon by that time, and she was picking up beef for dinner. Len likes his dinner at five o’clock sharp, so she would have gone straight to the locker, and then home.”
“But you said she wasn’t in a hurry when she left,” Bill Clinton said.
“She wasn’t. She had time, but she had to move along.”
“Maybe she was in a little bit of a hurry,” Luanne Baker said. “But she wasn’t in a
rush
or anything.”
“LET ME ASK you about the church,” Virgil began.
John Baker interrupted: “What religion are you?”
Virgil evaded a direct answer: “My father’s a Lutheran minister. Over in Marshall.” He paused, then asked, “Is it possible that Kelly was meeting, or was flagged down by, members of the church? Why would she stop for strangers, or go with strangers?”
“Because we do that around here,” John Baker said. “If somebody has a problem, we don’t expect them to be crazy killers. We stop and help out.”
“That’s nice,” Bill Clinton said. He fished a piece of Dentyne gum from his shirt pocket, unwrapped it with one hand, and popped it in his mouth. “But I thought you were standoffish.”
“That’s what people
say
, but we help as much as anybody,” John Baker said. “We’re just private in our beliefs. This whole country is dying from a lack of good morals and proper behavior, and we don’t want no part of it. We keep ourselves out of it, and we keep our children out of it, and we tend our farms.”
“You don’t know any church members who might have run off the tracks, or had a reputation for being a little wild . . . ?”
“
It’s not the church
,” John Baker said. “It’s not. You’re barking up the wrong tree. You know who killed Jake Flood. That boy is the one who did it—he’s the devil. He’s the devil in this. I heard that you think Jim Crocker killed him, and maybe he did, but if he did, it was because that boy attacked him. I think Jake found out something, and the boy killed him, and then maybe Jim asked him something, and he went after Jim—”
“Then Jim was murdered—” Virgil said.
“By the accomplices,” John Baker said. “It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
Virgil pushed them on the church, but got nowhere. A bit of history: the church members had been a branch of a fundamentalist movement in Germany that began in the 1830s, and had immigrated en masse to the U.S. in the 1880s. After arriving here, the group split up. Most of the various branches had eventually merged with other churches and movements around the Midwest and, finally, except for the Minnesota branch, had disappeared.
“We’re the last of them,” John Baker said. “The last who know the old ways.”
They talked for a while longer, but got no useful information—Kelly Baker had arrived, had sat in the kitchen and chatted, had looked at a Christian computer game with the children, and had left, moving quickly but not rushed, to go to the locker. That was all.
BACK IN THE CAR, they rolled out the driveway, and Virgil asked Bill Clinton, “What do you think?”
“Not much,” he said. “That thing about the Muslim medical examiner . . .”
“You see that a bit out here. People have ideas about Muslims and Jews,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, but . . . not like that. Not like some giant conspiracy,” Clinton said. “Then there was that whole thing about morals and good behavior. I’m not sure exactly . . . I’d like to know what their definition of ‘moral’ is. I mean, you smell that place?”
“You mean the soup? It smelled pretty good.”
“I mean the smoke. The dope. The spliff, the ganj. As these good Germans would say, the dank.”
Virgil put a hand to his forehead and rubbed. “That’s what it was. I was thinking it was some kind of herb in the soup.”
“It is some kind of herb, but I don’t think it was in the soup,” Clinton said. “I think it was in the curtains and the couch and the rugs. I think she was cooking up that soup to cover the odor. Those people are Christian fundamentalist stoners. I was sitting there grinning the whole time, listening to them. They were totally full of shit . . . depending on how you define ‘moral.’”
“What is it with these guys?” Virgil asked. “These church people . . . I talked to one today who was carrying a gun in her pocket. I think some of them know a lot more about Kelly Baker than they’re saying. I think—”
“I’ll tell you what it is,” Bill Clinton said. “What it is, is, something is seriously fucked. I wish you luck in detecting what it is.”
10
V
irgil called Coakley, who suggested that they meet at the Holiday Inn restaurant, away from the office and “not at the café, where half the town is, waiting for you to show up.”
“Works for me,” Virgil said. “I’ll see you in twenty.”
MOST SHERIFFS in Minnesota wore uniforms; a few didn’t. Virgil hadn’t seen Coakley in a uniform until she showed up at the Holiday Inn. When she took her parka off, she was wearing a star and had a pistol on her hip.
Virgil had gotten to the restaurant a couple of minutes earlier, and already had a booth. When she came up, he said, “You look like a cop.”
“Feels weird, wearing a uniform,” she said. “I wore one for five years before I became an investigator, and never did like it. But since I was working with the girls today . . .”
“Show some solidarity,” Virgil said. “They come up with anything?”
“Nothing that we didn’t know. Crocker and Jacob Flood were close. They all belong to a fundamentalist church that goes back to the Old Country, meaning Germany. They homeschool their kids, church services move around from one home to another.”
