“Yeah, well. Going to Mankato State, got married halfway through my senior year. I was knocked up by Memorial Day,” she said.
“What’d your husband do?”
“He’s the new car sales manager over at Gable Ford,” she said.
“Still see him?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, no. The new wife wouldn’t like it, for one thing,” Coakley said.
“Oh-oh.”
“What can I tell you? He got married three weeks after our divorce was final,” she said. “I guess it had been going on for a while. Never saw it coming.”
“She have really big breasts?” Virgil asked.
The thin smile again. “Ample. Or ample-and-a-half.”
“Give her any speeding tickets?”
“Hadn’t thought of it, but now that you mention it, I’ll keep it in mind,” she said. Her phone rang, and she picked it up, listened, and said, “Send him in.”
PAT SULLIVAN was a short, thin man, of the sort that Virgil thought of as “weedy.” He had brown hair, a prominent nose, a brush mustache, and square Teddy Roosevelt teeth. He wore brown boots with studded soles, was carrying a parka and a reporter’s notebook.
“Virgil Flowers,” he said, when Coakley introduced him. “I’ve followed your adventures. That shoot-out up in International Falls, with the Vietnamese dragon lady. The one out by Bluestem, with the federal guys.”
“They’re like bad dreams slowly fading away,” Virgil said. He pointed at a chair: “Sit down. We gotta talk. There’s more going on than a story.”
Sullivan sat down, a skeptical look on his face: “Like what?”
“We have to go off the record for a bit,” Virgil said. “That good with you?”
“Depends. We can start that way. If I can’t keep it off, I’ll tell you,” Sullivan said.
“When Bob Tripp was arrested, he wouldn’t talk to the sheriff until he talked to you first,” Virgil said.
Sullivan’s eyebrows went up. “Me?”
“Yes. Are we off the record?”
“Okay. For now.”
“We wondered if you knew what he might have wanted to talk about,” Virgil said.
“So you didn’t ask me to come in as a reporter, but as a possible witness.”
Virgil shrugged: “I don’t care if you’re both. Not a problem for me.”
Sullivan said, “I’ll have to think about it . . . but if Bobby wanted to talk, why would he have committed suicide?”
Virgil said, “He didn’t. He was murdered. Probably by Jim Crocker.”
“Whoa.” Sullivan went pale, leaned forward. “This has got to be on the record. Not about Bobby wanting to talk to me, but about Bobby and Crocker.”
“We’ll come back to it, give you a formal interview, on the record. Let’s stay off for now.”
Sullivan paused, then nodded.
“Crocker isn’t a sure thing, for Bobby’s murder,” Virgil said. “I can think of scenarios where he didn’t do it—but we think he probably did. We may have more definitive answers after the investigation.”
Coakley jumped in, pressing the question, “Do you have any idea why Bobby might have wanted to talk to you?”
Sullivan leaned back, looked at Coakley, then Virgil, then back at Coakley. “Lee, I assume you know that I’m gay.”
“I knew that,” she said, nodding.
“I cover a lot of sports. People around town had heard I was gay, and some of the high school kids knew about it. Maybe most of them. Anyway, I interviewed Bobby a few times, he was a star. Then, one time, he asked me if he could stop by my apartment and chat. I said, ‘Sure,’” Sullivan said. “By that time, I had an idea of what was coming. Anyway, he came over, and beat around the bush for a while, then said that he’d heard that I was gay, and that he was worried that he might be, and he just wanted to talk about it.”
“Was he?” Coakley asked.
“Oh, sure. As far as I know, he hadn’t been sexually involved with anybody—including me, we never were—but he had already gone through most of the self-recognition stuff,” Sullivan said. “You know, feeling this strong attraction toward some of his teammates, and he’d fantasize about them, instead of the girls in his class, and all the rest—checking out the scene on the Internet, maybe checking some gay porn.”
“Did he ever mention Jacob Flood to you?” Virgil asked.
