“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 said. 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?”
“Studio art, at the U,” he said. “I’m a painter, when it isn’t too cold. So: how can I help, and why me?”
Coakley said, “We’re looking at these murders—Flood, Tripp, Crocker. And Kelly Baker.”
His eyebrows went up. “They’re connected?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Virgil said. “We’ve heard—we’re keeping our sources pretty close to our chest, and we’ll do the same with you—but we heard that you were friends with Baker and with Bobby Tripp.”
Loewe sort of leaned back, the way people do when they’ve heard something they don’t like. He didn’t answer for a minute, then said, “Yeah, I was. I talked to the Iowa police a couple of times. Nothing ever came of it.”
“We’re coming at it from a different angle,” Virgil said. “Because we also know about the relationship between Tripp and Kelly. We’re wondering if Kelly ever told you about that relationship, or if Tripp did. If there was something in there that could cause Tripp to kill Flood. Did Flood have some sort of abusive relationship with Kelly?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Loewe said. “Jake could be a jerk, that’s for sure. I just wonder if there wasn’t a fight between him and Bobby, and it got a little too serious?”
Virgil shook his head. “If there’d been a fight, it would have shown up on Tripp—he would have been bruised or cut up or something. Flood was a big guy, and solid. We think Tripp snuck up on him, hit him with a ball bat.”
“Mmm, boy, I don’t see him doing that. He was a pretty tough guy, football player and all, but he wasn’t mean,” Loewe said.
“Do you think he was gay?” Coakley asked. She asked it with a motherly, understanding undertone that gave her thought away.
Loewe flinched: “Gay? Doesn’t seem likely. He was a big football guy.”
“It’s been suggested that you may have had a relationship with him,” Virgil said.
Loewe took a step back, but didn’t say anything for a moment, then, instead of saying, “No,” he asked, “Who said that?”
“Look, we’re keeping all of this very close. And we don’t even need to know whether or not you did, because that’s private, and I don’t see how it could affect the case. But: we need to know what Kelly did, what caused her to be murdered, and why Tripp would murder somebody in return, and then be murdered himself . . . and on down the line. Do not forget that there’s still a murderer running loose.”
“You don’t think I’m involved . . .”
“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Are you?”
Loewe turned, walked away from them, picked up a roll of the plastic window sheeting. “I’m not going to talk to you anymore. This is crazy—I don’t know what happened to anybody.” His voice was climbing in pitch: he was scared, and Virgil decided to push it.
“Do you think the killings might have anything to do with your church? We’ve noticed a lot of connections there—you know. Kelly Baker, Flood, even Crocker.”
“The church? What connection could it have to the church?” he asked. “I think there might be some connection because everything happened in the same place . . . but not the church. Look, I really don’t want to talk about this anymore. But I’ll tell you: I have nothing to do with this. Any of it. I was freaked when Kelly Baker died, and I was freaked when Jake Flood got killed, and even more freaked when B.J. was killed.”
“Did you ever know a woman named Birdy Olms?” Virgil asked.
“Birdy? What does she have to do with it? She took off years ago. Back when I was a kid.”
“Any idea where she went?” Coakley asked.
“Nobody does,” Loewe said. “I guess that’s how she planned it. She’s gone.”