Bad Blood

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2010 by John Sandford
    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
     
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Sandford, John, date.
Bad blood / John Sandford.
p. cm.
    eISBN : 978-1-101-44343-9
    1. Flowers, Virgil (Fictitious character)—Fiction.
2. Government investigators—Minnesota—Fiction.
3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. Minnesota—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.A516B
813’.6—dc22
     

     

     
     
    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
     
    While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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I wrote this novel in cooperation with Mike Sweeney, a fine reporter and longtime leader of the Twin Cities Newspaper Guild. We’ve been friends for thirty years and more, and Sweeney’s the one who led me on a long, wild canoe trip down the St. Croix River, only to be ultimately defeated by raccoons. But, like, they were big, vicious raccoons. And really big.
     
—JOHN SANDFORD

1
    O ne of those days: late fall, bare black tree branches scratching at a churning gray sky, days cold, nights colder. The harvest was very late—record late—and moving fast. The soybean crop had been delayed because of a cold summer, and then in the middle of October, with half the crop in, rain began to fall, a couple of inches a week, and didn’t quit for a month. Now it was dry again, but a landslide of bad weather hovered over the western horizon, and the combines were working twenty hours a day, bringing in the last of the beans and corn.
    Bob Tripp leaned against the highway-side wall at the Battenberg Farmer’s Co-op grain elevator, knowing that Jacob Flood was on his way.
    You could not only see the harvest—the working lights in the fields at night, the tractors and wagons on the roads—but you could hear it, and smell it, and even taste it in the air. Tasted like grain, and a little like dust, Tripp thought. His favorite time of year for the outdoors: regular deer season just over, muzzleloader coming up, snowmobiles ready to go.
    Flood had called from his field in the early afternoon: “I need to get in and out fast. You open?”
    “I got two wagons being weighed right now,” Tripp had said. “John McGuire’s coming in probably twenty minutes, nothing after that. If you can get here in an hour or so, we should be open. People have been calling to check, nobody’s called about coming in after John.”
    “Put me down for three,” Flood said. “And goldarnit, I gotta get in and out.”
    “Help you the best we can,” Tripp said.
    Tripp was nineteen, a high school jock who should have been playing freshman football at a state college. An automobile