Bad Blood (14 page)

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Authors: John Sandford

BOOK: Bad Blood
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“I really couldn’t tell you. I mean, she was there, but the Bakers are down at the far south end of the county, so we didn’t see them every day,” Spooner said. “I really don’t know. I mean, I guess . . . they say, the word is, she was sexually active. I was surprised, but I wasn’t really close enough to her to have any . . .
instinct
. . . about that. Maybe she was working in town, maybe she got loose somehow. I don’t know.”
“Were you homeschooled?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Reading, writing, arithmetic, German. Every year, for thirteen years, five days a week.”
“Is that part of the, uh, religion?”
“That’s one of the main parts—to keep the kids away from the influences in schools,” she said. She glanced at her watch. “I’ve really got to go.”
Virgil asked, “Jim—was he violent with you?”
She shook her head: “No. Jim was boring. That’s why I left. He’d get up, eat eggs, go to work, come home, eat dinner, sit on the couch and drink beer, go to bed. Every day. I couldn’t see living my whole life like that. This idea that he could have killed the Tripp boy . . . I mean, that’s very strange. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Do you know if he was dating anyone?”
“I don’t know. Really. I haven’t seen him in years. . . . All I know is history.” She looked at her watch again and said, “Now I’ve got two minutes to walk two blocks.”
“Come on,” Virgil said, “I’ll give you a ride. Where do you work?”
“At the CVS. I’m the assistant manager, I take care of the non-pharmacy items.”
On the way down the hall, zipping their parkas, he said, “I’m interested in the relationship between Jacob Flood and the Bakers. Flood and Baker both being murdered. Were they close?”
“Everybody in the church is fairly close—that’s mostly eighty or a hundred families, I guess. But I don’t know that the Floods were any closer to the Bakers than anybody else—they’re at the other end of the county from each other.”
Virgil said, “I chatted with Emmett Einstadt about Jacob Flood, and their relationships with the Bakers, Kelly Baker. He seemed to have about the same feeling as you did—close, but not every day. He was pretty upset about Kelly, you know, in a German way. If you know what I mean. . . . My mother is pure German.”
She smiled. “I do know,” she said. “Emmett never shows much, but because there aren’t so many church members, compared to the big churches, when somebody dies, you feel it. He gave a nice talk at her funeral.”
Virgil nodded and said, “That’s good. That’s good.” They were outside, and he pointed her at the truck, and they climbed inside.
“How long has the church been around? Is this a longtime thing, or did you all get converted?”
“Been around since the families came over from the Old Country,” Spooner said. “My great-grandfather was in it.”
“Most people marry into the church?”
“Oh, yeah. Because we know each other all our lives, and we have all these background things—don’t go to regular schools, so we don’t have any regular school friends. I always thought I might marry an outsider, if I fell in love, but when it came time to get married, I wound up with Jim. Somebody I’d known all my life.”
They pulled into the pharmacy, and Virgil said, “I might come back and talk to you again. I’m puzzled about Jim’s part in all of this. Why he might kill somebody like Tripp, and why he’d be so quickly killed in return.”
“I don’t have the faintest idea,” she said. “But if the Tripp boy knew both Kelly and Jacob, and you know he killed one of them . . .”
“But then why did Jim kill him?”
“That’s the mystery,” she said. “The only thing I can think of, is that he went a little crazy if the boy told him about killing Jake. Maybe he made a joke out of it, or something. Jim and Jake grew up together—they used to hunt and trap together, when they were kids, wander around the countryside. That’s all I can think of.”
“But then who’d kill Jim? And why?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know. Have you investigated the Tripps?”
“Well, we think the killer was a woman.”
“Oh. Well, it wasn’t me,” she said. “Mrs. Tripp is a woman. . . .”
“You’re right. You’re right. I’ll think about that,” Virgil said. He put out his hand and they shook, and she popped the door and climbed out, wiggled her fingers at him as she went through the door.
Virgil sat staring at the door for a minute, running it all through his head.
Einstadt had lied about not knowing the Bakers; he knew them quite well. That seemed critical, somehow. With Crocker being close to Flood, and married to Spooner, the church seemed more and more central to the whole situation. The only person not involved with it was Bobby Tripp.
And he wondered who’d been in Spooner’s apartment, not very long before himself, who’d left behind the damp footprints on the carpet, big bootlike footprints. And whether those footprints had anything to do with the fact that the hausfrau-looking Kathleen Spooner had a pistol in her pocket.
And he wondered about the color of the lipstick found on Crocker’s penis. Most Minnesota working women didn’t use lipstick, during the day, anyway. It was like a Minnesota
thing
. But Spooner wore it. Could the crime-scene people get enough of it off Crocker to match it to lipstick in Spooner’s bathroom or dressing table?
Stuff to think about: and while he was thinking about it, he carefully peeled off his parka and pulled back the sleeve of his shirt. He had a two-inch piece of double-sided carpet tape on his wrist. The sticky side was covered with fuzz, with a few dark hairs, from Kathleen Spooner’s couch.
Should be enough for DNA, he thought, if the lab guys would just give him the time. He peeled the tape off his wrist and stuck it in a Ziploc bag. Might not be an entirely legal search, but he was invited in . . . and once he
knew
, he could always come back.
Or not.
9
V
irgil headed south to Iowa, and called Bell Wood, the agent with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation: “I’m going down to Estherville,” he said, when Wood came up. “There’re interesting things going on, and I need to talk to John Baker and his family.”
“You won’t get much. They were pretty much mystified—Kelly backed out of their driveway and went on down the road,” Wood said. “We took a look at them, and nothing came up. We interviewed them all separately—John and . . . I can’t remember the wife’s name . . .”
“Luanne.”
“Yeah. John and Luanne, and their kids, and they all had the same story. Not rehearsed, just . . . the same.”
“All right. But I want to ask them about these new killings, see if they knew any of the people involved. . . . Did you guys look into their religion?”
“Not really. I remember they were churchy. Very dark dressers, kids homeschooled, and all that.”
“Huh. Okay—listen, would it be possible to get a highway patrol guy, or maybe an Estherville cop, whichever is better, to ride along with me? Somebody with an Iowa badge?”
“Let me make a call,” Wood said. “I’ll get back to you before you’re there.”
“Thanks.”
“Virgil . . . you’re getting somewhere?”
“Somewhere. But it’s murky. I’ll stay in touch.”
 
