Virgil opened a primitive version of iPhoto and found none. He stuck his head in the hallway: “Anybody found a camera?”
Coakley: “There’s an Instamatic in here, but there’s nothing in it.”
“Doesn’t she have a junk room anywhere?”
“Bunch of cupboards in the mudroom off the kitchen, there was an old Polaroid in there, looked like it hadn’t been used in years,” Wright said.
“No digital?”
Nobody had seen a digital camera. Nobody had seen any guns, either. “I’m starting to think that she cleaned the place up, just in case,” Virgil told Coakley. “We ought to take a look at her car.”
The car was included in the search warrant as a matter of course. Coakley called back to her office, got Greg Dunn to check around the parking lot for Spooner’s car. “Get Stupek to open it up, go through it, get back to me. We’d be interested in paper, photographs, cameras, guns, whatever.”
Virgil said, quietly to Coakley, when they were alone, “You know what? We didn’t take Dennis’s advice seriously enough— you know, that we hit Spooner with a search warrant. She’s implicated Flood and Crocker in the Baker case: let’s hit Flood with a search warrant. If we could separate Alma Flood from her daughters for a while, get somebody with Social Services with the kids, see what the kids have to say . . .”
“Then they’d know what we’re looking at, and if it didn’t pan out, we’d be screwed,” Coakley said. “I hate to give up that edge. The word would spread with these people in an instant—cell phones. They’ll destroy every bit of physical evidence that might be around. If they warn Rouse, do you think those pictures will still be in the closet?”
Virgil scratched his forehead, thinking. “Let’s get the computer and everything else, like the photo of Flood, locked up in your office, or up at the BCA. We don’t arrest Spooner . . . we let her slide.”
“That might be up to Harris Toms, depending on what he sees in her story,” Coakley said.
“Talk to him. No big rush. Ask him to let it slide for a few days,” Virgil said. “Spread the word that I’ve gone back to Mankato on another case. I’ll stop by the café and mention it there.”
“And in real life, you actually . . .”
“I’m going to track down this Birdy woman and see what she has to say,” Virgil said.
“I looked, but I couldn’t find her.”
“I’ve got somebody who can, unless she’s completely changed her name. . . . I’ve just been negligent in getting her started. I’ll call her right now.”
He got Sandy on the phone and explained the problem.
“You don’t know whether she’s alive or dead, or where she might have run to?”
“No, but she’s a Midwestern farm woman who was on her own, with some cash. I don’t know how much, but as I understand it, her husband was reasonably affluent, and she cleaned out his accounts. So, where do Midwestern farm women run to? Florida? California? Arizona? Or maybe someplace else in the Midwest?”
“Does she have any relatives she might be in touch with?”
“Sandy, it’s like this,” Virgil said. “I don’t know anything about her, except her name, and I can’t ask, because that would tip off people that we’re looking for her.”
“Interesting,” she said. “If she’s on her own, she probably had to get a job, so she should be in Social Security records.”
“And in state employment records, and probably DMV records, possibly insurance records . . . The way people talked, her husband doesn’t know where she went, so she probably never served him with divorce papers.”
Coakley, in the background, said, “She’s not in the NCIC, I looked.” Virgil passed that on, and Sandy said, “Unless she’s gone completely underground—changed her name, got a fake Social Security number, and so on, or is dead, or is on the street, this shouldn’t be too hard. I’ll get back to you in a bit.”
“I’ll be on my cell,” Virgil said.
VIRGIL LOADED Spooner’s computer into his truck, leaving behind a receipt. When he went back in the apartment, Coakley was on the phone with Dunn, the deputy who was searching Spooner’s car. Schickel was listening in. When she got off, she said to Virgil, “Nothing in the car at all.”
“We know she had a gun, because I saw it,” Virgil said. “She cleaned the house out before she came in, and stuck stuff away somewhere.”
“How do we find it?” Coakley asked.