Sullivan shook his head: “No. When I heard that Bobby was dead, and that he’d been arrested in the Flood case, I was amazed. We talked quite a bit, and he never mentioned Flood’s name.”
Virgil: “And nothing about Crocker.”
“Not a thing. Not even during the election.”
“Do you know if Flood or Crocker were active in the local Homestead gay culture? There must be a few more gay people here.”
Sullivan nodded. “Quite a few,” he said. “Maybe a hundred, or more? But not all of them are active around here, and I’ve never heard of those two. That doesn’t mean much, though—it’s not like we all hook up. I know maybe . . . a dozen gay people here? Something like that.”
“Did Bobby ever mention a girl named Kelly Baker?”
Sullivan, who’d been slumping in the chair, straightened, and tipped an index finger at Virgil: “Now
her
, we did talk about. Is she involved in this deal?”
“Wait,” Virgil said. “You say you talked about her. Did he know her?”
“Oh, yeah. He met her at the Dairy Queen. He used to give her a ride home, sometimes. I think he was hoping that he might, you know, get involved with her, find out that he really wasn’t gay. It didn’t work out that way. I think . . . I
think
—he didn’t actually tell me—that she picked up on the fact that he was gay. Didn’t bother her, and they became friends.”
“The Iowa people didn’t talk to him? The cops?”
“Not as far as I know. I mean, Bobby and Kelly were a summertime thing, when the Dairy Queen was open. After school started, she was gone, and then, you know, she was killed. He didn’t know anything, and they never really had a relationship, so . . . it just went away, I guess.”
“Doesn’t help much,” Virgil said.
“Let
me
ask a question,” Sullivan said. “Have you actually checked on Flood’s sexual orientation?”
“Not yet, but it’s on the list,” Coakley said. “We know he was married, but we also know that whoever killed Kelly Baker was into some extreme sexual behavior. Homosexuality might fit in there.”
“Doesn’t seem all that extreme to me,” Sullivan said. “Homosexuality.”
“You don’t know the details,” Virgil said. “But here’s the thing that hangs me up. Bobby wanted to talk to
you.
Not his father, or one of his pals. So, I have the feeling that you would already know something about what he wanted to talk about, and that most likely would have to do with sex. You say it’s not Crocker, not Flood, so it has to be Kelly Baker. But why would he want to talk to you about Baker?”
“I don’t know,” Sullivan said. “Maybe because I knew about the situation between them.”
“He never said anything to you about Baker being involved in . . . extreme sexual situations?”
Sullivan let a grin show: “That’s the second time you guys have used the phrase. . . . I’m starting to get interested. But no. He never mentioned anything like that.”
“Damnit. I was hoping for magic,” Virgil said.
“Let’s go back on the record, so I can get a few questions in,” Sullivan said, flipping open his notebook.
“Talk to Lee,” Virgil said. “I’ve got to make some phone calls before it gets too late.”
“I’m going to say that you were called in to work the case,” Sullivan said.
“That’s fine. Refer to me as the affable, good-looking, outdoorsy blond guy,” Virgil said.
“With a serious line of bullshit,” Coakley added.
VIRGIL CALLED Jacob Flood’s home number, got a woman who said she was his daughter, and who said, “Mother’s out. She’ll be back at supper time.”
“Does she have a cell phone?”
“No. I can give her a message.”
Virgil identified himself and said that he’d like to come over after supper. He left his cell phone number and asked for a call-back if Alma Flood wouldn’t be there.
He called the duty officer in St. Paul, learned that Beatrice Sawyer and Don Baldwin had the crime-scene van and should be at Crocker’s place. He called Sawyer, a cheerful middle-aged woman, who, Virgil thought, was sometimes a little too interested in death.
“Got here half an hour ago and had a look, eyeballin’ it,” Sawyer said. “It’s murder, all right. Tell you something else—the sun went down, and it’s dark as the inside of a horse’s ass out here.”
