Bad Blood

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