Bad Blood

much women . . . as any particular woman.” Wood scratched his head, just above his left ear, and said, “I don’t know how to put it. He was interested in women, okay? He was married for a while, but I never knew him to date. You see what I’m saying? He didn’t seem interested in particular women. He didn’t go out with anyone.”
    “Would there have been any takers?” Virgil asked. “If he started looking?”
    “Oh, yeah. There’s not a big surplus of women around here, but he had a good job. You know how it is.”
    Virgil nodded. “So you guys hung out, had a few beers . . .”
    “That was pretty much it. We’d go fishing a couple times a year,” Wood said. “We weren’t all that close. I’m married and he’s single . . . but, yeah, we go back a way.”
    “Can you think of anything . . . ?”
    “Well, you know he was tight with Jake Flood. They knew each other since they were kids. There must be something in there . . . something in that whole mess. Jake getting killed, then Jim.”
    Virgil said, “That’s what we think, too. We’re looking for the connection.”
    “Maybe you ought to talk to his ex-wife,” Wood suggested. “She’s over in Jackson, her name’s Kathleen Spooner. Kate. Changed her name back to her maiden name after they broke up.”
    “Bitter breakup?”
    “Well—no. He told me he didn’t know what the hell happened. He came home one day, and she said she was moving on, that she’d filed for divorce that day at the courthouse, and did he want pork chops for dinner, or meat loaf?”
    The woman chipped in: “I talked to her for a minute, downtown, and she said she just got tired of his act. She said she didn’t much want to marry him in the first place, and she’d been right.”
    “So she just went on down the road,” Wood said.
    “You know if he went for the meat loaf?” Virgil asked.
    “More of a pork chop man,” Wood said.
    They talked for a few more minutes, but nothing else came up—Wood didn’t know Kelly Baker or any of her family. “I know where they’re at, but they ran a pretty small grain operation, and that doesn’t need my product so much.”
    “Do you know anything about the religion he belonged to?” Virgil asked.
    “Just that it was a little unusual,” Wood said. “He didn’t talk about it that much, and he didn’t go to services much. But some.”
    “I thought they stayed pretty much to themselves.”
    “Some of them do, some of them don’t so much,” Wood said. “I never exactly figured them out, because, to tell the truth, I wasn’t much interested. But they’re not like the Amish. I’ve been in some of their houses, and they have TVs and stereos and computers and so on. They’re not so much for fancy cars—Fords and Chevys, mostly. But they do buy the Star Wars farm equipment. They got money.”
     
     
    VIRGIL GAVE HIM a card, and walked out to the truck. He’d just gotten in and started it when Wood came out of the front of the showroom, jogging toward the truck, his shoulders up against the cold. He pointed at the passenger seat, and Virgil popped the door and Wood climbed in.
    “I didn’t want to say a couple things in front of Delores, because she’s a good bookkeeper, but the woman does tend to run her mouth. This all might be nothing, and I don’t want to get good people in trouble, because of a bunch of rumors.”
    “They won’t be in trouble, if they didn’t do anything,” Virgil said.
    Wood shook his head and said, “Okay: Every few years I’m out at the Flood place. They run a hundred head of Charolais up there, grass-fed stuff for the specialty stores, and they’ve got some winter feeding platforms that I coat. . . . Anyway, I was up there a couple of years ago, and I made some comment to Jim about how religious the Floods were. He was a little loaded and he said, “Yeah, really religious, but that don’t keep them from fuckin’ like a bunch of goats.”
    Wood paused, put his hands over the warm air registers on the dashboard, then said, “The thing is, he said it in a way like there was something weird about it. Then he shut up. When I asked him about it the next time I saw him, he said he couldn’t remember saying anything like that, but I could see he did. Like he was keeping a secret. He really seemed to want to walk away from what he said.”
    “So what was weird?”
    “Just his . . . voice. And then his attitude. Not scared, exactly, but like there was some dark secret. About the