Bad Blood

in his pocket.
    Going to the closet, he shook down all the clothing, looking for paper, found a few gasoline receipts. Nothing in the shoes.
    On impulse, he went back to the computer and typed in “gay” and “homosexual” and “homo” and the computer shook him off. He lifted the mattress off the box springs, found nothing. He went through the desk drawer, found it stuffed with receipts, ticket stubs, photographs. Nothing that set off a buzz.
    He started sifting through papers and books, looking for anything that might be personal. Not much—no notes from anyone, just old schoolwork. The backpack contained workout clothes and two twenty-pound weights, probably to work his quads, and a printed-out calendar with a workout schedule on it, over the background image of a running horse, its tail flaring out behind it.
    And a much-folded piece of copy paper, with a line drawing of the Statue of Liberty on it. No words, just the drawing. There was a long oval drawn from the base of the statue right up to its face, which might have been the number “eight” but, if so, heavily distorted, with the upper loop nearly round, the lower loop a very long oval. The distortion seemed to mean something, Virgil thought, but he couldn’t think what—but it looked as though the paper had been something that Tripp had looked at over and over, and carried with him on his daily workouts.
    Virgil looked at the statue drawing, then the calendar with the horse, went back to the computer, typed “Mustangs”—the Southwest Minnesota State Mustangs, where Tripp would have gone to college—and the computer bit: he was in.
    “Excellent,” he said to himself, as the Mac started to load.
    He found 776 incoming e-mail messages and 538 outgoing. He clicked on the “From” queue to alphabetize the incoming messages, and found twenty-two from KBaker.
    Nothing from a Crocker or a Flood.
    With the sense that he was on to something, he began paging through the KBaker mail, noting the dates. The e-mail began in June of the summer before last, and rather than ending at the end of the summer, continued through the autumn, with the final KBaker note coming two days before Baker was killed.
    As he went through the mail, his sense of anticipation dwindled: the exchanges were letters between teenagers, about when Baker would be in town, about who was dating whom, about summer jobs, about football. Baker was apparently religious: she mentioned a couple of times that she couldn’t come to town because she had to go to church that night: the nights included Tuesday and Friday.
    Three interesting notes from Baker.
    The first: “Definite stud muffin.”
    The second: “I wish I could go with you. If I was in high school, it’d almost be like I was normal. You’re about the only outside person that I know, who knows how lonely this can be.”
    The third: “Can’t: Got Liberty.”
    The third note was the last e-mail from Baker, the one just before she was killed. He looked for antecedents to the two notes, either from Baker or Tripp, and found nothing. They were like remnants of oral conversations.
    The e-mail, as a whole, had a curious flatness to it: no flirtation, nothing in the least controversial. Something, he thought, was missing—and he suspected that Tripp had cleaned it up. The “definite stud muffin” message struck Virgil as a reply to something—and possibly a hint that Baker knew that Tripp was gay, and was commenting on some previous e-mail about somebody Tripp was attracted to.
    “Can’t: Got Liberty.” There was that paper in the backpack with the Statue of Liberty drawing on it. A connection? But to what? Or who? Was the capitalized word “Liberty” a proper noun, a specific person or place?
    Could the computer guys recover the deleted mail? Have to try.
    He looked through all the rest of the mail, scanning quickly, and most of it was the same as the mail to and from Kelly: meet me there, let’s do this or that, going up to the MOA with my folks. MOA was Mall of America, in the Twin Cities.
    Huh.
    He went to Safari, the browser, and clicked on “History,” and came up empty—not a single entry. He checked the settings and found that Tripp had set the browser to erase his website visits on a daily basis.
    He went to the “Security” icon, clicked on it, and found that the computer was set to accept cookies from the sites Tripp visited. He clicked on “Show Cookies” and came up with a list that ran into the