Bad Blood

with a dozen in between, all named for religious figures by Virgil’s minister father. Now a cat walked into the Floods’ living room and sniffed at him, and Virgil reached out a hand.
    Alma Flood and Einstadt exchanged exclamations about Crocker—“Can you believe that? How could that happen? What’s going on?”—and then Edna Flood said to Virgil, about the cat, “Don’t try to pet her. She’ll bite your fingers off.”
    Virgil nodded and pulled his hand back, and he gave them a short summary of the findings at Crocker’s place, then asked, “Do you know any reason Jim Crocker would want to . . . take revenge on Tripp, because of what happened to Mr. Flood?”
    “Well, they were friends all their lives,” Einstadt said. “If they weren’t hanging around here when they were kids, they were hanging around the Crocker place. Started rabbit hunting together when they were ten, when we gave them their first .22s.”
    “So there might be something,” Virgil suggested.
    “There might be, but I can’t see Jim killing because of that. He’d let the law take its course,” Einstadt said. “If justice didn’t get done, then he might . . . well, as a matter of fact, I doubt he’d do anything. He wasn’t that kind.”
    The cat sniffed Virgil’s pant leg, then hopped up on the arm of the chair, sniffed his ear, and then crawled up on his shoulders and settled down behind his neck. He could hear her purring.
    “That’s the darnedest thing I’ve seen in years,” Helen Flood said, as though she were forty.
    Virgil reached back and scratched the cat under the ear, and asked, “Did any of you know, or did Mr. Flood know, a girl named Kelly Baker, who was killed a year or so ago down by Estherville? She came from down south of here, a few miles . . .”
    Flood and Einstadt looked at each other, and then both shook their heads. “We know them,” Einstadt said. “They belong to the same church we do. But we don’t know them well. We’re not close. We know about what happened to Kelly Baker, of course. Everybody was talking about it.”
    Alma Flood asked, “Do you think they are connected? Kelly Baker and what happened to Jacob? That the Tripp boy did it?”
    Virgil had been considering the possibility, but hadn’t worked through it until Alma’s question clocked a new scenario into place: what if Tripp and some other kids had been using Baker, and Flood found out? What if Tripp had confessed to Crocker, and Crocker had killed him because of some relationship between himself and the Baker family? And that the other person involved in the murder of Baker had killed Crocker . . .
    But that didn’t work well: Crocker had been involved with a woman. Could there have been some kind of teenage sex ring, that included females, and something went wrong with Kelly Baker? But why wouldn’t Crocker simply have alerted the sheriff, rather than murdering Tripp?
    There was no logic to it—though that didn’t always mean much. But Virgil shook his head at Alma Flood and said, “No, we can’t make that work. Although Tripp did know Kelly Baker.”
    “Then you’ve got one boy you know for sure is a cold-blooded killer, who killed Jake. And he knew another girl who was killed, somehow. I won’t tell you how to do your business, but that looks like a solid connection to me,” Einstadt said. “How many murderers do we got in this county, anyway? Looks to me like the Tripp boy and one of his friends might have been up to something here.”
    Another scenario flashed: suppose Kelly Baker had been gay, and they had a three- or four-way thing going, involving the other woman? Too far-fetched . . .
    “Well, we’ll sure look into it,” Virgil said. “Like I said, we think Crocker was murdered. We’ll know for sure soon enough, and we’ll probably get some DNA from the killer.” The cat made a snogging sound behind his ear, and he reached back and scratched her again.
    They talked for a while longer, but on the central issue—what Jacob Flood might have known, or said, that triggered his murder—they came up empty. “I’d never heard of this Tripp boy before we were told that they arrested him,” Alma Flood said.
    When they were done, Virgil stood up and said, “I may come back, if I find more questions. I’m not familiar with this corner of the county. But if you talk to your acquaintances around here, you might ask if anybody knows of a connection between Deputy Crocker and Kelly Baker. Or Crocker