Virgil shrugged. “We don’t. She’s not a dumb woman. Could be in a safe-deposit box in some small bank fifty miles from here—or in a friend’s basement. No way to tell.”
Schickel said, “You saw her gun?”
“Yeah, she was carrying one in her pocket.”
“Come here and look at this.”
Virgil followed him into the front room and showed him a small pocket roughly sewn to the side of a couch. The couch was set diagonally from a wall, with the pocket against the wall, where it couldn’t be seen.
“Couldn’t figure out what the hell it is. You think it could be, like, a holster?”
Virgil got down on the rug, pulled the pocket open with a finger, and sniffed it, leaned back and said, “Smells like Hoppe’s to me.” Hoppe’s was the most popular brand of gun solvent and lubricant, with a distinct, oily-acid odor.
He moved aside, and Schickel sniffed it: “Yeah. So why would she have a gun pocket sewn to the side of her couch, for gosh sakes?”
“Maybe she’s scared, or a gun nut,” Virgil said. “We can ask her, but it won’t get us anywhere. She thought this out.”
“But the computer . . .”
“She didn’t understand the computer, and screwed up,” Virgil said.
THEY DIDN’T FIND anything else immediately, and Virgil and Coakley headed back to Homestead in Virgil’s truck, leaving Schickel and Wright to finish. “If we knew more about the church members in detail, we might be able pick out some weak ones. Maybe that’s the way to go: slow down, find the weak ones,” Coakley said.
“I’d have to leave that to you,” Virgil said. “I just can’t pick up and move down here and devote my life to it: I’m doing three or four cases at a time, as it is.”
She thought that over, then said, “Cold out here.”
Virgil looked across the barren landscape and said, “Amazing the change between fall and winter. From harvest time to January. In September it looks like you could feed the world with one hand tied behind your back; in January, even the buildings look starved.”
Somewhere along the way, they agreed that Virgil should sneak her in the back of the Holiday Inn, so she wouldn’t have to go through the lobby. They did that, and wound up in bed again, more intense this time, and less happy: the cloud of the case hanging over them.
“Some way,” she said, “we’ll be able to get into the Rouses’ place. The question is, will they know we’re coming, and get rid of the photographs and whatever else they have. I mean, Virgil, it’s right there, the whole case, and we can’t touch it. It’s driving me crazy.”
They were propped up on the extra pillows, snuggled together, when Virgil’s phone rang. He picked it up, looked at the incoming number on the display, and said, “Sandy. Maybe she found Birdy.”
He clicked on the phone and asked, without preamble, “You find her?”
“No, but I didn’t find her in a pretty interesting way,” she said. “When she ran away, she just disappeared. I can’t find a single sign of her. Social Security stopped—they still have her farm address as her address—driver’s license expired, no new driver’s license anywhere I can find. Anywhere in the U.S. No income tax returns, U.S. or state. Her husband divorced her six years ago for abandonment, and she never responded to the court in any way, and she probably had some alimony coming if she’d wanted it. She’s so gone that I suspect she’s dead. That one of your suspects down there killed her and buried her out in a field somewhere.”
“Ah, man,” Virgil said. “What all did you check?”
Sandy took a minute to lay it out, and then said, “I ran the whole search again under her maiden name, Lucy McCain—Birdy was just a nickname, Olms was her married name—and that came up dry, too. Lots of Lucy McCains, but she isn’t one of them, as far as I can tell.”
“Wait a minute,” Virgil said, “Her maiden name was McCain?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you know where she was from originally? I mean, was it down here in Warren County?”
“Nope. She was from Sleepy Eye.”
“Sleepy Eye. Does she have any family there?” Virgil asked.
“Parents, both alive, Ed and Ruth, brothers Robert and William, twin sister Louise.”
“Louise McCain?”
“Louise Gordon, now. Married Ronald Gordon, divorced three years ago. She works at Charles Winston, Auctioneers.”
“Still in Sleepy Eye?”
