Bad Blood

hundreds of items. Scanning down the list, he found a lot of what appeared to be sports sites and, from the names, what appeared to be gay porno sites.
    All right, he knew that.
    A thought popped into his head. What if Flood had somehow discovered that Tripp was gay, had ridiculed him, or challenged him—or even solicited him—and Tripp had lashed out purely in anger, with no other connection to anything?
    No: Tripp had taken the T-ball bat from home. He’d gone to work prepared to kill Flood.
    Besides, there were too many dead people for something that simple.
    And where in the hell did a woman fit in, a killer?
    Virgil continued working the room, no longer expecting to find much: Tripp had been covering himself.
     
     
    THE TRIPPS WERE back in a little under an hour, and Virgil was done with the room, sitting on the bed, looking around, wondering what he’d missed. He heard them come in, sighed, stood up, picked up the cell phone and the computer, and walked down the hall to meet them.
    “Find anything?” George Tripp asked.
    “I don’t know—I will have to take the computer. Your son was e-mailing back and forth with Kelly Baker, right up until the time she was killed. They were pretty friendly. . . .”
    “You figured out the password?”
    “Mustangs,” Virgil said, and George Tripp showed the tiniest of smiles.
    “How friendly were they?” Irma asked. She asked in a way, Virgil thought, that solicited a response that Bobby Tripp and Kelly Baker were in bed together. Because, Virgil realized, Irma knew or suspected that her son was gay.
    “Friendly. I can’t say more than that, but there’s no feel of . . . violence in it,” Virgil said. “Of potential violence. At this point, I really don’t believe your son was involved in hurting her.”
    “Of course he wasn’t,” George Tripp said. “It was that goddamn Flood, or Crocker, or both of them.”
    “I’m going to look into that,” Virgil said.
    He asked them to go through the contact list on Tripp’s phone; standing together, they did that, and identified each of the people on the list, including Sullivan, who, they said, had interviewed their son a half-dozen times.
    “Everybody knew Bobby was going to be a college star. He could’ve gone to the Gophers, but they wanted to make a corner-back out of him and he didn’t want that,” George said. Wistful, now, with a glint of tears in his eyes: “He was going to be something.”
     
     
    ON HIS WAY to the motel, Virgil threw the joints out the window—they were biodegradable—and crumbled the Ziploc bag into the trash. No need for Tripp’s parents to know about that.
    He called Coakley from the motel, told her about the search, about the relationship with Baker, and about the “Liberty” note.
    “Good: sounds like you’re getting somewhere,” she said. “I set up meetings with both of the female deputies for tomorrow morning. You’re not invited. I’ve been thinking about them since I left the office, and I already know they’re not involved. I’ll push them anyway, which means my popularity is going to take a hit, but I’ll do it.”
    “You’ve got four years—I think pushing them now will be pretty small potatoes when you break these murders,” Virgil said.
    “When I get done, to show that I trust them, I’m sending all of them out to the countryside around Battenberg, to talk to folks,” Coakley said. “The community out there is so sparse that somebody must know who Crocker was sleeping with—people know each other’s cars, and even if it was just seeing a car parked in his driveway, somebody knows.”
    “Okay. I want to talk to Kelly Baker’s parents. There’s something going on there.”
    “See you tomorrow,” she said.
     
     
    HE MADE a late check with Bea Sawyer: “We got the pants,” she said. “We can see a snag and what could be blood, and from what you said, I believe it is. So does Don. There’s enough blood for a DNA check, so we’ll be able to nail that down for you.”
    “Excellent. When will you be done?” Virgil asked.
    “We’ve already shipped the body up to Ike in Mankato,” Sawyer said. “We’re going through the house now, but we’re about to quit. We’ll be back tomorrow.”
    “You at the Holiday?”
    “Nah, we’re staying at a little ma-and-pa place in Battenberg. Pretty handy,” she said.
    “All right. I’ll see you out there tomorrow. Try not to destroy any evidence.”
    He called Coakley back: “Got a piece