LEE COAKLEY LOOKED in on Crocker’s body. Her mouth was a thin line, with a twist at the end, as though she’d been sucking on a lemon. “He could be a jerk, but I’d never have wished this on him,” she said.
“I called our crime-scene people up in the Cities. I thought you might want to go that way, given the situation, instead of using your own man,” Virgil said. “You say yes, I’ll get them on the way.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Get them started. I’ll get Gene to set up in the driveway, keep people out. I better go down and tell Jim’s folks.”
“You okay with that?”
She nodded again. “Yes. My job, and I won’t dodge it. I’d feel better if I could spit, but I don’t think I can.”
“Got a preacher you can take along?”
“We do, but his folks belong to some kind of private religion. I think it’d be best not to try to sneak a Lutheran in the door. I’ll just have Greg ride along.”
They went outside, and she told Schickel and two other deputies to shut the scene down and wait for the crime-scene crew from the Cities. “I don’t want anybody in or out.
Anybody.
”
“They’ll be three hours,” Virgil said. “They’re loading up.”
“What’re you gonna do?” Coakley asked.
“Not much to do until the crime-scene guys have a look,” Virgil said. “I think I might go get a bite to eat.”
He walked along with Coakley to her truck, and said, “I’d like to look at the files on this whole chain of events—the Flood killing, Tripp’s death, the personnel file on Crocker.”
“I’ll call in. You’ll want to talk to a deputy named John Kraus. I’ll have John put you in the conference room. I’ll be back in a couple hours, at the latest. I’d like to read through them again myself.”
VIRGIL STOPPED at the Yellow Dog Café in downtown Homestead, got a California burger and home fries, with a Diet Coke, and thought about the three killings. Had to be tied. He didn’t know how often Warren County had a murder, but he’d guess one about every ten years or so, if that often. To have three, in a week, all cryptically linked, was pressing coincidence.
They had no reason for Tripp’s murder of Flood; no reason for Crocker’s murder of Tripp; no reason for an unknown killer to murder Crocker, especially when Crocker was lying on a couch with his penis sticking out. Crocker hadn’t been surprised; everything in his old house rattled, so he must’ve known that he wasn’t alone in the house, must’ve known the person who killed him. And he hadn’t feared that person; probably had some sexual relationship with her. Or him.
Hmm. Or him. A few months earlier, Virgil had worked a case in the North Woods in which a bunch of lesbians had been involved. Didn’t seem right that he’d go right on to another case involving homosexuals.
On the other hand, Tripp may have been gay, active or inactive. He had wanted to talk to a newspaper reporter about the Flood killing, and the only fact known to Virgil about the reporter was that he was gay.
On the third hand, he
did
only know one fact about the reporter, and taken with all the facts he didn’t know about him, his sexual orientation was probably irrelevant.
Maybe.
He took out his cell phone and called Coakley. She answered on the third ring, and he asked, “Are you at Crocker’s folks’?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t say anything else, and Virgil realized that she was sitting there with them, and they were listening. “Is there any possibility that Crocker had homosexual inclinations?”
“Very, very unlikely. But nothing’s impossible, as I’m sure you know,” she said.
“You gonna come with me when I talk to this newspaper reporter?”
“Absolutely. I’ll see you in an hour.”
Virgil hung up, toyed with his home fries. Unless the crime-scene crew came up with something that definitely pointed at a particular person as the killer, or somebody came forward with information, it would be tough to get into the Crocker killing . . . though it would be interesting to learn more about friends and relatives of Tripp, to see if they blamed Crocker for the death.
And with Crocker dead, it’d be tough to get into the Tripp killing, as well. Had to be some private motive. Some motive that involved Tripp and Crocker and almost certainly Flood.
Tripp had wanted to talk to somebody about Flood, so that killing can’t have been on impulse. Tripp planned it. Took the T-ball bat with him. Could be an entry there . . .
HE WAS ABOUT to leave the café when a man in a dark suit and close-cut silver hair came through the door, followed by a pretty, dark-haired woman carrying a briefcase and dressed in a gray lawyer suit. He looked familiar, and the man did a double take when he saw Virgil.
“Virgil Flowers,” he said, and, introducing himself, “Tom Parker—I cross-examined you in the Larson case.” He said it with a friendly smile and Virgil remembered him. Good attorney, he thought, though he’d been on the other side.
“Oh, sure,” Virgil said. “Nice to see you again.”
They shook hands, and Parker said, “This is my associate, Laurie . . . and I bet you’re not here on a social visit. There’s a hot rumor going around the courthouse that Jimmy Crocker’s been murdered. That true?”
Virgil said, “I can’t really talk to you about it in detail. But, yeah. I’m just in from his place. The sheriff’s out telling his folks.”
“Better her than me,” Parker said.
Laurie asked, “You know who did it?”
“No idea, yet.”
“When you find out, let me know,” Parker said. “I want to rush out there with my card.”
“Maybe not. That didn’t work for me the last time,” Virgil said. They chatted for a couple more minutes, Parker and the woman probing for more facts, Virgil telling them only that it superficially looked like a suicide, by gun, but that he thought it was probably a murder. Other than that, he didn’t know anything.
“Three murders, though, I figure they should be connected,” he said, aware that everybody in the café was listening to the conversation. “If you have any ideas, I’d listen to them. I’m fresh out of my own.”
“I’ll give you a ring,” Parker said.
But Laurie said, “In a way, it’s four murders.”
Virgil: “Four?”
“About a year ago, a girl was murdered out there . . . not murdered here in Warren County, but across the line in Iowa, north of Estherville. But she came from a farm by Blakely.”