“You’re sure?”
“Well, I’ve never actually been inside a horse’s ass.”
“About the murder?” Virgil asked.
“We feel that after the slug penetrated his lower jaw, tongue, roof of his mouth, sinus passages, eye socket, brain, and skull, he probably wouldn’t have had time to wipe the gun, or any interest in doing so,” Sawyer said. “But the gun was wiped. With a cotton blouse, we think. A couple threads got caught in the action. Ergo . . .”
“All right. So he wasn’t alone,” Virgil said. “You saw his penis? Exposed?”
“Yes. We believe he was involved in heterosexual activity immediately prior to his demise. Whether he actually ejaculated we won’t know until the autopsy is done, but we have no signs of semen on his clothing or the couch.”
“There was a suggestion here, by the sheriff, that he may have been involved in oral sex,” Virgil said.
“That would be accurate,” she said.
Virgil was surprised that she was so positive. “Really?”
“Yes. Because that explains the lipstick on his penis,” she said. “That’s also why we think it was heterosexual, and a blouse was involved in the gun-wiping. We could be wrong, but we rarely are.”
“Bea . . . you’re my huckleberry.”
“Yeah, you say that to everybody,” she said. “If it was oral sex, we have the possibility of getting some DNA. I won’t go into the details of how we plan to collect it.”
“Thank you.”
“But we will be doing that. I’ll tell you, Virgil, there might not be much more. This shag carpet, this fuzzy couch, there was a blanket . . . it’s an old house, and there’s a lot of dirt around. The furnace has been blowing dust on everything. It’s going to be a chemical mess. Our best hope is the DNA on his penis, and we’ll check the fly of his pants.”
“We’re also looking for a pair of uniform pants, green wool, with blood on them,” Virgil said. “Could be a very small amount, but you’ve got to find them. Check every pair of green wool uniform pants you can find. The blood comes from a ripped fingernail, so there might not be much. We’ll need DNA on that, too.”
“If it’s there, we’ll get it,” she said.
“Bea . . .”
“Don’t say it,” she said. “The huckleberry thing. Once was annoying enough.”
ON HIS WAY back down the hall to Coakley’s office, Virgil got a local call, from a number he didn’t recognize. He answered, and found Bob Tripp’s father on the other end. “I’ve talked to my wife, and we’re going over to the funeral home tonight at seven-thirty. If you wanted to get here at seven twenty-five, we could put you up in Bob’s room by yourself. We’d just as soon not be here when you go through it.”
“I’ll see you then,” Virgil said. “Thank you.”
Coakley was alone when Virgil got to her office. She had her boots back on the wastebasket, and was staring out her office window. When Virgil stuck his head in, she pointed at a visitor’s chair.
“Look a little bummed,” Virgil said.
“I am.”
“We’ll get this cleared up, you’ll be the town heroine,” Virgil said.
“Three murders,” she said. “And probably four. You know the last thing I did before I got elected sheriff? My last investigation? I was looking for some kid who was going around keying trucks.”
“Catch him?”
“No, but I know who did it,” she said. “I got myself close to the little asshole’s father, down at the diner, in the next booth. I was having lunch with the chief, and I said, ‘There’s gonna be trouble when I catch this kid. He’s done fifty thousand dollars’ worth of damage, and the insurance companies will be after him or his parents with a chain saw.’ That stopped it, you betcha.”
“Well, that’s good,” Virgil said.
“But you never did car-keying investigations,” she said. “And I can tell you, you can flat get whiplash from the change in speed, from car-keying to quadruple murder.”
“Never did a car-keying investigation, but I once investigated the theft of toddlers’ pants,” Virgil said. He told her about it, and they exchanged a few more stories, and Virgil told her about the phone calls, and finally she sighed and said, “It’s supper time. You should get out to Flood’s, and I’m going home to cook some . . . crap. Macaroni and cheese. I can’t stand to think about it.”