Bad Blood

have been done by panicked high school boys? But the level of sexual deviation suggested older men, with longer-standing sexual tastes. Would her parents know the older men? Could it have been teachers, or familial abuse?
    The care with which the DNA had been obliterated again suggested older men, and perhaps men experienced in removing DNA. Had they killed before?
     
     
    HE WAS THINKING about it when Kraus appeared with a thick stack of paper and handed it to him. “That’s it. We have some paper of our own on the case; we did interviews with friends and schoolmates of hers, but most of that’s in the Iowa reports. Ours might have a little more detail, but probably nothing too significant.”
    “What I’d really like is a list of names of everybody you interviewed,” Virgil said. “Not what they said, just a list.”
    “I could put that together. I’ll do it now,” Kraus said. “You think this is really tied to Flood and Bobby Tripp and Jim?”
    “Well, Flood was killed in Battenberg, and came from two miles northwest of there. Crocker lived on a farm a couple miles southeast of Battenberg, and Baker here came from a farm five or six miles south. So you could probably put all their places in a twenty-five- or thirty-square-mile area. How big is the county? Seven hundred square miles? With maybe a murder every decade or so? And you have three killings, in little more than a year, with all the victims from that little square, who knew each other? Or another way—they all lived within a mile or so of Highway 7. . . .”
    “I’ll get busy,” Kraus said.

    VIRGIL DID a quick scan of the Iowa file, looking for names, especially Bob Tripp’s. It wasn’t there.
    Going back through the paper, he found photos of Baker when she was alive, as well as crime-scene shots and several autopsy photos. The autopsy photos didn’t do anything but gross him out, and he put them aside. She had been a reasonably pretty girl, blond, busty. When she’d fully filled out, she would probably have been stocky, with broad shoulders and hips, and overlarge breasts.
    In the early flush of womanhood, though, she looked good. Salable , Virgil thought, with a little thrum of guilt. The Iowa investigators had dug hard into the possibility that she’d been involved in prostitution, and had found nothing.
    Virgil got back on the phone to Wood. “Solved it yet?” Wood asked.
    “About halfway there,” Virgil said. “I’ve been reading the file, and want to know what you thought about the prostitution angle. Your guys asked a lot of questions. . . .”
    “Let me run down the hall and grab a guy,” Wood said.
    He was back in a minute, and another phone was picked up. Wood said, “I’ve got Mitch Ingle on the phone; he worked that the hardest.”
    “I’ve got all the paper here,” Virgil told the Iowans. “What I want is some opinions. Was she hooking?”
    Ingle said, “It’s easy to think so, looking at the whole package. But I don’t believe it. In a community that size, the word would get around. You got a school full of horny high school boys in a small community, where everybody knows everything, and we couldn’t turn up a hint of that. What I started to believe was that she may have been picked up by a couple of older guys who were working on turning her out, and killed her before that got done. That would also explain the other prostitution problem—there was no sign that she had any money. And she had no birth control pills, she had no condoms. She had no hooker stuff.”
    “Estherville can’t be that big. . . .”
    “Checked every apartment and every loose male, anyplace she might have gone for sex. We concluded that she might not have actually . . . performed whatever it was . . . in Estherville. She might have been dumped there from somewhere else.”
    “Her car was found there.”
    “Yes, but we don’t know that she drove it there. Nobody saw who parked it. It was alongside a convenience store and coin-op laundry, off to the side, people coming and going. Could have been her, but maybe not. The thing is, we’re assuming that she was not kidnapped. She went with these guys, maybe not because she wanted to, but she didn’t fight them. She met them. She left her uncle’s place, and drove somewhere and met them. Judging from those earlier marks on her breasts and legs, she’d met them before.”
    “I haven’t been through all the paper, and I’m not sure you put every name in, but do you remember