Bad Blood

with the Vietnamese dragon lady. The one out by Bluestem, with the federal guys.”
    “They’re like bad dreams slowly fading away,” Virgil said. He pointed at a chair: “Sit down. We gotta talk. There’s more going on than a story.”
    Sullivan sat down, a skeptical look on his face: “Like what?”
    “We have to go off the record for a bit,” Virgil said. “That good with you?”
    “Depends. We can start that way. If I can’t keep it off, I’ll tell you,” Sullivan said.
    “When Bob Tripp was arrested, he wouldn’t talk to the sheriff until he talked to you first,” Virgil said.
    Sullivan’s eyebrows went up. “Me?”
    “Yes. Are we off the record?”
    “Okay. For now.”
    “We wondered if you knew what he might have wanted to talk about,” Virgil said.
    “So you didn’t ask me to come in as a reporter, but as a possible witness.”
    Virgil shrugged: “I don’t care if you’re both. Not a problem for me.”
    Sullivan said, “I’ll have to think about it . . . but if Bobby wanted to talk, why would he have committed suicide?”
    Virgil said, “He didn’t. He was murdered. Probably by Jim Crocker.”
    “Whoa.” Sullivan went pale, leaned forward. “This has got to be on the record. Not about Bobby wanting to talk to me, but about Bobby and Crocker.”
    “We’ll come back to it, give you a formal interview, on the record. Let’s stay off for now.”
    Sullivan paused, then nodded.
    “Crocker isn’t a sure thing, for Bobby’s murder,” Virgil said. “I can think of scenarios where he didn’t do it—but we think he probably did. We may have more definitive answers after the investigation.”
    Coakley jumped in, pressing the question, “Do you have any idea why Bobby might have wanted to talk to you?”
    Sullivan leaned back, looked at Coakley, then Virgil, then back at Coakley. “Lee, I assume you know that I’m gay.”
    “I knew that,” she said, nodding.
    “I cover a lot of sports. People around town had heard I was gay, and some of the high school kids knew about it. Maybe most of them. Anyway, I interviewed Bobby a few times, he was a star. Then, one time, he asked me if he could stop by my apartment and chat. I said, ‘Sure,’” Sullivan said. “By that time, I had an idea of what was coming. Anyway, he came over, and beat around the bush for a while, then said that he’d heard that I was gay, and that he was worried that he might be, and he just wanted to talk about it.”
    “Was he?” Coakley asked.
    “Oh, sure. As far as I know, he hadn’t been sexually involved with anybody—including me, we never were—but he had already gone through most of the self-recognition stuff,” Sullivan said. “You know, feeling this strong attraction toward some of his teammates, and he’d fantasize about them, instead of the girls in his class, and all the rest—checking out the scene on the Internet, maybe checking some gay porn.”
    “Did he ever mention Jacob Flood to you?” Virgil asked.
    Sullivan shook his head: “No. When I heard that Bobby was dead, and that he’d been arrested in the Flood case, I was amazed. We talked quite a bit, and he never mentioned Flood’s name.”
    Virgil: “And nothing about Crocker.”
    “Not a thing. Not even during the election.”
    “Do you know if Flood or Crocker were active in the local Homestead gay culture? There must be a few more gay people here.”
    Sullivan nodded. “Quite a few,” he said. “Maybe a hundred, or more? But not all of them are active around here, and I’ve never heard of those two. That doesn’t mean much, though—it’s not like we all hook up. I know maybe . . . a dozen gay people here? Something like that.”
    “Did Bobby ever mention a girl named Kelly Baker?”
    Sullivan, who’d been slumping in the chair, straightened, and tipped an index finger at Virgil: “Now her , we did talk about. Is she involved in this deal?”
    “Wait,” Virgil said. “You say you talked about her. Did he know her?”
    “Oh, yeah. He met her at the Dairy Queen. He used to give her a ride home, sometimes. I think he was hoping that he might, you know, get involved with her, find out that he really wasn’t gay. It didn’t work out that way. I think . . . I think —he didn’t actually tell me—that she picked up on the fact that he was gay. Didn’t bother her, and they became friends.”
    “The Iowa people didn’t talk to him? The cops?”
    “Not as far as I know. I mean, Bobby and Kelly were a