“Services are held in barns,” Virgil said.
“Nobody seems to know much about the religion, except that it’s conservative,” Coakley said. “They’re all farmers, or come from farm families. Some people say they’re standoffish, but other people say they know members of the church who work in town and are like anyone else. Which sounds like Crocker.”
A waiter came up, and they ordered hamburgers and fries, and Coakley got coffee and Virgil got a Diet Coke, and when the waiter went away, Coakley asked, “Did Spooner have anything to contribute?”
“Not much,” Virgil said. “She kept trying to get around the questions. But I expect she’s the one who killed Crocker.”
Coakley’s eyebrows went up.
“What?”
“She let me sit on her couch, and using a special BCA investigatory technique, I got some of her hair,” he said. “I need to get it up to our lab. Then I’m going to use unfair tactics to get the lab to do some rush processing on it, so we ought to know for sure by day after tomorrow.”
“Virgil, how . . . ?”
Virgil told her about it: about the gun in Spooner’s pocket, about the lipstick, how nobody knew of anyone Crocker was seeing. “On that basis alone—somebody familiar enough with him to get involved with oral sex—she’d be a suspect. The gun thing is big. She’s a member of the church, born to it. I’ve got a feeling that the church could be involved here. Or maybe there’s just something going on with this tight little knot of people, coming down through the generations. Most of them are related to each other, if I understood Spooner right. Lot of intermarriage.”
“If she’s the one, that’d be a pretty amazing clearance,” Coakley said. “It’s like you plucked her out of the air.”
“Nah. All you do is, you look around,” Virgil said. “Everybody says Crocker didn’t have much to do with women, and the woman we know that he had something to do with, happens to carry a gun in her pocket. So she knows how to use one, and is maybe prepared to do it. Plus, she wears lipstick, which most women out here don’t, except on special occasions. It’s just . . . obvious.”
“What if she killed him for some personal reason that has nothing to do with Flood or Tripp?” Coakley asked.
Virgil was already shaking his head. “Too big a coincidence. I’ll tell you something else. I led Spooner on a bit . . .”
“How unlike you . . .” But she said it with a smile.
“. . . and she told me that Einstadt gave a nice talk at Kelly Baker’s funeral. Einstadt and the Floods and the Bakers know each other
very
well, and they’re lying about it. Why would they do that?”
“They . . .”
“They’re covering something up. Maybe Kelly Baker’s death,” Virgil said.
She looked at him for a long time, then said, “Maybe. But it’s a jump.”
THE FOOD CAME, and Virgil asked if she could send one of her deputies up to the BCA, in St. Paul, with Spooner’s hair samples. She nodded. “Most of them would be happy for the chance, on the county’s dime. Do some shopping.”
“I’ll give you the sample when we leave,” he said.
SHE WAS PICKING at her food without much interest, and then she said, “I was talking to a friend up at the BCA. She said you’ve been married so often that the judge gives you a discount.”
Virgil nearly spat out his hamburger. “What? Who told you that?”
“A friend. She’s anonymous,” Coakley said. “She said she thought you’ve been married and divorced four times.”
“That’s slander; I’d arrest her if I knew who it was,” Virgil said.
“So how many times, then?”
“Three,” Virgil admitted. “But it’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“Tell me the truth,” Coakley said. “How bad did it hurt? When you got divorced?”
“It hurt,” Virgil said. “I’m human.”
“But she said all of this, all three marriages and divorces, were like in five years. And you have another girlfriend about every fifteen minutes. And that you’ve supposedly slept with witnesses. I don’t know. I was kind of shocked.”
“Hey . . .”
“Because when I got divorced, I mean, I was lying there for months, at night, trying to figure out what went wrong—and whose fault it was. I still do it,” she said. “You know. I could no more have gotten married again in six months . . . I was still a basket case in six months.”
“Well, I didn’t have so much of that,” Virgil said. “It was pretty clear, pretty quick, that me and my wives weren’t going to make it. One of them, it was about a week and a half, you know, that we had the talk.”
“That’s absurd,” Coakley said.
“Yeah,” Virgil said. “I know. I did like the first one. But she had lots of plans. I didn’t have much input into them, and I wasn’t doing what she planned. Then, one day, I just wasn’t in the plans anymore. She’d decided to outsource her expectations.”
“How about sex. Did she outsource the sex?”
“Not that I know of—that wasn’t the problem,” Virgil said. “The problem was more . . . business-related. She’d decided I couldn’t really be monetized.”
“Hmph,” Coakley said.
“That was a denigrating hmph.”
“Well. Might as well get it out there,” she said. She glanced around the room. “The thing is, when Larry stopped having sex with me, I thought maybe he was . . . just losing interest in sex. I’d never gotten that much out of it. I’m not especially orgasmic, and so, I just let it go. But then, he dumps me off, for this other . . . person . . . with big . . . and I start to wonder, maybe I’m just a complete screwup as a woman.”