Bad Blood

you, Earl.”

4
    V irgil left the café pleased with himself. He’d learned something, and it had made the case more intricate and therefore more interesting, and also more breakable. The more ways in, the better. He drove over to the sheriff’s office and found John Kraus, a tall, portly bald man who wore the department uniform, and looked like a cook, or a potential department-store Santa.
    “Got your files right down the hall,” Kraus said. “We got them either on computer, or on paper, but I got you the paper ones. Easier to shuffle things around.”
    “That’s terrific. Just the way I like it,” Virgil said.
    Kraus said, “I’ll leave you to it. We got some coffee going down the hall, to the right. Can’s around the corner.”
    Virgil started by calling Bell Wood, an agent with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. “Tell him his personal hero is calling from Minnesota,” Virgil told the woman who answered the phone.
    Wood came up: “That fuckin’ Flowers. Everything was going so well, too. Just a minute ago, I told Janice, everything’s going too well—something’s wrong.”
    “I heard the fools who run the National Guard made you into a major,” Virgil said.
    “That is indeed the case. People now call me Major Wood.”
    “That wouldn’t be any women you know,” Virgil said, “or have known, or will ever know.”
    “Au contraire, my ignorant Minnewegan friend. My standing is well known in the female community. So, is this a social call?”
    “Nope. Something’s wrong,” Virgil said.
    “Ah, crap,” Wood said. Wood was the number two guy in the major crimes section. “Let’s hear it.”
    “You know the murder of a young Minnesota girl named Kelly Baker?” Virgil asked. “Down by Estherville, a year or so ago?”
    “That would be ‘up by Estherville,’ if you were correctly oriented. Yeah, I do know about it. Ugly. Ugly case, Virgil. October eleventh. Fourteen months ago. Our sex kitten. We got nothing.”
    “You got sex kitten,” Virgil said.
    “We do. Are you at your office? I’ll send you the file.”
    “Actually, I’m in Homestead. . . .” He filled in Wood on the three murders, beginning with Flood. Wood listened, then said, “I heard about the jail hanging, but I didn’t know it was murder.”
    “Just found it out today,” Virgil said. “This morning. Listen, that file on Baker, shoot it down to me. Up to me.”
    “Sure. You want e-mail?”
    “I don’t know if they’re running wireless,” Virgil said. “Hang on, let me walk down the hall and find my guy.”
    Kraus said they did not have a wireless hookup. He got on the line with Wood, agreed that they could take and print a color PDF document, gave Wood the address, and handed the phone back to Virgil.
    “It’s on the way,” Wood said. “It’s big, three hundred pages, in color. Let me look at this, for a minute, I’m looking at the computer. You probably want to read the whole thing, to see who we interviewed, and what they said, but right off, go to page thirty-four. That’s the beginning of the autopsy report.”
    “That’s a big deal?” Virgil asked.
    “Yeah. That’s the big deal, so far,” Wood said. “Virgil, if you can nail the guys who did this, man, I’ll get you tracks in the Iowa Guard. That’s the same as a Minnesota general.”
    “I’ve had tracks,” Virgil said; he’d gotten out of the army as a captain. “When you say ‘guys,’ plural . . .”
    “Read the report,” Wood said.
    “You got DNA on these guys?”
    “Read the report. And listen, keep me informed.”
     
     
    VIRGIL DECIDED that he wanted to read about the murders in the order that they happened, and so went down and got a cup of coffee, then waited, watching, as the file came out of Kraus’s laser printer.
    The autopsy report, including findings and conclusions, was fifteen pages long. When the last of it came out, Virgil said to Kraus, “Holler when it’s done. I’m going to start with this.”
    The first few pages of the report laid out the reasons for Iowa DCI involvement: the department was asked in by Emmet County authorities after Baker’s body was found in the Lutheran cemetery north of Estherville. The body was nude, and half-hidden behind a tombstone in an older section of the cemetery, where it was found by chance by an elderly woman who’d come out to put the year’s last blooming wildflowers on her husband’s grave.
    The Emmet County sheriff’s office had put out