Bad Blood

religion, I think. So—for what it’s worth.”
    “But you really don’t know about the religion.”
    “No, I don’t. There are a lot of little different ones scattered around here, mostly, you know, Bible-thumpers of one sort or another. There’s quite a few Muslims around now, immigrants, and there’s even a rabbi or two over at the slaughterhouse—that’s what I understand, anyway.” He shook his head again, and added, “Anyway, I thought I should mention it, because it seems odd, and because both Jim and Jake Flood have been murdered.”
    “Glad you did. If anything else pops into your head, give me a ring. Whoever did all this is dangerous, and we need to get him off the road.”
    Wood nodded and said, “The other thing that I didn’t want Delores to hear, is that Jim was seeing his ex every once in a while. He didn’t even want me to know that, I think, but it came out a couple times. They weren’t talking about getting back together, but they were . . . you know, whatever the kids call it: hooking up.”
    Virgil said, “Thanks for that, too. Stay in touch.”
    “I’ll do that,” Wood said, and he popped the door and ran back through the cold to his shop.
     
     
    VIRGIL MADE a note to talk to Crocker’s ex-wife as soon as he could, and eased out onto the highway. As soon as he got going, he called Coakley; she had finished talking to the women, was sending them out to Battenberg to knock on doors.
    “I’m going out to the Bakers’ place. You want to go out in your truck, or you want to ride along with me?” he asked.
    “Huh. Why don’t I meet you there? I might need my truck later on.”
    “Tell me how to get there. . . .”
    She gave him some simple directions, said, “That’s not the shortest way, but it’s the easiest, you won’t get lost—and it’ll let me catch up to you.”
    “See you there. Before you come out, run Jacob Flood through the NCIC, see if you get a hit.”
    “Already did that—no hits.”
    “See you at Bakers’.”
    The trip out took half an hour, the countryside not quite flat, but rather a series of broken planes, now a frozen wash of gentle blues and grays with the new snow. Virgil had read once that Grandma Moses was a primitive painter because she thought snow was white. The writer said if you really looked at it, snow was hardly ever white. It mostly was a gentler version of the color of the sky—blue, gray, orange in the evenings and mornings, often with purple shadows. When he looked, sure enough, the guy was right, and Grandma Moses had her head up her ass.
    On the way over, he called a researcher named Sandy at the BCA and asked her to find Kathleen Spooner, called Kate, formerly called Kathleen Crocker.
    “If she’s still in Minnesota, I’ll get it in a minute or two,” she said.
    “Text it to me so I’ll have a record.”
     
     
    LIKE MOST of the farmhouses around, the Baker place sat facing a county highway, a hundred yards back, perched on a rise with a windbreak of box elders and cottonwoods to the northwest. Virgil slowed to check the name on the mailbox and saw Coakley’s truck coming up from behind. He waited on the side of the road, and she slowed, and pointed, and he followed her up the freshly plowed driveway to the house. On the way up the drive, his cell phone burped: a text message. He looked at the screen and found an address and a phone number for Kathleen Spooner.
    Out of the truck, Coakley said, “I called ahead. They’re both here, and waiting. They’ve got a boy, he’s off studying wind power at Minnesota West in Canby.”
    “Would he be Bobby Tripp’s age?”
    Her eyes narrowed: “I think . . . he might be three or four years older. We can ask.”
    They were walking up to the side door of the farmhouse, and Virgil filled her in on the conversation with Son Wood, and added, “I’ll try to find Crocker’s ex-wife this afternoon.”
    “Worth a try,” she said. “She’s been gone for a while, though. Five or six years, I guess.”
    “But Wood thinks they may have been back sleeping together,” Virgil said. “That’s interesting. A familiar female.”
    “We could use some DNA. . . .”
     
     
    THE BAKERS WERE as different as grapes and gravel; Leonard Baker had yellowish-red hair that flopped over one side of his head, so that if it had been black, it would have looked like Hitler’s haircut. He had a pointed chin and a pointed nose, and freckles all over his face and hands.
    When he nodded and