“That’s right,” Parker said. “Kelly . . .”
“Baker,” Laurie said.
Virgil snapped his fingers: “I remember something about that. Found her in a cemetery, right? The Iowa guys covered it, out of Des Moines. Did she go to school here in Homestead?”
Laurie said, “Maybe, but her house would be out in the Northwest High area. . . . I mean, some people transfer around depending on where their parents work. So, I don’t know where she went.”
“Had she graduated, or was she working?” Virgil asked.
Laurie said, “I don’t know, really. . . .”
A man two booths down from them cleared his throat and said, “She was homeschooled. She had a summer job here in Homestead, at the Dairy Queen. My daughter knew her.”
“You know how old she was?” Virgil asked, turning in the booth.
“About the same as my daughter—my daughter was a junior when the girl was killed, so, sixteen, seventeen.”
Virgil said, “Huh. Another mystery. I wonder if I could clear it all out, with another order of home fries?”
“You’d clear something out, but I don’t think it’d be the murder case,” the man in the booth said.
A waitress said, “Hey. No pie for you, Earl.”
4
V
irgil left the café pleased with himself. He’d learned something, and it had made the case more intricate and therefore more interesting, and also more breakable. The more ways in, the better. He drove over to the sheriff’s office and found John Kraus, a tall, portly bald man who wore the department uniform, and looked like a cook, or a potential department-store Santa.
“Got your files right down the hall,” Kraus said. “We got them either on computer, or on paper, but I got you the paper ones. Easier to shuffle things around.”
“That’s terrific. Just the way I like it,” Virgil said.
Kraus said, “I’ll leave you to it. We got some coffee going down the hall, to the right. Can’s around the corner.”
Virgil started by calling Bell Wood, an agent with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. “Tell him his personal hero is calling from Minnesota,” Virgil told the woman who answered the phone.
Wood came up: “That fuckin’ Flowers. Everything was going so well, too. Just a minute ago, I told Janice, everything’s going too well—something’s wrong.”
“I heard the fools who run the National Guard made you into a major,” Virgil said.
“That is indeed the case. People now call me Major Wood.”
“That wouldn’t be any women you know,” Virgil said, “or have known, or will ever know.”
“Au contraire, my ignorant Minnewegan friend. My standing is well known in the female community. So, is this a social call?”
“Nope. Something’s wrong,” Virgil said.
“Ah, crap,” Wood said. Wood was the number two guy in the major crimes section. “Let’s hear it.”
“You know the murder of a young Minnesota girl named Kelly Baker?” Virgil asked. “Down by Estherville, a year or so ago?”
“That would be ‘up by Estherville,’ if you were correctly oriented. Yeah, I do know about it. Ugly. Ugly case, Virgil. October eleventh. Fourteen months ago. Our sex kitten. We got nothing.”
“You got sex kitten,” Virgil said.
“We do. Are you at your office? I’ll send you the file.”
“Actually, I’m in Homestead. . . .” He filled in Wood on the three murders, beginning with Flood. Wood listened, then said, “I heard about the jail hanging, but I didn’t know it was murder.”
“Just found it out today,” Virgil said. “This morning. Listen, that file on Baker, shoot it down to me. Up to me.”
“Sure. You want e-mail?”
“I don’t know if they’re running wireless,” Virgil said. “Hang on, let me walk down the hall and find my guy.”
Kraus said they did not have a wireless hookup. He got on the line with Wood, agreed that they could take and print a color PDF document, gave Wood the address, and handed the phone back to Virgil.
“It’s on the way,” Wood said. “It’s big, three hundred pages, in color. Let me look at this, for a minute, I’m looking at the computer. You probably want to read the whole thing, to see who we interviewed, and what they said, but right off, go to page thirty-four. That’s the beginning of the autopsy report.”
“That’s a big deal?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah. That’s
the
big deal, so far,” Wood said. “Virgil, if you can nail the guys who did this, man, I’ll get you tracks in the Iowa Guard. That’s the same as a Minnesota general.”
“I’ve had tracks,” Virgil said; he’d gotten out of the army as a captain. “When you say ‘guys,’ plural . . .”
“Read the report,” Wood said.
“You got DNA on these guys?”
“Read the report. And listen, keep me informed.”
VIRGIL DECIDED that he wanted to read about the murders in the order that they happened, and so went down and got a cup of coffee, then waited, watching, as the file came out of Kraus’s laser printer.
The autopsy report, including findings and conclusions, was fifteen pages long. When the last of it came out, Virgil said to Kraus, “Holler when it’s done. I’m going to start with this.”
The first few pages of the report laid out the reasons for Iowa DCI involvement: the department was asked in by Emmet County authorities after Baker’s body was found in the Lutheran cemetery north of Estherville. The body was nude, and half-hidden behind a tombstone in an older section of the cemetery, where it was found by chance by an elderly woman who’d come out to put the year’s last blooming wildflowers on her husband’s grave.
The Emmet County sheriff’s office had put out inquiries, and had been informed by the Warren County sheriff’s office that Leonard Baker, of Blakely, Minnesota, had reported that his daughter had not come home the night before, after an afternoon’s visit with an aunt, uncle, and cousins on a farm near Estherville.
The description fit, and the parents had later identified the body as Kelly Baker, seventeen. Her mother’s car, a 2004 Toyota Corolla, was found in downtown Estherville. Witnesses said it had been there overnight, and after nailing down the times, by interviewing owners of local businesses, and Baker’s uncle, DCI investigators determined that Baker must have left it there shortly after leaving her aunt and uncle’s farm.
That made it an Iowa murder, and explained why Virgil hadn’t heard more about it.