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Authors: John Sandford

BOOK: Bad Blood
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He did wind up liking most of them, though, simply because of shared backgrounds, and the fact that Virgil was a social guy. So social, he’d been married three times over a short space of years, until he finally gave it up. He didn’t plan to resume until he’d grown old enough to distinguish love from infatuation. He felt he was making progress, but he’d thought that the other three times, too.
He considered Lee Coakley, and thought,
Huh
. She had a glint in her eye, and he knew for a fact that she was recently divorced. And she carried a gun. He liked that in a woman, because it sometimes meant that he didn’t have to.
 
 
HE CUT I-90 at Fairmont, stopped to stretch and get a Diet Coke, and headed west. The sun was already low and deep into the southwest, and the sky was going gray.
Homestead was an old country town of fourteen thousand people or so, the Warren County seat, founded in the 1850s on rolling land along a chain of lakes. Warren was in the first tier of counties north of the Iowa line, west of Martin County, east of Jackson. Most of the downtown buildings, and many of the homes, were put up in the first half of the twentieth century. Interstate 90 passed just to the north of town, and Virgil stopped as he went by and reserved a room at the Holiday Inn. That done, he drove on into town, to the sheriff’s office. Her office was in an eighties-era yellow brick building built behind an older, mid-century courthouse. The office included working space for the worn deputies, a comm center, and a jail.
 
 
COAKLEY WAS WAITING, with two deputies, big men in their thirties, both weathered, square-jawed Germans, one in civilian clothes, the other in a sheriff’s uniform.
“Agent Flowers,” Coakley said, “I’ve got your warrant. These men are Gene Schickel and Greg Dunn, they’ll be going out with you.”
He shook hands with the two, and Virgil said to Dunn, “I remember you from the Larson accident.” Dunn nodded and said, “That was a mess,” and added, “I gotta tell you, I don’t like this.”
“Nobody ever does,” Virgil said. “Me coming in, it’s like internal affairs. When I was a cop up in St. Paul, I shaded away from those guys as much as anybody. No reason to, but I know what you’re talking about.”
Dunn said, “Just a feeling that maybe we should clean up our own messes.”
Virgil nodded. “But you’ve got a lifetime job, if you don’t screw up. Sheriff Coakley has to get elected, and you’ve gotta see the political problem in all this.”
Dunn nodded. “Yeah, I do. I just don’t like it.”
Virgil looked at Schickel, the one in uniform. “What about you? Or are you the strong and silent type?”
Schickel’s lips barely moved: “We got to look at Crocker. I’d do it, even if nobody else wanted to.”
“Then let’s go,” Virgil said.
 
 
SCHICKEL RODE with Virgil, to fill him in on Crocker, while Dunn took a sheriff’s truck and led the way. Crocker lived seventeen miles out, most of it down I-90. Schickel said, “Greg wasn’t trying to give you a hard time. He says what he thinks.”
Virgil nodded. “I appreciate that. He didn’t cut Larson any slack, either.”
Larson had been a state senator who’d gotten drunk, but not very, had run a rural stop sign and T-boned another car on his way home from the bar. The driver of the other car was killed. The question had been whether it was purely an accident, or vehicular homicide. Virgil had helped with the investigation, and though Larson had been indicted on the homicide charge, he’d been acquitted.
“Greg’s a good guy, but he doesn’t cut anybody a lot of slack,” Schickel said. Then, loosening up a little, “Including his wife. He’s halfway through a divorce.”
“Been there,” Virgil said. “So what’s with Crocker? Good guy? Bad guy? You think he knew Tripp? Any rumors around?”
“Jimmy’s not a good guy,” Schickel said. “I’m not talking behind his back. He knows what I think, and I’ve told him to his face.”
“What’s his problem?”
“He’s got some bully in him, for one thing. Not physical—that’s one thing I’m not sure about in this Tripp thing. The Tripp boy was a hell of an athlete. Jim Crocker is a big guy and strong as a bull, but I don’t know if he’d have the guts to take on Bobby Tripp.”
“So when you say Crocker’s a bully . . .”
“He’s political, always sucking around for something,” Schickel said. “He was Harlan’s messenger boy, when somebody had to give out the bad news. You know, if somebody was gonna get fired, or laid off, or disciplined. He was like the assistant principal, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“And he enjoyed doing it. But he was also one for dodging serious work. When he went for the sheriff’s job, practically the whole department was out there talking up Lee. I would’ve quit, if he’d won.”
“But not crooked . . . not on the take, or anything.”
“Not like payoffs, like protection. But he’d do a favor for somebody,” Schickel said. “One time, two or three years back, a doctor’s kid got caught driving drunk, one-point-one blood alcohol. No accident or anything, pretty good kid, otherwise, but drunk. His old man came in to talk to the sheriff. Said they had a family cabin up in Canada, and the Canadians wouldn’t let the kid into the country with the conviction. He wanted a
little consideration
.”
“And the sheriff said . . .”
“Basically, that it was too late. Everybody in town knew about the situation. Best to hire a good lawyer. Anyway, when they went to send the file over to the county attorney, the key evidence was missing. The original ticket with the blow-tube numbers on it,” Schickel said. “So the prosecutor refused to prosecute, because of tainted evidence and mishandled paperwork. She was happy to do it, because she didn’t want to hang up the doctor’s family anyway. And she had an out: she blamed our office. Hell of an embarrassment. The eventual . . . conclusion . . . was that Crocker lifted the file.”
“But no proof.”
“No proof, but I’m on board with the conclusion,” Schickel said. “Crocker . . . you can have a beer with the guy, and he can tell a story, but basically, not a good guy.”
 
