Authors: John Sandford
Bad Blood (26 page)
The guy in the next booth asked, “Anything new?”
“Woman came in this morning and said she was there when Jim Crocker shot himself,” Virgil said.
Jacoby sat down across from him, Virgil’s order forgotten for the moment. “Would I know her?”
“Crocker’s ex-wife, Kathleen Spooner. Said he was all morose about Tripp, and he shot himself.”
“Whoa.” Jacoby scratched his nose, said, “I know her. Dark-haired gal. I think she was one of those religious people out there.”
“Yeah, she was. Or is,” Virgil said. “Her story’s a little shaky, but I don’t see any way to break it.”
A couple more people moved in, on stools, and in the booth behind Jacoby. One of them said, “You said you thought Jim Crocker was murdered.”
“Still possible,” Virgil said. “The same set of facts that say he was murdered can, if they’re turned around just right, say it could be a suicide.”
“But you don’t believe it,” Jacoby said. “I can tell by your voice.”
Virgil nodded. “You’re right. I don’t believe it. I think it was murder.”
“You think you can get her?” Jacoby asked.
“I don’t know. Haven’t even arrested her, for what she did, unless Coakley did it after I left,” Virgil said.
Jacoby got up and walked down the café and clipped Virgil’s order to the cook’s order rack, then came back, sat down, and said, “Damnedest thing. She might’ve done it, and she might walk away.”
“No way to tell, for sure, unless there was a third person there,” Virgil said. “I don’t think that’s likely.”
The guy behind him said, “But if she murdered him, why did she do it?”
“Cover something up,” Virgil said. “She told us that Crocker might have been scared because he thought we might take DNA evidence from him, because of the jailhouse suicide when he was on duty. And that he might have had something to do with the death of that Kelly Baker girl last year. Him and Jake Flood. And they might have left some DNA behind.”
“Holy shit,” the man in the back booth said.
The one on the other side, behind Jacoby, said, “They’re all those religious people. Spooner, Flood, the Bakers . . .”
Virgil nodded.
The guy behind him said, “If you ask me, you need to know more about that church.”
Virgil said, “They don’t talk much to outsiders. . . .”
HIS FOOD CAME, and he sat munching through it, as the panel discussion continued, then confessed, “I’m pretty much stuck if I don’t get more information coming in. But, you know—win a few, lose a few.”
“That ain’t right, Virg,” somebody said.
Virgil shrugged and said, “We’re talking about law enforcement, not television. Nothing’s perfect. Without the information . . .”
“I’d hate to see you quit and leave town,” Jacoby said. “You’re better than TV. Business is up ten percent since you started coming in.”
“Happy to do it, Bill. Just wish this could come to a better end.”
The waitress appeared and slid a saucer with a slice of blueberry pie across the table.
Virgil picked up the fork and cut into it, became aware of the silence around him. He looked around and said, “What?”
The guy in the booth behind Jacoby asked, seemingly fascinated, “You really gonna eat that?”
Jacoby twisted, said, “Hey!” Back to Virgil. “That’s perfectly good . . . pie.”
THE CONSENSUS in the café was that Virgil should keep pushing, and find a way around Spooner’s confession; the patrons voted unanimously that she was lying, that Crocker’s death was murder.
“Maybe we should get up a lynch mob,” Jacoby joked. He added, “That was a joke.”
“I’ll hang around a day or two to see what happens,” Virgil said. He ran the tip of his tongue around his gums. “I’m really gonna miss the . . . pie.”
WHEN HE CAME out of the café, with a feeling that he had purple sticky stuff lodged between all of his teeth, he still had some time to kill. He looked up and down the street, spotted the redbrick tower of a church, and ambled down that way. The sign out front said, “Good Shepherd Lutheran Church,” and Virgil climbed the granite steps, pulled at one of the big wood doors, and walked in. A woman was pushing a dust mop down an aisle between pews, looked around at him, said, “Can I help you?”
“Is the pastor around?”
“He’s in the office. Do you have an appointment?”
“No. I’m an agent with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’d like a few minutes of his time, if he’s got it.”
“Well, c’mon back. He’s not doing anything but reading the paper, anyway.”
Actually, he was polishing his shoes, with his feet on the paper he’d apparently finished reading. He was a soft, middle-fiftyish man, with white curly hair, blue eyes, and gold-rimmed glasses that sat on a wide German nose. He was listening to soft rock on a Wave radio.
Virgil introduced himself and the minister half-stood and put the polish rag in his left hand and stuck out his right. “John Baumhauer,” he said. “I’ve heard about you, Virgil. Down at the café.”
“I do my best thinking there,” Virgil said. And, “I guess Joshua was right: the house of God still has its hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
Baumhauer brightened, ticked a finger at Virgil, and said, “Not many people pick that up, Baumhauer being a chopper of wood. And you know your Old Testament.”
“My dad’s got a church over in Marshall.”
“Flowers? Oh, heck yes. He’s your dad? We’re old pals, we overlapped in grad school, he was a year ahead of me. How’s your mom? She was a looker, let me tell you; still was, I saw them a year ago at a conference up in St. Paul. . . .”
They spent a minute or two connecting, then Virgil said, “John, I’ve got a problem. We’re starting to turn up some answers on this string of murders, and also the murder last year of Kelly Baker, down across the Iowa line.”
“I remember that. That was a mystery.”
“It was, but now . . . Look, I’ve got to ask you first, I want to keep this talk private,” Virgil said. “At least for a while. Even if it turns out you don’t know anything, or don’t want to talk about it.”