 
THE HIGHWAY PATROLMAN’S name was Bill Clinton, “but not that Bill Clinton,” he said, as he shook Virgil’s hand. He was a thick-set, shaved-head man of perhaps thirty-five; he had three fleshy wrinkles that rolled down the back of his neck like stair steps. They’d hooked up at a café across the street from the Emmet County Courthouse.
“Hope you’re a Democrat, anyway,” Virgil said. Virgil got a cup of coffee while Clinton finished his lunch.
Clinton shook his head. “Lifelong Republican. My old man is the Republican county chairman down in Sac County. But I didn’t mind—it was kinda fun. I was in the army back then.”
Virgil gave him a quick outline of the investigation, and Clinton whistled and said, “Man, that’s a hell of thing.”
“You heard anything about Kelly Baker since last year?”
“Oh, sure, all kinds of stuff. But it’s all bullshit,” Clinton said. “There was a cop from Des Moines who came up here on his own and was poking around, looking for Satanists. One of the churches here, pretty fundamental, he got the pastor all churned up, but it didn’t come to anything. Nobody believed it.”
“Neither do I,” Virgil said. “I’ve met a couple Satanists. They’re about what you expect—people who never got over Halloween.”
Clinton nodded. “Exactly right. People here are pretty commonsensical. The thing nobody could get around was what actually happened to her. The state ran the investigation, but technically, the Emmet County sheriff was in charge, so they got all the reports. When the autopsy came in, word about it got out in a couple of hours. Whips and multiple partners. People here look at the Internet, just like anybody, but they don’t believe that stuff happens here. Not with little farm girls.”
 
 
VIRGIL HAD CALLED ahead to the Bakers’ and had gotten directions on how to get there. Clinton left his patrol car in Estherville, and they rode together out to the Baker place. The Bakers’ house was a low, pale yellow rambler, with a miniature windmill in the front yard and an attached garage. The usual collection of farm sheds and buildings stood behind it, along with an early-twentieth-century brick silo, with no roof. A collection of rusted farm machinery was parked behind the old silo.
As they went up the drive, Virgil asked, “You know anything about these folks?”
“Not a thing. I looked them up after Bell Wood called, and law enforcement doesn’t even know they exist. Not even a traffic ticket.”
JOHN BAKER was Kelly Baker’s uncle. He was a tall, thin man with hollowed cheeks, long, lank black hair and a beard going gray; he wore oversized steel-framed glasses, like aviators, dark trousers, and a dark wool shirt. His wife was more of the same, without the beard, and with smaller glasses, and an ankle-length skirt that looked homemade.
A brilliant crazy quilt, made of postage-stamp-sized snips of cloth, hung from pegs on the front-room wall; Virgil liked quilts, and this was a good one. He took a minute to look at it, as they were sitting down, and realized that in its natural craziness, it concealed a spring landscape.
The house smelled of vegetable soup—very good vegetable soup—and something else, some kind of herb, perhaps.
“Terrific quilt,” he said to Luanne Baker.
She nodded, and then, almost reluctantly, “My mom made it.” She had a dry, tinny voice, and Virgil realized that she was frightened.
Virgil smiled and asked, “Do you quilt yourself?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, and nothing more.
John Baker asked, “Is this about Kelly? It must be.”
Virgil said, “Yes, it is. . . .” He looked around, tipping his head, and asked, “I understand you have kids?”
“They’re over at a neighbor’s,” John Baker said. “We got them out of the way of this—they’re scared enough.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “What we’ve got going up north . . . you may have heard some of it—”
“You have a killer running around loose,” John Baker said.
“Yes. And we think the killer knows something about what happened to Kelly. We’re linking up the cases. For one thing, Kelly, and two other victims, Jim Crocker and Jacob Flood, are members of your church. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything—there are a lot of church members out in the same area—”
“A lot of people don’t like us. They say we’re standoffish,” Luanne Baker blurted. “Kelly was wearing her bonnet when she left, and I think some perverts spotted her and they took her right off the street. This boy who killed Jacob, he must’ve been one of them.”
Virgil shook his head. “That really doesn’t fit with the facts, Mrs. Baker. It appears that Kelly had been with these men more than once.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “She was a good, cheerful girl. I would have spotted something like that. We all would have. There’s something rotten in the state of Iowa, and I think that medical examiner is part of it. You know, he’s a Muslim?”

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