“So why was it a fraud?”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly, but you know what I mean,” Van Mann said. “Things happen when you’re farming. She was bit, and it hurt, but it was nothing anybody else would have thought was serious. No farmers, anyway. And sure as hell not fifty thousand dollars’ worth.”
“No insurance?”
“Let it slip—the liability. Like I said, things were really tough back then,” Van Mann said. “This was back before gasohol.”
They talked about bad times for a couple of minutes, and Van Mann said that he didn’t know much about the church, but that his father had said that it was “bad business” and wouldn’t talk about it. “They keep to themselves, and always have. They’re very tight. Don’t socialize with their neighbors, don’t get involved in politics, never run for anything.”
“Is there a sex thing going on in the church?”
Van Mann leaned back and crossed his legs, a defensive move, but then said, “The thought has occurred to me. But I don’t have any direct information.”
“You ever know anybody to take off? Leave the church?”
Van Mann’s eyes narrowed as he thought about it, and he said, “There was some talk about a woman who ran away to somewhere. Her name was Birdy, that’s what I remember about it. Must have been ten or twelve years ago. Birdy Olms. I can’t remember what the situation was, or even how I know about it, but it seems to me that she was going to a doc, and left the office, and when her husband came to pick her up, she was gone. They went looking for her, and it turns out she’d gotten on a bus and that was it.”
“Never came back?”
“Not that I know of. She was an outsider. From up north, somewhere. I don’t know where Roland Olms picked her up. “
“Birdy Olms.”
“Yup.”
Virgil asked the gay question, and Van Mann shook his head. “The thing about those people is that they’re standoffish. If Kelly Baker knew a gay boy, he was probably a member of the church. Or maybe a relative.”
“She worked at a Dairy Queen in the summer.”
“Yeah, you see some of them working around,” Van Mann said. “I think maybe the Bakers needed the money. For somebody who’s been doing it as long as he has, Baker is one horseshit farmer.”
BY THE TIME Virgil left Van Mann’s place, it was dark. He tried calling the newspaper again, and was told that Sullivan had already filed his copy from Mankato, and might be heading north to the Cities to spend the night.
He called Coakley as he turned onto I-90 and said, “Holiday Inn, twenty minutes?”
“The restaurant. See you there.”
He thought about that as he drove into the gathering darkness: they could have met at the restaurant, or they could have met in his room. He’d known and carefully observed a reasonably large number of women in his life, and the choice of the restaurant was significant, he thought, and in a good way.
COAKLEY WAS BACK in civilian clothes, tan canvas jeans, a black blouse and deep green sweater, and her cowboy boots. Virgil had found a booth well away from the three that were already occupied, and she slid in across from him and said, “I can’t do it.”
“Really.”
She leaned toward him and said, “I want to, but I just can’t jump into bed with somebody, cold. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon.”
“So have I,” Virgil said.
“And what do you think?”
Virgil leaned back and closed his eyes and said, “You know what? It’s been a while since I’ve been in bed with a woman, and I miss it. I’m just . . . needy enough . . . that I would have gone for it, and tried to patch the holes later. You are a seriously attractive woman. But this is better. We need to talk a lot more. Then jump in bed.”
“Deal,” she said, and she smiled, and the smile lit up the booth—and Virgil’s heart as well. But then, his heart wasn’t all that hard to light up. “God, you made that easy. Is it because you’re generous, or because you’re slick?”
“Hey, I’m from Marshall. There aren’t any slick guys from Marshall.”
“I once knew a slick guy from there,” she said.
“Now you’re lying,” Virgil said. “There are no slick guys from Marshall.”
“No, no, really—his name was Richard Reedy—”
“Richard,” Virgil said, laughing. “I know Richard. He was two years ahead of me. My God, you’re right. He used to wax his hair, so he had this little pointy thing that stuck up from his forehead, like the crest on a cardinal. He used to wear sport coats to school when he didn’t have to.”
“I saw him up in the Cities a couple of years ago,” she said. “He wears these plutonium suits and his hair is still waxed and he’s got one of those little telephone clip things on his ear, like he’s expecting a call from his agent,” she said. “Like his movie is being made.”
They both had a nice laugh, and then Virgil said, “All right. Now. Whoops, here comes a waiter. Shoo him away.”
She did and Virgil went on: “I’m getting more and more of a feeling that there’s something seriously wrong with this church. And that it might involve underage sex on a pretty wide scale. How underage, I don’t know.”
“Farm girls, not all of them, but some of them, can grow up pretty early. Sex is no big mystery if you grow up on a farm with animals,” Coakley said. “And when you’re out in the country, you spend quite a bit of time on your own, if you want. It’s easy to sneak off with a boyfriend.”
Virgil nodded. “Get a blanket out in a cornfield and you’re good.”
“Except you get corn cuts all over your butt, and itch like crazy,” she said.
They looked at each other and laughed again, and then she said, “If it’s under age seventeen, I think people would look past it. If it’s under age thirteen, we could get a lynch mob going.”
“Think about the fact that Kelly Baker was pretty badly abused, in a hard-core way, a porno-movie way,” Virgil said. “Whips. Multiple partners, possibly simultaneously, according to the Iowa ME. And that she’d been previously abused in the same way, and that nobody can find any sign that she was hooking, or any partners.”
“Virgil, that’s really ugly, what you’re thinking,” Coakley said, dead sober.
“Yes. It is.”
He told her about trying to call Sullivan, based on the interview with Tripp’s friend Jay Wenner, that she already knew about. “These farm guys, Craig and Van Mann, kept coming back to the fact that these church people are really tight with each other, and don’t much socialize with outsiders. If this gay kid was a friend of Kelly Baker, then he’s probably a church kid, and he probably knows everything she did. About everything. We need to find him. We need to talk to Sullivan, soon as we can.”