“Yes. You want the address?”
VIRGIL TOOK DOWN addresses, then hung up and put his arm around Coakley’s back, cupped her right breast in his right hand, and twiddled her nipple while he thought about it. “What?” she asked.
“Birdy dropped off the face of the earth. Our researcher could find Hitler, if he was still alive, and she got nothing on Birdy. Her name was Lucy McCain, by the way. Not a German name, and she’s not from Warren County. She was born in Sleepy Eye, and still has a twin sister living there.”
“If they were close . . .”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Virgil said. “If anybody would know where she is, it’d be her sister, or maybe her folks. Or maybe all of them. I better run up there.”
“What about Spooner?”
“Think about her. Threaten her. Tell her we know there’s something else going on, and she’ll get no mercy if she doesn’t talk to us about everything. Tell her we’re taking her down for murder, we’ll put her on the stand, we’ll make her perjure herself, and send her to prison for that, when we finally break it.”
“In other words, rain all over her,” Coakley said.
“Exactly. I don’t think it’ll work, but if things start to crumble, she might want to get out in front of it.” He gave her nipple a final twiddle and said, “I’m outa here.”
SLEEPY EYE WAS roughly seventy miles straight north, a little more than an hour on the two-lane state highways. Night was falling by the time he drove into town, past the implement dealer and the car dealer and a Lutheran church where his father once substituted for a sick pastor, taking a right on Burnside, then slowing, looking for house numbers.
Louise Gordon lived in a brown-and-white bungalow with a covered porch and a one-car garage down the back. Both the living room window and the back, kitchen window showed lights; he pulled into the driveway, killed the engine, and walked up the porch, which had been cleared of snow, and knocked and rang the doorbell.
Gordon was a slightly heavy, middle-sized woman of perhaps thirty-five, with curly reddish-brown hair. She came to the door holding a half-eaten raw carrot, peeked at him through the glass, opened the inner door, the storm door, just a crack, and said, “Hello?”
Virgil held up his ID. “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. If you’re Louise Gordon, I’d like to speak to you about your sister, Lucy. Birdy.”
“Lucy,” she said, and, “Pardon me, but you don’t look much like a police officer.”
“Well, mmm, you could check with my office. . . .”
“What if I called the police here?” She said it in a challenging way, to see if he’d run.
“Good idea,” Virgil said. “Go call them, I’ll wait in my truck.”
She nodded, pulled the door shut, and Virgil went and sat in his truck. Five or six minutes later, a Chevy Tahoe parked across the end of the driveway, and a man in civilian clothes hopped out. Virgil climbed out of his truck, and the man came up and said, “Charlie Lane . . . you’re with the state?”
Virgil gave him his ID: “I’m Virgil Flowers with the BCA. I need to talk to Miz Gordon about her sister.”
“Hey, Virgil. I’ve heard of you.” He tipped the ID into the light from Virgil’s open truck door, looked at Virgil’s face, then passed the ID back. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
LOUISE GORDON DENIED knowing where her sister was, but she denied it with a relish that said she was lying. “When she disappeared, we were all shocked, but I said, ‘That’s Lucy. If she’s run away, there’s a good reason for it.’”
“What was the reason?” Virgil asked. “Her husband?”
“Of course it was her husband; what else would it be? Lucy and I are the first women in our family to be divorced. Ever. With me, it was because I got tired of putting up with my husband’s laziness. With Lucy, it was worse. Rollo beat her. And worse than that.”
“Rollo?”
“Roland. Her husband.”
“What’s worse than getting beaten? Did he sexually mistreat her?”
A moment of hesitation, then, “That’s what I understand, yes.”
They were sitting in Gordon’s living room and Virgil leaned forward and said, “Miz Gordon—I spend a lot of time interviewing people, and I know when they’re lying to me. You’re lying to me when you say you don’t know where she is, or how to get in touch. I need to talk to her, and we’re not fooling around. I don’t want to have to threaten you.”