Baumhauer was interested, intent with a small smile. “Sure. As long as it’s not, you know, illegal.”
Virgil nodded. “But you might not want to talk about it when you hear the question.”
“The question is . . . ?”
“I’ve only been here a couple days, but we’ve made some progress—but everywhere I turn, in this thing, I stumble over the World of Spirit.”
“Those guys,” Baumhauer said.
“Yeah. Have you heard anything that would suggest there’s something wrong with that group? Something not right?”
“You do make me feel a little like a rat,” the minister said. “But . . . yes, a bunch of us church people in town have thought about them. We had a Catholic priest here for a few years, Danny McCoy—he’s up at the archdiocese now, doing something important. We used to play poker with a couple of other guys. He was no good at it, he couldn’t bluff worth a darn. He won’t tell you anything, because I think it came in a confession, but he apparently heard from somebody that there was no good going on there. He was conflicted. He mentioned it to me privately; I’m sure he wouldn’t talk to you. I don’t know if it went any further than me, or if he took it up with his superiors—he took the bonds of confession seriously. He was never explicit, but I got the feeling, though, that there was something sexual going on.”
“Have you ever felt that?”
Baumhauer took a deep breath, looked away for a moment, then said, “Yes. I can’t say where or how, because I can’t remember—it’s just rumors and implications and comments over the years, about marrying them off young over there, and things like that.”
“Mmm. You never mentioned it to anyone?”
“Well, I suspect you’d find a lot of older people around here, especially churchgoers, who have heard something. But it’s all vague,” Baumhauer said. “The other thing is, when I was a kid, I was working in an area in Indiana with a lot of Amish. I got to know some of them, and they’re good folks. Solid. They have some of the same characteristics as the World of Spirit—they keep themselves separate, they homeschool, they intermarry. And they’re good people. So you get the feeling, you can’t pick on a whole church. If you even hint at it, people are going to go off in all directions. That’s just not right, either. Tainting a whole church, with no real knowledge at all.”
Virgil sighed and said, “Yeah.”
“But, that said, they’re not the Amish,” Baumhauer said. “The Amish are separate, but not secretive. They’re not paranoid. And you can see why they believe what they do—they’re staying away from the modern world, and it carries right through from the way they dress, to the vehicles they drive, to the way they furnish their houses. No TV and so on. The World of Spirit, you don’t see that—they’ve got TV and nice cars and big tractors, and back during Vietnam, their boys would get drafted and go off to fight. The only thing they’re different about is what happens with their church, what it’s all about, and they’re secret about that. Paranoid.”
“As you say, you don’t have anything specific.”
“No, no, I don’t. But . . . did you ever hear of Birdy Olms?”
“I have. She supposedly ran away from them.”
“I’ve heard that, too. Quite a few years back. The story in the church circles here was that the local Jehovah’s Witnesses took to witnessing on her porch when her husband wasn’t around, and she began to doubt the church and got into some kind of trouble with the church and ran away. If you can find her, she’d be worth talking to, I think.”
VIRGIL WAS RUNNING behind when he left the church, and was five minutes late to Coakley’s house. Coakley, along with Schickel and Dennis Brown, was waiting in her living room. Brown was a tall, fat man, with a round, red face and white hair. He did not look jolly, and would have been a rotten Santa Claus; he carried a sad, deep-eye brooding look, and perpetually pursed lips. When he and Virgil shook hands, Virgil was surprised to find his hand hard, dried, and callused, like a sailor’s.
Coakley said, “Okay, Virgil. You called the meeting.”
Virgil dragged an easy chair around so he could face Brown and Coakley on the couch, and Schickel on another easy chair. Schickel had a laptop and a legal pad, used the laptop as a lap desk as he doodled on the yellow pad.
Virgil asked, “Everybody know about Spooner, and her story?”
They all did, and Schickel said, “I think she killed him. I’ve known Jim Crocker for a long time, no goddamn way he ate his own gun. He would have wiggled and squirmed and cried and hired lawyers and done everything he could to get out of it. If he
was
going to commit suicide, he would have taken pills.”
was
going to commit suicide, he would have taken pills.”
“I’ll second that,” Brown drawled.
Virgil nodded. “My boss is going to call me anytime now and tell me if we got DNA on Spooner. If we had it, we were going to charge her, and then use the charge to see if we deal with her on issues like the Kelly Baker murder, and what I believe is a cult-operated child abuse ring. That’s all out the window. No way we’re going to get a conviction on what we’ve got—and she’s signaling that she’s going to trial, if we decide to take her. She ain’t gonna talk. So now, we need to figure out what we’re going to do. We got nothin’. But we’ve got to do something about those kids.”
“How sure are you about the kids?” Brown asked. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve never heard a hint of that.”
“There’ve been some hints, Dennis,” Coakley said. “We just didn’t hear them. Or see them. Virgil’s talked to a couple of people out west, and they both said they wouldn’t want their kids around church people. And those names I called you about, when I was collecting the names of church families. I took the names over to the courthouse this morning, while Virgil was probably down at the Yellow Dog eating pie. . . .”
Virgil nodded and said, “Man’s gotta eat.”
She brushed him off. “I went through vital records, marriage licenses, over the past fifty years or so, hooking up as many families as I could. I found fifty-four cases where one of the church families, out there, married off an eighteen-year-old girl to a man more than thirty. There have been as many as eighty families involved in the marriages. And there are more of these families over in Jackson County and down across the line in Iowa. Right now, I’ve got one hundred and eight family names, all still on the tax rolls.”
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