“He’s probably with his friend up there. You think we should try to track him down?”
“Ah, they told me he’s working tomorrow, so we can probably get him early tomorrow. Can’t do much more tonight, anyway,” Virgil said.
“Have you thought about the possibility of spying on one of these church meetings?”
He smiled: “Yes.”
“I’m up for that.”
“It’d have to be one of your guys you absolutely trust,” Virgil said. “It’s possible that Crocker was actually planted on the department by the church. . . . If you’re involved in some kind of mass child abuse thing, even if it’s religion-based, you’re going to be curious about what the local law enforcement agency is up to.”
She said, “It’ll be someone we can trust. Me.”
He nodded. “Okay. We’ll be like ninjas, black ghosts slipping unseen across the Minnesota countryside.”
“Probably get eaten by hogs,” she said.
“Minnesota ninjas fear no hogs,” Virgil said.
“And what else?”
“We need to track down a woman named Birdy Olms,” Virgil said. He explained. “With a name like that, I think we’ve got a chance.”
“I’ll get on that. And your DNA sample is at your lab. Jeanette took it up, and said they whined at her.”
“Yeah, well, I got my boss to jack them up,” Virgil said. “The problem is, everybody wants DNA. DNA for everything. We’re jumping the line, which pisses everybody off.”
“We’ve got four dead,” she said.
“But if the DNA pans out, we’ll have a hammerlock on Spooner. She grew up in the church, but she’s already stepped away from them. If we can get her with a murder charge, we might be able to open her up.”
She thought about that, and then said, “They’ve been out there for a long time, this church. I wonder what they’d do if they thought it was about to come down on them?”
11
P
atrick Sullivan, the reporter, woke Virgil at seven o’clock in the morning: “Hope I didn’t wake you up. I just found your message.”
“I need to talk to you,” Virgil said. “Are you at home?”
“Right now, I am. I need to get cleaned up and head into work by eight,” Sullivan said.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Virgil said.
He got cleaned up in a rush, stood for an extra minute in a hot shower, storing up some warmth, dressed, and headed out. The predawn was bitterly cold, the dry air like a knife against his face; and dark, as the season rolled downhill to the winter solstice, and the days were hardly long enough to remember. Sullivan had given him simple directions, and Virgil was at the curb outside his house twenty-nine minutes after he’d gotten out of bed, street-lights twinkling down the way.
Sullivan lived on the second floor of a stately white-and-teal Victorian on Landward Avenue. When Virgil arrived, the reporter was in the driveway, chipping frost off the windshield of a three-year-old Jeep Cherokee.
“When did you get in?” Virgil asked, as they headed up the walk to his apartment. If he’d driven down from the Cities, he wouldn’t have been chipping frost.
“I came back late last night. I was afraid if I stayed over, I’d get jammed up in traffic. What’s up?”
“A couple more questions about Tripp,” Virgil said. Sullivan led the way through the front door and up an old wooden staircase with a polished mahogany railing curling around a halfway landing.
“Not bad,” Virgil said.
“The price is right,” Sullivan said. He unlocked the door of his apartment. “Up in the Cities, this place would cost me fifteen hundred more’n I’m paying here.” He had three rooms—living room, bedroom, and kitchen, with a bath off the bedroom. “Microwave some coffee?”
“Fine,” Virgil said. He took a chair at the kitchen table, and when Sullivan brought the cups over, took one, and Sullivan sat opposite. “So.”
“There’s a lot going on out there,” Virgil said. “Kelly Baker, these other killings, they’re all hooked together, I think. We’ve been talking to people, and one guy who should know tells us that Kelly hooked up Tripp with another gay guy. Probably somebody she knew from this church she belonged to.”
“And you want to know if I know who he is,” Sullivan said.
“In a nutshell.”
“I don’t,” Sullivan said. “I’d be a little surprised if Bob was sexually active.”
“What if he kept it from you? I mean, this would be something he might not even want to admit to himself, much less to somebody outside the relationship,” Virgil said. “Since whoever he is was a friend of Kelly’s, we wonder if you ever saw a guy hanging around with her, who might’ve given you a look . . .”
Sullivan stared down into his coffee for a minute, then said, “There’s something . . .”
Virgil took a sip of coffee, waiting.
“I didn’t hang around with Bob in public. He wasn’t ready for people to know. But I ran into him once at the Dairy Queen, and he and Baker were with another man. The other guy gave off this vibration. . . . I didn’t remember until you asked.”
“You know him?”
“No. He was a real tall guy,” Sullivan said. “I mean, six-seven or six-eight. Not real good-looking, but interesting-looking, like somebody had chipped him out of wood. Abe Lincoln.”
“How old?”
Sullivan fingered the rim of his ear, thinking, then said, “I can’t say for sure, but I’d say, older than Bobby. Twenties. Probably not thirty. Dark hair, wore it long. Not hippie-long—farmer-long.”
“Huh,” Virgil said. “Thank you.”
THAT WAS WHAT Sullivan had, and Virgil stood up to leave. “Give me one thing for my story,” Sullivan said. He reached over to the kitchen counter and picked up a narrow, half-used reporter’s notebook and a ballpoint. “Anything good.”
Virgil considered, then said, “We think we’ve linked the Baker killing to the murders of Jacob Flood and Bob Tripp. I can’t tell you more than that. I will say that we’ve collected a variety of evidence, which is now being processed by the BCA lab, and we could get a break in a day or two. Chemistry takes time. But—I would like you to attribute this to an unnamed source, if you can. If not . . . I could take some heat.”
“I can do that.” Sullivan scribbled in the notebook. “What about the evidence involving Bob in a homosexual affair?”