 
THEY FOLLOWED DUNN off I-90 at Highway 7, turned south through the town of Battenberg. Schickel pointed out a grain elevator: “That’s where Tripp killed Jake Flood.”
“Oh, yeah? Was Crocker in on that? The investigation?” Virgil asked.
“No, he had nothing to do with that. That all happened in the daytime, and Crocker’s been working nights,” Schickel said.
“Did he work last night?”
“Nope. Yesterday and the day before was his weekend. He’s on tonight.”
They passed the high school and went on down Main Street to the intersection of a county highway, turned back east for a couple miles, jogged south.
“He’s really out here,” Virgil said. “He got a family?”
“No. Wife took off a few years ago. She’s married to a guy over in Jackson, now. Or was. This house belongs to his uncle: he gets it free, as I understand it. Otherwise, it’d probably be abandoned. His folks have a farm further on south.”
 
 
THE FARMHOUSE SAT on the south side of a tangled woodlot of cottonwoods and box elders, beside a shallow drainage creek that crossed the roadway south of the house. The house was typical old Minnesota: a narrow two-story clapboard place in need of paint and new shingles, and probably new wiring. A thin stream of heated air was coming from a chimney, visible as a shimmer against the sky.
A machine shed, showing fresh tracks going in, but not out, with a new garage door, sat to the left of the driveway, with a ten-foot-long propane tank to one side. The front porch was covered by untracked snow; entry was apparently through the side door, next to the driveway. A satellite dish was bolted to one of the porch pillars, aimed to the southwest.
Dunn led the way in, and Virgil parked behind him, and they got out and stretched and stomped their feet in the snow-covered drive, and Dunn said to Virgil, “Well, time to do your thing.”
Virgil nodded and said, “You know what?” He went back to the truck and got the Glock out of the center console and put it in his pocket.
Schickel’s eyebrows went up: “You don’t carry?”
“I’m more of an intellectual,” Virgil said.
Dunn actually smiled: “I’ve heard that.”
 
 
VIRGIL CLIMBED the stoop and knocked on the door. No answer. No sound, except the faint hiss of the chimney. Knocked again, louder. Called, “Crocker? Jim Crocker?”
Silence.
Virgil stepped back from the stoop, asked the deputies, “There’s no chance that anybody called him? That he’s running for it?”
Dunn shook his head: “I know for a fact that the sheriff didn’t tell anybody but me and Gene, and Judge O’Hare, who’s about as tight-lipped as a guy could get.”
“O’Hare didn’t tell anybody,” Schickel said. He climbed the stoop and banged on the door again, yelled, “Jimmy?”
Dunn said, “Let me look in the shed. Maybe he’s over in Jackson or something.” He walked across the driveway to the shed, peered in a window, came back. “His Jeep’s there,” he said.
The three men looked at each other, and Virgil said, “I’m going in, on the warrant.”
Dunn nodded and said, “Probably best to take out a pane of glass, instead of breaking the door. Be hell to get somebody out here to fix the door.”
Virgil used the barrel of the Glock to knock out a pane of glass in the door, reached in, and turned the lock. He pushed the door open, then stepped back.
“Somebody dead in here,” he said.
Dunn, suddenly pale-faced, said, “What?”
“I can smell him,” Virgil said. “Not much stink, but somebody’s dead in here.”
“A mouse?”
“Not a mouse . . . You guys step careful, here. If he’s dead, we don’t want to screw up the scene.”
They found him on the living room couch, staring with blank eyes at a rerun of
Married . . . with Children
.
“Ah, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Schickel said, crossing himself. “He ate his gun. He must’ve killed Bobby.”
A pistol, a matte-black Glock like Virgil’s, except in .45 caliber, lay on the floor next to the couch.
“Did he carry a .45 Glock?” Virgil asked, looking at the big black hole at the end of the barrel.
“Yeah, he did,” Dunn said.
Crocker was on his back, an entry wound under his chin, a massive exit wound at the back of his skull. The arm of the couch, covered with a plush green material, was soaked with blood, hair, and what might have been pieces of bone; a couple of small holes in the wall beside the couch looked like they might have been made by fragments of the exiting slug.
“Maybe he knew he was gonna get caught,” Dunn said.
“Didn’t kill himself,” Virgil said. “He was probably murdered. Let’s clear the house, just to make sure there’s nobody hurt, somewhere. We don’t want to dig around, just clear it. Two minutes.”
The three of them moved through the place, but found it empty. Crocker had lived only on the first floor; the second floor was closed down, the door at the top of the stairs sealed with 3M insulating tape. They pushed through, and found a bunch of old dusty furniture sitting in cold, dry, dusty rooms.
When they were sure there was nobody else in the place, Virgil said, “Let’s call the sheriff. This is really gonna make her day.”
They stepped carefully past the body and back outside. Dunn made the call, and Schickel asked Virgil, “Why’d you think it’s murder?”
“When Lee was telling me about B. J. Tripp, she mentioned him being hanged from the bunk. I asked her if his dick was hanging out—you know, strangled himself while masturbating.”
“Heard of that, but never seen it,” Schickel said.
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t. Hanging out. But if you go up there and look, you’ll see that Crocker’s fly is down, and you can see his dick sticking out. I never, ever, heard of anyone who was yanking his crank and stopped to kill himself. Or anyone who took his dick out, and left it out, and killed himself. It’s not dignified. When people kill themselves, they tend to think about how they’ll be found—they imagine it. They imagine how sad everybody’ll be. They’re going to
show
them . . . but they don’t stick their dick out.”
“I didn’t pick up on that,” Schickel said. “His dick.”
Dunn came back: “The sheriff’s on the way. What about his dick? Whose dick?”

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